Stitched Snowflake

Fabiola's last challenge as host at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown is a technique challenge, and she's chosen sewing.

My card was inspired by a technique from Splitcoaststampers, which I've put my own spin on.

I started by raiding my stash of backgrounds for a suitable blue, I wanted a bright, solid colour. This is what I chose.

It has flecks of gold in it.

I then stamped a snowflake onto scrap paper.

This is a great new stamp set that lets me create multicoloured snowflakes, but I used it a different way today.

I fastened it over the blue background, then pierced holes through the snowflake to give me a pattern to sew into.

This is the back of the background, you can see the pattern in the holes.

And then I embroidered the card with needle and white embroidery thread. This wasn't a quick task, and a bit fiddly to find the right holes, but didn't take a long as I feared.

This is my focal point, which I die cut with a stiched edge square die - all kinds of stitching, faux or real, are fine for this challenge.

To make this into a card, I cut sections of other blue, snowflake themed backgrounds from my stash, and arranged them together. I edged each in grey and drew on faux stitching with a grey pen. I stamped the word "snowflakes" on a scrap and edged that in the same way.

Finally, I stamped a small snowflake onto a scrap of paper and used that to pierce through the card and add small snowflakes or stars, embroidered in pale blue.

This is a bit of a different card for me, but it turned out really pretty. Partly due to the delicate embroidered snowflake, and partly drawing on the variety of themed backgrounds I found.

To share your version of a sewn card, head over to the 52CCT blog. This challenge is open until Friday 31st July.