Hi there! I’m back again today with another pair of projects featuring some of the beautiful new products from the Honey Bee Stamps Make It Merry release! While my projects yesterday felt fairly traditional, today’s projects change up the color schemes a bit, with lots of neutrals, metallics, and a pop of muted pink. I love traditional color schemes for holiday cards, but I love unique holiday color palettes just as much. The beautiful new products lend themselves so well to both!
I have two projects today, both of which feature the gorgeous Lovely Layers Winter Greenery to help accent the focal points on the cards. I also used more greetings from the Foil Script: Holiday Hot Foil Plate and Dies. I like to sit down with my foil machine and foil lots of greetings in different shades of foil and on different colors of cardstock so that I have tons of options when I start creating. Let’s get started with the details!
For my first card, I started by creating the finch from the sweet little birds in the Lovely Layers Winter Birds Honey Cuts set. I kept the colors traditional, with creamy and crisp white, grays, and black. It was super simple to put together! I also matched the shades of gray to the warm gray foil that I used for the greeting, foiled using the Foil Script: Holiday Hot Foil Plate and Dies, the Pinkfresh Studio Solid Hot Foil Plate, and some matte pewter foil. I used those two elements as the basis for the rest of my color scheme!
Because I wanted to create a little scene with the fairly large Bird House A2 Card Base Honey Cuts, I cut a 5×7 card front from some plain white cardstock, then masked the edges to create a 1″ white frame around the edge. This 4×6 inch opening created the perfect space for the Nordic Winter Stencil. Using a blending brush, I blended some medium gray ink over the stencil to create the subtle pattern, then removed the stencil and lightly blended around the edge of the opening with the same shade of gray to create a framed area to ground the rest of my images. I find that creating a smaller blended area as a focal point on my card fronts helps to keep the large clean card front from being intimidating when building a scene!
I created a little bird house using similar colors from the Bird House A2 Card Base Honey Cuts, adding a little pop of pale blush pink to the scallops on the roof. I die cut a few elements from the Lovely Layers Winter Greenery, with super dark green pine boughs and some muted melon pink berries. The foliage is the perfect spot to rest my little bird! I adhered the bird house using foam adhesive, then arranged my foliage and berries beneath it, finally nestling my little finch on top and adhering with another layer of foam adhesive to create lots of height and dimension.
I popped up the greeting from the Foil Script: Holiday Hot Foil Plate and Dies and added a heat embossed sentiment strip using a greeting from Bitty Buzzwords: Holiday, both with a double layer of foam tape. Finally, I accented the project with a few sparkling Winter Wonder Gem Stickers! Lots of dimension in this card. Definitely saving this for a super special friend!
My second project uses the same blush pink cardstock that I used in the first project as an accent, but this time it’s the focal point! I had creating some greetings using the Foil Script: Holiday Hot Foil Plate and Dies on this blush pink cardstock using some matte rose gold foil and decided to use that as my starting point for the color scheme for this card.
I die cut the layers from the Lovely Layers: Anemone from the blush cardstock, then used some slightly darker pink ink to lightly blend around the edges and add a bit of extra dimension to the die cuts. I adhered them all together, adding a black and gray center, using liquid adheisve. I also die cut several elements from the Lovely Layers Winter Greenery in a few shades of deep green, as well as some more of the muted melon colored berries, the shade of which coordinated beautifully with the ink on the edge of the anemone.
For the card base, I ran the Winter Gems Cover Plate through my die cut machine with some crisp white cardstock. I love the subtle texture that this cover plate adds to the background; I can’t wait to try this plate with hot foil! I adhered a glittery rose gold frame cut from the Sentiment Frames Honey Cuts die set in the bottom corner of the debossed card front, then arranged my holiday flora in a swag, adhering the components with liquid and dimensional foam adhesive for tons of dimension. I added the foiled blush and gold greeting with a double layer of foam tape, then finished the project with a few iridescent hunter green gems from the Make It Merry Sticker Gem set.
Well, that’s all for these projects. These non-traditional color schemes are some of my favorites, but the images themselves are undeniably holiday! Thanks so much for reading today, and have a marvelous day!
