Hi there! Today, I am over on the Pinkfresh Studio YouTube channel with this holiday card that has so much sparkle, you might need some sunglasses to look at it! Sparkle is one of my favorite ways to differentiate my holiday cards from the cards that I make the rest of the year. If you can’t add sparkle on Christmas cards, when can you add sparkle? It just makes them so terribly festive!! Here’s the video:
Or you can click HERE to watch it on YouTube in HD.
This entire card began when I was experimenting with the new-ish Snowflakes Hot Foil Plate. I love the look of hot foiling on vellum, but I get mixed results, and I read somewhere that you could heat emboss on Hero Arts’s acetate. I thought to myself “if you can heat emboss on it, can you hot foil on it?” I feared that it would melt and ruin my plate, but it was a risk I was willing to take… and just look at the result!! I am so in love with this new-to-me technique, and I can’t wait to apply it to other projects. I hot foiled the Snowflakes Hot Foil Plate on some acetate using Speckled Prism hot foil from Spellbinders, which creates a beautiful, iridescent effect, which is particularly striking on the clear acetate!

Once I had my snowflake acetate panel, I knew that I wanted to create a snowy scene with snowflakes in various sizes, so I heat embossed the Snowflakes Background stamp on some watercolor paper using White Satin Pearl embossing powder. I taped the panel down to my watercolor board, spritzed the entire panel with some clean water using a fingertip sprayer, then used Sennelier watercolors to add some diagonal color. I started with a few stripes of blue, blended that into some minty turquoise, then created a custom purple by mixing the same blue with some bright magenta. The already-damp watercolor paper helped the colors to meld together beautifully and seamlessly. I hit the very wet panel with my heat gun and added some Winsor & Newton Iridescent Medium along the blue areas to create a sparkly, wintry, almost Aurora Borealis effect on my background. Once that had dried, I added some Payne’s Grey around the edges, pulling the color out to a nice fade using a clean damp brush, which created a halo effect around my sparkly AB background.

While my panel was drying, I created a frame using some pure white glitter cardstock and the Stitched Rectangles Essentials Dies. I used some super strong tape to adhere my clear snowflake panel to the sparkling frame. Once my watercolor panel had dried, I used some thin foam squares to adhere the framed acetate panel to my watercolored piece. I love how the foiled snowflakes look as though they’re floating on the watercolored background!

For the greeting, I heat embossed two different sentiments from the Ornaments Stamp set onto some Spellbinders Waterfall cardstock using white embossing powder. I used the Ornaments Dies to die cut the cursive greeting, which I think makes it look so incredibly clean and polished. I die cut the solid halo piece from the Jeff Alpha dies from some more Waterfall cardstock, then die cut the detail layer using the same white glitter cardstock, adhering them together with liquid adhesive. I added them to the clear snowflake panel with small dots of liquid adhesive to keep everything nice and clean, orienting them in the bottom right corner to allow the hot foiled snowflakes and watercoloring to take center stage!
Well, that’s all for this project and video! I can’t wait to try this hot foil-on-acetate technique out on more projects, and I hope you’ll try it out too. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!
