Christmas Stepmother

I went onto the Sizzix website the other day and as they have a HUGE sale on I spent £27!! However, this was a saving of £108!! I got a Bigz die, a couple of sizzlits dies (a circle die, decorative border die and a snowflake trio of dies), two lots of dies with stamps, a pack of dies with embossing folders and two embossing folders. So I decided to play this afternoon and use some of my new goodies to make a Christmas card.

A SMIRK snowflake motif was stamped onto papermania Christmas vellum using black ink an heat embossed with a Candy Blue embossing powder. This was attached to the centre of a gold base card. I used the sizzix snowflake circle die to cut a snowflake border out of a pale teal 12 days of Christmas papermania paper and attached over the homemade paper. The SMIRK stamp was inked with black versamark ink and applied to white card, which was then embossed and die-cut using another of my new toys :). The image was then coloured using Promarkers - including teal highlights to compliment the teal tones of the embossed snowflakes and snowflake border. To finish gingham embellishments, with diamantes, were added to the outside and a gingham greeting to the inside of the card.

This card is being entered into the following challenges:
Sweet Stamping - Embossing - background snowflakes
Crafty Hazelnuts - People Matter - SMIRK main image
Completely Christmas Anything Goes #27
Catch The Bug - Recipe challenge - Bling = diamantes and gold; Teal = snowflakes and circle as well as accents to figure; die = snowflake die
Allsorts - Christmas
Winter Wonderland - Gingham or Checks
Cute Card Thursday 336 Anything Goes
SimonSaysStamp Wednesday - Anything Goes
ilovepromarkers 234 - make your own backing paper - Embossed snowflakes on patterned vellum
abcChristmas - Q for Quick and Easy (the most time consuming was finding the papers I wanted lol).
aud sentiments #114 Any sentiment NOT birthday
hobbybookdesigner - 2 or more designer papers - patterned vellum and papermania paper used for die
jinglebelles - baby it's GOLD outside - gold base card, gold pattern on vellum, gold embellishments
polkadoodles Christmas challenge
Crafty Calender - Anything Goes

This weeks audio book was the stepmother by Carrie Adams. This story starts off from the perspective of a single mum of 3 girls who is very overweight and unhappy with herself. It introduces the main people and shows their characters and also brings up the fact the Bea (the single mother) would actually like to have her ex husband back to reunite the family. However, the ex informs her that he is in love with somebody else, crushing Bea's hopes. Then the story switches to the new womans (Tessa) perspective. It brings up the difficulties that can arise when trying to take on somebody elses children, as the oldest child realises her mother does not like Tessa and that it causes her upset, which then leads to Bea drinking to excess, and so tries not to like Tessa herself. Bea gets more despondent and irrational as the wedding party draws nearer and eventually manages to, unintentionally ruin it for her daughter. However, Tessa and Bea must come face-to-face when the ex is out of the country and Tessa's mum falls ill whilst Bea is completely drunk!
A very good story that I enjoyed on my commute, wondering what will come up next and how they will resolve it.

Hugz Tinz