Christmas in July? Midweek Throwdown....

I have friends who start on Christmas cards in February but I've always been a "do 'em at Thanksgiving" person.. being my first year doing the cards for heros, this Christmas card in July thing is new to me BUT if it will break the nasty heat waves we have had this summer, I'll do 'em 24/7!

So a friend had some gorgeous card fronts done with a resist technique I hadn't seen (and we also played with this technique at her stamp-a-stack) so thought I'd try at home. We used new "Liquid Pearls" in opaque to play with, but I had to change it up and try it with the silver Liquid Pearls = not! I like the opaque better!

How do you do it? Put a dollop of the liquid pearls on a plastic plate, aluminum foil (anything not porous) and spread really thin and quickly with your fingers. Ball up part of a plastic grocery bag and dab the pearls onto glossy paper - a pretty good coating but not "even." After it dried I used Distress Ink in the green pine color (Distress Inks works best), swiping the inkpad over the pearly coated paper and then quickly rubbing the ink off with a paper towel - voila! Legal patina and shine without glitter to ship overseas! Like I said, after using the silver pearls, I think I'll use the opaque next time to make it shinier. You can also use a rubber stamp dipped in the liquid pearls to stamp images and I'm going to try that with a new snowflake stamp and a light blue distress ink. If you use stamps with this technique you have to stamp quickly and clean off the stamp even quicker so the pearls don't harden on it. The stamp I used on this NOEL card is one of the "Big on Christmas" set from Stampin' Up! that I got specifially for OWH cards. I stamped, colored and cut a second ornament for the "O" to make it "stand out" a bit and and glitzed up the ornament hangar on the original stamp image with a glitter pen...but the forest green background paper still looks "black" no matter where I photograph it or how... oh well!