Jingle Belles - The Holly and the Ivy

The Jingle Belles challenge was to use foliage, not necessarily just holly and ivy. 

Yep, yep, yep.  I missed another deadline.  I so wanted to have this posted by 6:00 last night, but I am my own worst enemy with time these days.  I spent a good amount of time peacefully watercoloring these images on Sunday and then fussy cutting the one on the card on top out.  Well, that cutting process proved to be very tiring for my bum hand so I set that aside missing a few berries and leaves and cut the second one with a simple border (below). 

When I found the ivy cut file I knew I wanted to use it for one card, and then I got fixated.  Fixated on finding my pastels.  I wanted to add a little blue shading to the ivy leaves on the background like I did with the ink when I was coloring the image.  I have decent light above my craft space, but below, well, let's just say the craft castle has a dungeon.  One never knows what lurks in the dark recesses of the dungeon after a certain hour of the day. 

I had told HWNSNBP that I would be downstairs by dark and when I wasn't, after a while he came looking for me only to find me on my hands and knees, draped over my chair, flashlight in hand under the table with my butt facing the door.  Of course the obvious question would be "what are you doing?" and he did ask, but all it took was glare in his direction and he backed out mumbling "nevermind, sorry I asked" and he retreated down the stairs. 

I followed shortly after still not finding what I was looking for and frustrated.  I said I would take a look when I got home from work the next day when it was still light.  

 

But I had not yet cut out that background and planned to do that the first thing when I got home from work.  Let me say that I am still learning the ins and outs of my Cameo and really need to do some more experimenting with blade depth and speed, but impatient I was, so I forged ahead with using a sub-par cut image and overlay and resorted to trying to clean up the overlay with a craft knife.  (The pieces weren't popping out on their own, they needed a little help in the corners.)  Time-consuming?  Yes.  It didn't look bad but I really didn't like the green on green and I still hadn't found the missing pastels and the sun was setting fast.

I told myself I would find them on Tuesday.  Yes, Tuesday would be good.  But when I got home from physical therapy and still could not find them I pushed it off until Wednesday.  Fixation!  I came home yesterday and sat down at the dining room table where I have my laptop and Silhouette set up and was trying to think what I could do to add that color instead of using the pastels and thought about maybe using my Prismacolor pencils which were there behind my computer.  And guess what I found?  Under the box of pencils was ............I'm sure you guessed it............ my pastels. 

So I ran upstairs and started futzing around with them on the back of the overly and, well, I didn't even like it.  Fixation!  Determined to have that blue ivy look, I grabbed a sheet of Not Quite Navy paper and ran back downstairs to cut that out.  Well, when all was said and done, I looked at the clock and it was 5:56 and even though I had the computer on, I knew I would never get the photo taken and uploaded in time.  So I blew the deadline, but I took my time adding some more details on that card like the glitter gel line around the sentiment piece and the card base (which my friend Sabrina does beautifully but I haven't mastered yet).  And then I didn't just want to discard that image that I had spent so much time cutting out so I looked through my embossing  folders and in 5 minutes that card was done. 

If I hadn't been so fixated on finding those pastels..................................................