Joyful stamping

Tonight I had a great time stamping with the Season of Joy stamp set from the holiday mini collection. If you read my mini collection impressions you may recall that at first I didn't really like this set, but when I saw what other stampers had done with it I fell in love! Thanks to my friend Sara, who let me borrow the set for a couple of days, I was able to confirm for myself that I absolutely, positively must own Season of Joy! It really is just as fun and versatile as I thought it would be.

I spent a lot of time this evening CASEing cards designed by other stampers, but I came up with a couple of original designs as well. This first one is in shades of blue and silver, which I absolutely love! The base of the card is bashful blue and it was stamped with the larger flower image in versamark. The silver strip was stamped in versamark with the snowflake image and embossed with silver embossing powder. The central image was stamped on silver with night of navy craft ink and embossed with clear embossing powder. Both the main image and the strip were matted with night of navy card stock and the main image was adhered with dimensionals. It's not a complicated card, but it looks really pretty in real life.

Next I wanted to create a card with this set that had nothing to do with Christmas or even winter. I started with the flourish stamp, inked it up with certainly celery ink and stamped a boarder around a 3.75x5" main panel of whisper white. I added the birthday sentiment from Sincere Salutations to the center of the panel, stamped in purely pomegranate. I then added a bunch of the little flowers stamped in pretty in pink. I stamped the large flowers in purely pomegranate onto pretty in pink card stock, trimmed them out by hand and adhered them in the corners of the main panel with dimensionals. I then added a purely pomegranate mat and adhered the whole thing to a pretty in pink card base. And there you have it -- an everyday card made with Season of Joy!

I could have stopped there, and may be should have, but I got the idea to add glitter to the large flowers. I painted the petals and centers with 2-way glue and covered everything with dazzling diamonds stampin' glitter. And here is the final product. What do you think? I like the sparkle but I also like the color intensity of the flowers stamped in the purely pomegranate ink when it's not muted by glitter. Either way, though, I love how fun it was to put this card together and how the design can be used for just about any occasion. Needless to say, Season of Joy will be making its was onto my next order :-).