WASTED SNOWFLAKES

I just love it when that happens.When WHAT happens, you ask. Well, when a weird idea that I have actually works out when I try it!

My November Paper Pumpkin kit arrived in the mail a few days ago. Whenever I see a sneak peek on someone's feed before mine arrives, I quickly scroll past. I do not like knowing what it's going to be ahead of time. That's part of the charm of Paper Pumpkin: the wonderful surprise of opening that red-orange box to discover the contents and the projects.

Well, the November kit was no exception to how wonderful they always are. The kits contains tons of stuff to make some really cool Christmas tags. Not needing any more Christmas tags, I looked all the components over carefully, only to realize how easy it would be to make these darling tags into Christmas cards!

I have all my Christmas cards made already for this year, so what I decided to do was punch out all the diecut elements anyway, so they are ready for me to get card making next year. 

The first element I removed from its surroundings was a sheet of snowflakes, 

shown below.

I know most <normal> people wouldn't hesitate to toss the waste in the garbage. Not me! 

What a great STENCIL! 

So I grabbed it and rushed down to my Creation Station, my mind madly swirling with ideas. 

I cut a piece of Night of Navy cardstock to 4" x 5 1/4". I placed my new stencil even with the top of the cardstock and centered horizontally. I used sticky tape to hold it in place while I worked with it. You can see -- if you look carefully -- my white pigment ink pad and my Sponge Brayer in the upper right corner. The sponge brayer can be found on page 181 in the Annual Catalog. 

After inking up the brayer very well with the white ink, I brayered across the navy cardstock through the taped down stencil. I continued doing this until all the snowflakes were evenly inked.

Although I was naive enough to think I was going to get white snowflakes on navy cardstock, the snowflakes actually turned out to be more of a blue. No matter. It worked perfectly!

I then excitedly went to work figuring out how to use this in a card. 

The card below shows my result.

I realize the sentiment I used on my card was retired a long time ago, but it fits so wonderfully across the empty space at the bottom of the card. As I often say, if you love something enough to buy it, why not keep using it? Right? 

Just a closeup of the brayered snowflakes:

And a closeup of the pretty snowflakes I die cut using the snowflake dies 

from the Seasonal Layers set on page 195. 

Did you ever actually check out that die set and the stamp set that coordinates with it, Colorful Seasons, on page 56? If not, take a look. Both sets have so so so much to offer. Including the "just breathe" phrase that I use often in my work.

With the exception of the three Basic Rhinestones 

that I added to the sentiment piece, 

this card is perfectly flat.

From that same Paper Pumpkin kit, I have several more "stencils" to use 

after punching out the elements. I can't wait to give them a try!

Now, be honest. Would you have thrown away this valuable art supply after removing the snowflakes from it? No no. Never Never. Uh uh uh. 

Stay tuned to see what I come up with using the other "stencils" in the coming weeks!

Stenciled

Smiles.