This week I’m playing along at at few Christmas challenges, but my inspiration came from a new one – Muse: Christmas Visions. It’s no secret that I love clean and simple cards, and Ardyth Percy-Robb is the queen of Clean and Simple. I love all her creations and am inspired by her work. I encourage you to check out her blog – Maskerade. This past week, she started a new Christmas Challenge which is a spin off the weekly challenge – Muse. It’s called Muse: Christmas Visions.

I’m excited to play along in their first challenge. The way the Muse challenge works is a design team member posts a project and you use that as your Muse for your creations. The first challenge was created by Kimberly Wiener and here is her card:

Kimberly’s card has several possibilities to pull from, but I chose the core – Blue, White and Gold. The colors immediately inspired me to think of the Christmas Star and a frosted scene, so I decided to grab one of my Stampscapes stamps and make a scenic card. Here is my creation:

If you would like to see the exact video for this project, it’s in our project library at The Creative Grove VIP Community. Click here to find out more about becoming a member.

Creative Tips –

• To get the soft winter glow in the sky, you’ll want to try Distress Inks as they blend quite effortless – Click Here for a video on how to blend distress inks
• For the snow banks, I used a few shades of blue to create depth and interest among the drifts. If you’d like to learn more on how to create snow drifts – Click Here for a video on Snow Drifts

• The Leafless Limb stamp by Stampscapes was stamped twice, once in versamark, then again in Versamark/Espresso just slightly offset. They were then both embossed in clear embossing powder.
• Embossing your limbs gives you that frosty shadow and allows you to use the emboss resist technique preserving your image while you create the scene around your image.
• I wanted to have some stars, but wanted a little more gold in my card, so I created several dots with my Versamarker and drew a north star before embossing them in gold.

• The greeting is cut from Brushed Gold card stock and the Hand Lettered Holiday dies from WPlus9.
• The scene is matted onto a brushed gold card stock layer before going onto a Night of Navy layer by Stampin Up.

I’m also submitting this project to three other great challenges that I encourage you to check out:

• Merry Monday – Embossing is the key this week – wet or dry!
• Just Us Girls – Embossing this time around
• Addicted to Stamps – Holiday

I love the feel of this peaceful frozen evening, I hope you do to! I encourage you to play along in all the above challenges, I had fun creating this one, and am excited for a few more at Muse: Christmas Visions.

See you soon –

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