Yummy Christmas Gingerbread House and Cuckoo For You

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Hello Stamping Friends,

I missed posting our September club cards and one is a Christmas card!   Now that it is getting down to the wire for Christmas cards you might be looking for the details to this card you made “way back when”!

I cased Bronwyn Eastley with a gingerbread house box card.

http://addinktivedesigns.com/product/yummy-christmas-box-card/

Things I recommend doing differently:

• add strips of window sheets to the back of each pop up
• Make two of each pop up to put front and back so the back is prettier
• cut that little point on the bottom middle front and back just a tiny bit – not cutting in to the black line – so the box sits squarely
• Use the Bronze Stampin’ Blend for the gingerbread man and the deer for a darker brown
• Use puff paint for the snow

Cuckoo For You

With the ‘Yummy For Christmas’ and ‘Cuckoo For You’, we have two stamp sets that use the same set of dies!

Isn’t that so cool!  The deer becomes a holly branch, the clock door becomes a gumdrop, the clock weight becomes a peppermint and the tree becomes a Christmas tree!

Christine Rohr posted a picture on Pinterest which used the Cuckoo For You and the Bird Ballad DSP.  I cased and selectively edited it to come up with this card for club:

Push up on the little arrow and you see the little cuckoo bird!

Note: DSP means Designer Series Paper

• Base:  Petal Pink  5 1/2 X 8 1/2  Scored at 4 1/4
• Layer 1:  Bird Ballad DSP   5 1/4 X 4  Watch the direction on your DSP
• Strip of DSP for inside:  3/4 X 5 1/4
• Front Stitched Nested Label:  Whisper White,  2nd largest label is 2 5/8 X 4 5/8 so start with 3 x 5 piece; emboss with the Subtle 3D embossing folder; then cut with the Stitched Nested Label.  Use handheld hole punch to punch a hole on each side of the label for the ribbon. Mount the label 1″ down from top of base and 5/8″ from the sides of the base to the point of the Stitched Nested Label
• Ribbon:  1/4″ Copper Trim,  6″ , make two
• Clock and Parts:  Whisper White  3 5/8 X 8 1/2;  Stamp in Memento Tuxedo Black ink:  clock, 2 pulls, 1 squirrel, 1 door;  color with Stampin’ Blends:  Old Olive on the vines, Bronze on the dots, roof-Dk Soft Suede, Clock Outline-Dk Balmy Blue, Pulls-Bronze & Dk Soft Suede, Squirrel – Bronze body, nut in Lt Suede, with a Dk Suede top, Door – Lt Suede, blue trim and be sure to cut off the white border of the door created when cutting with the framelit.  Tip:  When coloring with the alcohol markers in tiny areas just barely dot the area to color it.  The ink spreads and you won’t be getting ink outside the lines.

• Mask the 2 flowers, the clock middle, the inside of door and sponge with Blushing Bride Ink.

• Clock Weight and clock hands:  Copper Foil,  1 1/4 X 1 1/4.   Stamp the clock weight in Versa Mark ink, emboss with copper powder and cut with the circle die.  Cut the clock hands out of the foil and save the little pieces to use for the squirrel’s nose, the handle on the door, and the little dot right above the 12.
• Clock pull:  left over from the Whisper White used for the clock and parts: cut one with the die.  I used my Stamparatus to line up the lines with the arrows and the one word “cuckoo” so my stampers could easily stamp the images:

You stamp the arrow and lines image with the right side up and then stamp “cuckoo” on the back of the same piece.  With the Stamparatus we could line up the one word “cuckoo” from the greeting “I’m Cuckoo About You” and didn’t even need to mask the edges. By using the grid sheet we can save it with the stamp set for the next time.

The odd looking die with a little heart on the top and the bottom is a piece that matches up with the hearts on the clock face to cut slots for the sliding mechanism in exactly the right places.  There are YouTube videos using the two sliding mechanisms to make butterflies that “fly” and other fun tricks so the pieces are good for other applications.

Be careful to fold the score lines of the mechanism very straight so it slides nicely in the slots created by the second die.  The slot is a little larger than the door -necessarily so- so that you can slide it in, but once it was in place, I cut two little strips of Whisper White and glued them to either side of the slot so the mechanism stayed straight.

Inside Layer:  Whisper White 4 X 5 1/4 stamped in Soft Suede ink with the greetings in the “Special Celebrations” stamp set.

Front Greeting:  Scrap of Whisper White run through the Big Shot part way with the Rectangle Stitched Framelit and then turned around and run through the other sider with the same Framelit to shorten it to just the right size for “Time To Celebrate”.  I didn’t stop and made the whole Stitched Rectangle so I just ran it again to shorten it and then had a little piece left that was perfectly stitched that I used on this card:

My youngest granddaughter, Emma, was born on 9/24 at 7:12 AM.  I moved the house over a bit, found some left over pink twine from a Paper Pumpkin, and stamped the date with one of the first photopolymer stamp sets made by Stampin’ Up!

The inside uses the “New Wonders” stamp set and a template of the ‘1’ cut out of cardstock and then sponged with Blushing Bride Ink.  The fairies are colored to match the DSP with white and blue like the flowers and green like the vines.  This card will be hard to top when birthday #2 comes around.  My grandsons are turning 2 and 3 in the next few weeks and I will be working to make them something memorable.   Do you think parents save hand made cards?

The next Christmas Stamp A Stacks are December 4th and 7th at my house at 9:30.  RSVP by November 25- next Monday.  Wow, where has the month gone?

SAL,  Stamp A Lot

Karen