Happy Pawlidays and Striped Ombre Background

I have a new post for Anna's Craft Cupboard featuring My Favorite Things to share with you today.

I wanted to make some more Christmas cards for family and friends as I still don't have enough!
So I decided to use the cute Happy Pawlidays set again and combine it with the Santa's Elves stamp set.
I love how the MFT sets all work so well together!
The possibilities are endless really :)

I also decided to use a new (to me) MFT die-namics Die called Bold Stripes Cover Up with these stamps and talk a little about how I created these Christmas cards.

This first card was very simple and pretty quick too!

I coloured the image with copics and used a circle die to cut it out.
I used one of the sentiments from the Happy Pawlidays set but masked off the the bottom of the sentiment so that it just says "Santa Paws".  On the inside of the card I have stamped the "is coming to town" part of the sentiment.
I used the MFT Blueprints 5 Tag Builder Die to cut the sentiment out.

I used the Bold Stripes cover up to cut out the white background piece.
It will leave you with lots of white rectangular pieces, but don't throw these out!
They are perfect to save for later to use for sentiment strips :)

Then I used the die again to cut the coloured stripes from Lawn Fawn Watercolor Wishes papers.
I used 7 different colours to create a rainbow look.
If you were going to make a set of 7 backgrounds the same, for a set of cards, you could just use the whole die to cut the paper and you would have made 7 cards very quickly.
But I was just making 1 so I just used the die on the end of the paper so that I didn't waste any and only cut 1 stripe out.

I cut a piece of kraft card the same length as the die but slightly wider.
I glued the white die panel to the kraft card and then glued each coloured piece of paper into the die cut space.
I then attached this piece to the card base.

I think this made a lovely background and you could use it for so many occasions.
A rainbow pattern isn't even "Christmassy" but I thought it worked and looks cute too :)

For my second card I decided to use the die as a stencil and create an ombre background with Distress Inks. You could also use Distress Oxides for this.

I used the die to cut out a piece of card for the stencil.
I then put Tombow Mono Multi Liquid glue on the back of it and waited for it to "set" so that it would be repositional.

When ready, I attached it to the smooth side of some watercolour paper.

I then used Distress Inks and the Tim Holtz Mini Foam Ink Blending Tool to create an ombre background.

I started with the darker colours at the top and worked my way down to light.
I started sponging the ink in a circular manner which is the usual way of applying distress ink but I ended up kind of just swiping across the lines.
I put more ink on each side and kept the centre lighter.

At the very top it is a mix of the darkest blue I had with the purple.  And it made a great colour :)
Most of the background is done by doing 2 rows using the same ink colour but making one of the rows darker.
I did this by adding a little of the darker ink (from the row above it) to the new colour.

After I was satisfied with the look, I removed the stencil and I had my background piece.  It did look gorgeous with the dark stripe over the top but it just wouldn't have worked for the card I had in mind.
I will have to do it again that way another time :)

I then splashed some water on it and used paper towel to remove wetness.
I also added a few little splashes of  Dylusions white paint to the background.

I trimmed this piece to attach to some kraft card and then attached this to a Kaisercraft Square white card. I then rounded the corners of this.

On this card I used the dog and present from the Happy Pawlidays set and the tree and sentiment are from Santa's Elves.

I made a happy discovery when doing the sentiment :)
I realised I could use the Bold Stripes Cover Up die to cut it out.  Yay!
So I stamped it and cut it out using the smaller rectangular opening on the die.
And then I used the larger rectangular opening to cut a piece of black card for a perfect mat for it!!!

I will be using this all the time now for any narrower sentiments that I want to use :)

You can use this die in so many interesting ways

The stamps were coloured with copics and I added some glitter glue to the star on the tree for a little sparkle.
I also used the tag die again and some antique linen and walnut stain distress ink around the card's edge.



I love this die and both of these stamp sets from MFT!

You still have time to make some more Christmas cards too!
I would love to see what you create :)

Thanks for dropping by today

Kathy