A Christmas Penguin

Happy Tuesday!
I hope everyone is rested up from their busy holiday weekend!  I spent yesterday on the couch sick...once again.  Matthew and I can't seem to shake this silly bug that is cycling between us.  We are feeling a bit better now, so hopefully it is gone...we'll see :)

We have a fun new challenge at Tuesday Throwdown for you - Cute and Cuddly.  Our fabulous sponsor - MyGrafico - has provided some adorable little images for our team to use.

I don't use a lot of patterned paper on my cards anymore...I find it much more fun to come up with my own backgrounds.  But once in awhile, a paper catches my eye and screams to be used.  That was the case with a Recollections Christmas paper pack at Michaels called Be Merry.  I had seen it on my last shopping trip there and walked around the store with it, only to decide to put it back.  But when we went there again on Black Friday, and I still wanted it, I decided to pick it up.  It has the most beautiful pastel sparkly patterns...I'm excited to use it :)

So I grabbed a piece that worked for today's card and set to making all the details.  I started by stamping snowflakes onto an inked up banner and embossing them.  Then I inked up and die cut a little tag and used the Mini Scenery: Peppermint Zone stamp from Winnie & Walter to get a fun swirl in the background.  I achieved that by misting the stamp with some white shimmer spray and stamping it down on my blue inked tag.  It's subtle, but so cute!  Then used my Fuse tool to create a cute little shaker with it!  It took me a few tries...I'm not sure if the plastic that I'm using is too thin, or if I just need more practice, but I keep melting it too much so I have all these little holes everywhere and have to start over...oh well.  I got it on the third try for this tag :)

I printed off and colored up one of the cute penguins from the Penguin Digital Set from MyGrafico and cut it all out.  I white heat embossed the sentiment onto some vellum and then added a cute little present in the penguins hands.  After getting it all assembled, I decided it needed a little more detail, so I white heat embossed and then fussy cut out some snowflakes from the WPlus9 Folk Art Flurries set, and adhered them around the card.  This helped to really finish it all off.

I hope you'll join us this week!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Artistic Inspirations #146-Anything Goes/Christmas
    Crafting When We Can #108-Don't Forget the Animals
    Fab n Funky #283-Christmas
    Simon Says Stamp-Anything Goes
    The Paper Shelter #229-A Christmas Card

Thanks so much for visiting! <3