Silent Night

This week on the 52 Christmas Card Throwdown, we have a theme challenge. Andreja has chosen "Silent Night".

This has obvious musical connotations, so I wanted to use musical notation in my card. It's such a soft, peaceful song, I sing it to my daughter as a lullaby, which is where I think the soft grey colour scheme came from.

The first layer of the background was stamped in a pale grey pigment ink. I used a background stamp on one side and snowflakes, stamped repeatedly to build up a pattern, on the other.

Over this I added my music stamp - I used archival black, second, third and more generation, added randomly. I realise it looks a right mess in the photo, in real life it was more pleasing!

I cut the background down to size for a 5x7 card, and blended silver pigment ink around the outside. I then ran the black ink pad around the edge.

I decided it still needed more framing, so used black and the same snowflake stamps to add to the outside.

The final step for the background was some black thread (normal sewing thread, I do have some of the heavier weight stuff somewhere but have no idea where!) wrapped around.

My idea for a soft layer to go over this was to die cut snowflakes from parchment. Picot cut snowflakes would be absolutely gorgeous, but I don't have the time for that at the moment!!

After one false start, I put copy paper under the parchment to cut it, and was able to get the snowflakes out of the die without tearing them. They were a little too subtle, so I pressed the reverse into the silver pigment ink pad. It picked up the ink incompetely, and a bit got onto the front, which actually worked well I thought.

The sentiment is from a stamp set I've had for years, probably one of the first sets I ever got, from Papermania/Docrafts. I simply stamped onto white card with black archival ink, masking the words to separate them, cut out and edged with the black.

I'm really happy with how this has come together.

I'm curious to see how it would look with more colour - maybe a sepia look to be warmer, or even something really bright!





To join in with the challenge, head to the 52CCT blog. Entries close on Friday 25th January. I'm looking forward to seeing how you all interpret this theme.