Christmas Card Trio

Still have a couple more cards to get done.  On this one I tried the trees my blogging buddy Lauren recently did a tutorial on.  She shows how to turn a tree into a forest using the negative and positive from her die cut tree.  My tree die is on a plate with a bunch of other stuff making it pretty impossible to get a good negative "stencil".  So I just went with using her painting technique on the trees.  They came out pretty good, but probably could have used another darker shade of green.  I fell in love with these animal stickers and just had to give them a little tree in the forest to decorate.

I don't know why, but I suspect it's the color of the background, but this card just did not photograph well. The card base is Early Espresso - a dark brown.  And the panel the tree is on is Cool Carribean which looks more like turquoise in the picture.  The snowflakes on the tree are white with silver embossed snowflakes and I sponged the edges of each one to give them more pop. The tree and branches are embossed in brown EP.  And the sentiment is die cut from silver paper.   Believe me, this is so much prettier IRL - so much so I would like to keep one for myself.   

This last card is based on a card I saw on Pinterest by Rambling Rose Studio.  I changed it up by using what I had left of that white and gold woodgrain paper I had (made 3 of these).  I used three of the swirl dies in matte gold, Brown Sugar, and shiny metallic gold paper.  My card base is Chocolate Chip and the ribbon is brown grosgrain with white snowflakes held together in the middle with some Tim Holtz jingle bell brads.  I didn't put a sentiment on the outside.  Again, the picture doesn't do it justice.

So at this point I figure I'm still in need of 6 cards.  I have 3 or 4 in progress which is good, but I had hoped to be done by now.  Of course, I never would be this far along if it weren't for the Jingle Belle Challenge blog which keeps me moving on Christmas cards all year long.  

The tree is up and little by little the decorations are appearing.  I lost 4 days to a sinus infection last week, including the weekend, so I'm not as far along as I hoped to be.  

Good news is the first batch of marshmallows are done!   Gotta find some red hots to make my cinnamon marshmallows.  The store that I usually get them at doesn't carry them anymore.  I had just about enough left to make a half batch tonight.  We'll keep looking.