Christmas Leftover's

Don't worry! we're not making cards smeared with sprouts and cranberry sauce. The leftovers that I refer too are those bits and pieces that we all keep in nooks and crannies stashed around our craft room. Little bits of decorative paper that are just too good to throw away, odd buttons, trinkets and of course die cuts.

The great thing about the freestyle collage style of card making is that anything goes, there's no right or wrong and a s long as you are happy with the visual balance then who's to tell you it aint perfect?

This is one of my favourite styles of card making although it is a bit hit and miss and you will spend forever moving the various elements around the blank space but it's so rewarding when it all clicks into place.

I used dies by one of my favourite designers of all time, the wonderful Ms Paula Pascual. I chose the wonderful Christmas Tree Framelits and the super-useful Doilies set.

Before I go on, I should tell you that I'm not going to itemize every thing I use simply because I have no idea either what it is called or where I got it from, Its STASH!!!

I die cut the tree from Kraft board and randomly applied some pale green acrylic paint with my fingertip. Next, I went to my online dictionary and typed in the word 'Joy' (the other two are for the coming weeks) I typed up the definition in a typewriter font and printed it onto graph paper before triming it to size and lightly inking with 'Old Paper' Distress ink.

I die cut a doily from Core'dinations card stock and lightly sanded around the edges,Next I mounted it onto a base card with a piece of green patterned card stock, before adding a strip of news type paper and my printed phrase. I then added an ornate button alongside a threaded wooden button.

Finally, added assorted pearls and gems to the tree and news type strip along with a couple of staples and there we have it.