What was I thinking?

It's official. I'm nuts. Not that anyone who knows me wasn't already certain, but this card proves it. I'm making nine of these. Nine. Because I'm crazy. This is the first one. It's taken me several days to get this one done. The rest will go a bit faster, but there's still a lot of work that has to be done to put them together. Here's how I made this.

The piece that's been dry embossed is hand painted. I wanted to use a specific Twinkling H20 color (pomegranate if you care to know) and SU! doesn't make a color even close. So I thought "Gee, I can make my own special color." I wish I had a stamping buddy close by who could have slapped a little sense into me at that moment. I painted three 8.5 x 11 pieces of Cryogen White card stock (shimmer white paper much like SU!'s) with two coats of the Pomegranate H20, and then a coat of acrylic varnish to give it a really nice sheen. The painting time and drying time between coats took about a day. The varnish can be tacky if you don't let it dry really well. I then gold embossed the tree from Flourished Christmas and the peace dove from Peace(from Flourishes) onto the cryogen white. I heat emboss a lot. My heat gun is well loved, but this was time consuming and a huge pita. Little embossing powder flecks and not stamping a clear image with Versamark, and well, anyone who's ever heat embossed everything knows what happens. That took a long time.

Then I had to cut and dry emboss and glue down and attach. And cut and change and cut some more. UGH!! You'd think this would be some great fancy card with all sorts of layers and special effects given the time I put into it, but NOOOOOOOO. It looks just like most of my other cards -- pretty enough but not overly ornate.

I decided I wanted gold cord. I found that gorgeous mesh wire ribbon and chose that, too. I tried adding both that and the cord, but I couldn't make the cord work so I scrapped it. I cut out the little snowflakes from a garland I bought and snot-dotted them to the card. I'll be finishing the rest of them this week, and then I'm designing another Christmas card that's not as time consuming. Whew. I like the card, but dang, this addiction is supposed to be fun.