Joy of Christmas For AYSI385

Today I'm sharing my design team card for our new challenge over at As you See It where it's time for a speed challenge chosen by Deborah:

Shades of green - perfect for the festive season and more besides! I am ramping up my Christmas card making and whilst I considered some simple speed stamping, I thought the Sunday Stamps layout would be perfect for showcasing some busy designer series paper - always a good time-saver when you need to make a quick card! So I searched through my Christmas DSP collection and this is what I came up with:

 Here's the low-down on today's card:

This watercoloured foliage pattern is one of my favourites in the retired Joy of Christmas paper pack: it showcases several shades of green and a pop of festive red from those berries too. I covered the whole of the base of my card, grabbed a few leftover scraps of foil and foiled vellum to cut my banners and some additional scraps to diecut some foliage to create a topper for my banners, all tied with some retired silver twine. The final touch was a sentiment from the Magical Christmas Foil Dies that I had already foiled in Silver Opal and diecut - all I needed to do was fish through my box of finished sentiments to find something suitable:

A few clear epoxy droplets and some hasty dots on my berries with a white gel pen complete my card.

So how long did this take me? 

A total of 9 minutes and 29 seconds - longer than I thought it would. It's surprising how much time you can spend poking out diecuts and tying bows!! It's a good job that I had my sentiment already foiled for sure, otherwise it would have been a straightforward 'ink and stick'! Having made this card, I decided to make a few more in a similar design using up some other paper, including this photographic design from the retired All Is Bright papers:

This time I went with gold accents and a reverse-foiled sentiment on Garden Green, and added a couple of tiny jingle bells to my twine bow:

It's quite tricky to see the detail of the foiling on the sentiment - any and all tips as to the best way to photograph foiling, especially on a dark background, are welcome! I can assure you it does look lovely in real life. I often find these kinds of photographic papers quite difficult to work with, but I'm quite pleased with this finished card.

Here's a summary of our challenge rules:

• Create any card, scrapbooking page, 3D or packaging project that fits the challenge.
• For a Speed Stamping Challenge you must tell us the time it took to make your project and it must be finished in under 10 min.
• Please include the challenge graphic and link back to the challenge in your post.
• Make sure you link the specific post and not the whole blog to the Linky. Use AYSI#(insert challenge number) when uploading to a public gallery
• Please turn off word verification so that we can send you lots of feedback.
• You can combine our challenge with up to 3 other compatible challenges. 
• We do reserve the right to delete, or not consider for Top Pick and Featured Artist, entries that do not comply with these guidelines.

Enjoy your day and I'll be back tomorrow with another project. Until then, happy stampin'!