'Tis the Season, and I am Jolly!

Yep, I am jolly! I finally got the idea for my holiday card out of my head and onto paper. And the good news is I used a ton of stuff from my stash!

Among my hoarded stuff is a box of almost every color of A Muse cards, and just about all the ribbon I have ever grabbed from Mike's. My goal this week was to not only design a card, but to use some of my must-have-but-never-used stash, and I think I've done it!

First, my idea was to put the A Muse cards on an A2 base so they fit in a standard envelope. That way I do not need to pay extra postage for the non-rectangular envelope. Hopefully my embellishments will not push me over on postage anyway.

Here is my card:

Recipe: Snow Flurries (SU), Penguins (The Cat's Pajamas), sentiment by A Muse; Paper - Blue Bayou, Old Olive, Whisper White, A Muse note card; Other - SU markers, misc ribbon, Dazzling Diamonds (SU), glue pad.

Since I always hand-write a note to each person, there is no way I will get these done and mailed before Christmas, so I used a Winter theme instead. The challenge for me was to find a Stampin' Up! color that worked with the various A Muse card colors I wanted to use. I decided on Blue Bayou, and set about to find ribbon to tie it all together. I had several ribbons that worked, but I had to bend my self-imposed "must match" rules and learned to go with a "pretty close". A step outside of my comfort zone and a growing experience, to boot!

Here are two more of the ribbons I used:











And since non-SU ribbon spools tend to be so much shorter than the SU spools, I went through about 5 different spools from my stash. YAY!

Between now and the first of the year I will be working on my writer's cramp, but I will probably take a few breaks to work on next year's cards. That's the plan, anyway. ;-)