Jingle Belles Rock #33 - Bling On The Holidays

Tonight was a sad night in the Crooked household. Tonight, a dear family member has passed on. Although it was an inanimate object, it had a lot of moving parts, but a few of them move no more. I'm speaking of my dear, departed Big Shot. The darn thing had the nerve - THE NERVE - to seize up on me at the very moment I was cutting a most-critical part for this week's Jingle Belles Rock card. Hmph.

Once I knew a replacement Big Shot was on its way (they have a 3-year warranty) I got permission to try and remove my still-stuck die with whatever force was necessary, then I went to work. I started with the most obvious screws, then the next set, then the next... until I finally had the whole thing in pieces on my craft room floor. It blocks one of my major paths. Here she is:

That part in the lower left? That's the iron grip of the jammed rollers holding my all-purpose platform and cutting plates hostage. They are locked in there gooood. I have a week to re-assemble her. Wish me luck.

Please note: Do not try this at home. If I had taken off the handle first, I would have realized there was no hope, and I would have saved all that time removing the rest of the screws. My bad.

So anyway, what was I cutting? I was using this die from Memory Box:

I cut it last night (JUST FINE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH) out of some of the new SU Silver Glimmer paper (available Sept 1st). A sheet of this stuff is blinding, but the tree came out so one doesn't need sun glasses to view the final product. But it disappeared into my chosen background paper, so I was cutting it again out of a piece of card stock vellum when disaster struck. :(

I did (obviously) manage to rescue the die and the piece of vellum (I have my priorities), but at that point I was faced with the task of finishing my card without the use of a die-cut machine. {horrors} I might have to punch or tear or ... it was too much for me to accept. Just too much. I was still reeling from my loss. It's been a rough night, people.

So, do you wanna see my card? Lookie:

Here's a close-up of the tree:

You can see the shimmer, though it is not even close to being captured here. I added red Distress Stickles at the last minute. You can also see the vellum behind the tree - it's just enough without being really obvious. (Thanks to Lisa for her suggestion!)

Here's the other side of the card:

The ribbon ... do you know that 99.5% of all Christmas ribbon uses gold accents, not silver? I rummaged through my box of "you don't belong in the other color boxes" of ribbon and finally found this shimmery one. I like it!

You can also see the stars I was reduced to punching since the snowflake punch was too detailed to cut through the glimmer paper. And I opened and used my Robin's Nest bottle of Christmas tear drops.

Here she is again:

Check out that swirl on the top right. It's one of the punch-outs form the tree. :)

So that's it. I survived my craftastrophe, though I have a week to go before my new Big Shot arrives. What will I do?!?!? It could be an interesting week.

I'm going to post this over at the Jingle Belles blog. Why not get your bling on and join us? :)

Thanks for stopping by!