This post was sponsored by Simon Says Stamp. Thanks, Simon!
Hi friends! I am back today with February’s installment of my Songs of the Season series: holiday cheer throughout the year inspired by the songs of the Christmas! I took my big kids to see a production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker this past December, and as always, the music and the sumptuous costumes were incredibly inspiring. For this month’s project, I wanted to channel some of the imagery that we commonly associate with The Nutcracker outside of the ballerinas! My mind always conjures lots of pinks and purples and sweets when I think of The Nutcracker, especially thinking of the exotic costumes made to look like desserts and Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. I tried to capture some of that imagery in my card with some pretty inks, Layering Peppermints Stencils, and the Sweet Tooth Bears stamps. Let’s get started with the details!
To start my card, I used the Layering Peppermints, pairing it with Bubblegum and Lilac Pawsitively Saturated Inks, all from Simon Says Stamp. I blended the larger solid layer using the Bubblegum ink, keeping the blending quite light to create a very subtle background. The Simon Says Stamp blending brushes are super fine and perfect for creating the soft, subtle blending I was after! After I’d blended the pattern on the entirety of the A2 card front, I blended more Bubblegum ink around the edges, lightly blending some Lilac ink on the very edges. After I’d finished blending, I splattered the entire panel with some super sparkly watercolors. I love the softly blended stencil background… it makes me think of bokeh, which I think is magical on it’s own!
While my background was drying, I stamped lots of the images from the Sweet Tooth Bears set using Intense Black ink, which is compatible with alcohol markers. The striped peppermint candies definitely put me in mind of the different candies represented visually in The Kingdom of Sweets during Act II, and so I wanted to pair them with a “sugarplum” color combination. I pulled out some Copic markers in different shades of pink and lavender, keeping all of the elements cohesive by sticking to these two different color ways for each stamped image. To keep my whipped cream looking “white” on my cup of hot chocolate, I added some pale gray shadows in the folds of the whipped cream and blended out the edges with my colorless blender marker, allowing the white of the Hammermill cardstock to be the main color while still adding shape and shadow to the otherwise-flat image.
After I had colored and die cut my images from the Sweet Tooth Bears set, I needed to create my greeting. I stamped the oversize “sweet” and coordinating sentiment strips using my MISTI, first stamping them with more Lilac ink, then while keeping the stamps in place, stamped the sentiments again over the top using embossing ink and sprinkled Hero Arts’s Iridescent Purple embossing powder over the top. The semi-sheer embossing powder adds the prettiest lavender sheen to the sentiments and really helps them to pop from the colorful background due to the textural interest! I arranged all of the different die cuts in a cluster on my stenciled background, adhering them with liquid and foam tape, adding some of the die cuts with a double layer of foam tape to help them pop even more and add extra depth. Finally, I added a few lavender gems for even more shimmer and shine. I always feel like you can’t add too much sparkle to a Christmas card!!
Well, that’s all for this month’s Songs of the Season post. The Nutcracker is a veritable gold mine of inspiration, so I am sure I will be plucking some inspiration from this classic for another card during this year’s series. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!
