Guest Designing over at The Challenge

As you are reading this I am spending a long weekend with my bestest friend ever. We hardly ever get to see each other after she went back home and I stayed over here in the UK. So right now we are having a girl's weekend in Riga. But I scheduled this post to go live right at this moment as I have a really special card to share today. I was absolutely chuffed to bits when I saw that my macaron card was picked as the winner over at The Challenge a few weeks ago. It's always a thrill to see one of my cards picked as a favourite in one of the challenges, it's just so nice to know someone else enjoyed something you made. The prize you get for winning is the honour of joining the amazingly talented DT as a guest designer. So thank you to The Challenge DT for having me, and for you for popping over to my blog to see my creation. For the next week The Challenge is to create something using the sketch below. So come and join us over at The Challenge to see what the wonderful DT has created to inspire you, and then get creative and don't forget to share your gorgeous creations!

This is such a great sketch as it will really let your imagination run free. I'm not very good with using circles, and I always try to replace them with another shape. I absolutely adore the Lawn Fawn Stitched Snowflake and Mini Snowflake dies, and I used them with vellum to create a beautiful snowflake flower. I have to admit that despite a penchant for stockpiling patterned paper, I don't have very much Christmas themed paper. I do have a Stampin' Up set from last year called All Is Calm, and I love the delicate snowflakes and gorgeous colours on it. So I decided to use that for the strip of patterned paper and create a watercolour background using Distress Inks in similar colours. I die cut a piece of watercolour paper using a Stitched Rectangle die and watercoloured an ombre background using Cracked Pistachio, Peacock Feathers and Mermaid Lagoon, splattering some ink onto the background as I went along. I heat embossed the sentiment from the Winter Penguin stamp set from Lawn Fawn in white powder and added a few adhesive gems and finally a dash of glitter using a Wink of Stella pen.

A closer look at the vellum snowflake embellishment. You 
can just about see a bit of the glitter on it, but it doesn't show
up very well in the photo.

I would like to link up my card with the following challenges:

Unicorn Challenge - Winter Theme

CAS-ual Fridays - Snowflake

Make My Monday - White Christmas

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge - Let It Snow

Time Out - Snowflakes are Winter's Butterflies

Sparkles Christmas Challenge - Die cut

Our Crafty Corner - Anything Goes/Winter

Card: 300 gsm white card, 300 gsm watercolour paper, Dovecraft 110 gsm premium vellum

Paper: Stampin' Up All Is Calm

Stamps: Lawn Fawn Winter Penguin

Ink: Tsukineko Versamark, Tim Holtz Distress inks in Cracked Pistachio, Mermaid Lagoon and Peacock Feathers

Other: Lawn Fawn Stitched Rectangles, Stitched Snowflake and Mini Snowflake dies, Papermania Seafoam White embossing powder, adhesive gems from my stash, Wink of Stella pen