Christmas Nutcracker

Happy Wednesday!!
I hope your week has been suburb so far!  Mine has been a bit slow, but hopefully will pick up soon as I get to start moving my stuff back into my craft room!  Whoop whoop!  The landlord came by last night and patched the wall all up where we had the leak/mold problem so everything is fixed!  I so cannot wait to get settled back in...while using the kitchen table has been nice for the time being, it is not easy to organize and leaves me feeling flustered a lot.  So yeah, I'm ready for my regular space again :)

But today I upped the creative mojo in an attempt to get some Christmas cards made.  I seem to be way behind on that holiday this year, so I really need to catch up!

I think this card turned out exactly as I wanted it to.  I love the gold/brown with the dark green color combination.  And the little bit of sparkle on the background paper is just so gorgeous!  I followed the sketch at The Sweet Stop challenge, but tweaked it a little.  I tilted the back panel behind the image, and instead of having text on the front, I cut out and assembled a poinsettia (which turned out so incredibly gorgeous!!).

The poinsettia is actually printed and hand cut (since I can't use my cricut right now).  Once it was all cut out, I used 2 different Copic sketch markers-R85 and RV91 to add in the veining on the petals. (look at me getting all fancy with my copics :)  I have to play with the few that I have!)  The colors didn't blend as well as I expected them too, but I think it still turned out beautifully!

The cute little image  is Christmas Nutcracker from Saturated Canary.  I just love these images and love using them on my cards!  I colored her in with my colored pencils and cut her out with a spellbinders oval.  Then used my scallop scissors around the edge.

The last element I added was the tree die cut tucked behind my image!  This is the Snowflake Tree die from Memory Box!  I absolutely love this die cut!  It cuts so clean and is a perfect embellishment :)

I'm entering this card in the following challenges:
    2 Sisters #113-Anything Goes
    ABC Christmas-U for Up to You
    A Gem of a Challenge #57-Flowers
    Color Me Creative-A Touch of Red
    The Crazy Challenge #130-Handmade Flowers
    Ladybug Crafts-Flowers and Embossing
    Stampin Sisters in Christ #161-Include a Tree
    The Sweet Stop #180-Sketch
    Tammy's Scrapin Corner #32-Anything Goes
    Totally Stampalicious-Christmas

Thanks for stopping by today!  And be sure to check back later this week/weekend as I will be having my first giveaway!!  It's for Christmas/celebration of my 1 year anniversary both as a blogger and an Etsy shop owner!!  Can't wait!!