White Winter Village for Christmas!

This post is sponsored by Simon Says Stamp. Thanks, Simon!

Hi friends! As you might have noticed, tone-on-tone is a favorite “technique” of mine. I think it creates such a dramatic and elegant effect, and holiday cards are certainly the perfect excuse for drama and elegance! The beautiful Winter Village dies from the Season of Wonder release from Simon Says Stamp were the perfect product to use for a monochromatic white holiday card, adding in a few special tricks to make all of the elements stand out individually as well as work together for the entirety of the card! Let’s get started with the details.

To start, I die cut the Winter Village dies (which are currently out of stock, so be sure to sign up for email notification for when they come back in stock!!) from some iridescent white mirror cardstock. I am always on the lookout for unique specialty papers whenever I am shopping, because the specialty papers really make these monochromatic projects pop. The unique texture of this iridescent white mirror cardstock helps the die cuts stand out from the rest of the white on the project!

For the background, I wanted something soft and simple, but still captured the holiday mood of the sweet little houses, so I heat embossed the Soft Plaid background using Hero Arts White Satin Pearl embossing powder on white cardstock. This pearlescent embossing powder is a workhorse in my craft room; it creates beautiful pearlescent tone-on-tone embossing and can also be used to create custom embossing powder looks by stamping your image or sentiment in colored ink, then using your MISTI to stamp it again with embossing ink and adding the White Satin Pearl embossing powder. I used this technique to create the sentiment for my card today. I stamped the greeting from Inside Greetings Christmas using Flannel Pawsitively Saturated ink, then again with embossing ink, finally adding the White Satin Pearl embossing powder to create a soft pearlescent gray embossed greeting. This pearlescent gray is a bit softer than typical silver embossing powder… I love that you can create custom embossing colors with one simple addition to your craft stash!

I trimmed down my plaid background panel and matted it on a full size A2 card front with liquid adhesive. To help my village stand out a bit from the white background, I die cut a vellum circle using the circleThin Frames die. This softens the plaid pattern on the background so that the shiny white village can stand out as the focal point. I adhered the embossed sentiment strip to the bottom of the vellum circle, then arranged the village die cuts above it using the sentiment strip as a guide to keep things straight. I adhered the vellum circle to the plaid background by hiding my adhesive behind the solid die cuts!

Well, that’s all for my project today! If you’ve never tried doing a monochromatic white card, take this as your sign to try it out. It’s so fun to mix and match textures and patterns to create interest on your monochromatic cards! Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!