Jingle Belles - Merry Sketch-Mas

The lovely Stephanie has provided a sketch for this round of the Jingle Belles challenge.  I'm once again squeaking in under the wire with my card.

Here's the sketch - 

I found this die on my work table while I was working on a birthday card that I need for later this week and remembered the sketch I had seen on the JB blog using a hexagon.  The physical die actually has the straight 6 sides to it but when you cut it out you get the snowflake.  I used some gold metallic thread to add the stitching forgoing beads at this time.  We were having work done in our basement today involving jack hammers and a lot of noise and doing this "embroidery" on paper helped keep my sanity a little closer to normal (for me at least).  I did two of them and then I had to decide what other elements to add to conform to the sketch.  There was some trial and error involved ..... taking more time of course...... and then I thought I had misplaced the second snowflake and spent a good amount of time searching for it before I found it in and amongst the other pieces of the cards that I was going to complete all along.  The little town scene in the circle cut is from last year's Unity advent calendar and the sentiment is from an old Stampin' Up set.  I struggled with the embossing of that sentiment because I didn't use the fine embossing powder the first time and it was very broken up.  Luckily I had been using my Misty and hadn't removed the stamp from the lid yet and was able to add more VersaMark ink and emboss it again with the finer powder.  I think it still doesn't show up too well against the dark green background paper, but I'm letting it ride this way.

I hope to be back on track with the JB challenges for the next several months and may go back and do a few that I missed so that I have all the cards that we'll need.  This summer has been busy with family events and life changes that I'm still trying to adjust to, but hopefully more arting will be in my future to share.  Please check out the Jingle Belles blog by clicking here to see all the other wonderful creations.