Dreamweaver Free Challenge week

I love the Christmas season and while I'm just getting started with my decorating our little neighbor hood is in full swing. I don't know why but I always think of snow when the season starts, however the last time it snowed in Castro Valley I was 8 yrs old and that was a very long time ago. For today's post I chose to showcase one of my favorite stencils, the Antelope Snowflake (LL399).

I also used the Swirl background stencil (LJ 863).

The first thing I did was pick out the notecard color I wanted to use, this is a Memory Box notecard and the color is called Thistle, the color is kind of a gray green. After choosing the color I decided on the background stencil because the swirls remind me of how snow might fall. I started by using the Tim Holtz tool with blending foam and rouging in one of his new seasonal distress inks called Iced Spruce then when I had that done I took one of my large stencil brushes and added a little of the other new distress ink call Evergreen Bough. I wanted my snowflake to have that Thistle color so I started with Regular Embossing paste and added Glacier Blue metallic F/X this colors the paste a beautiful turquoise color so then I added just a pinch if Ivy Garden metallic F/X and got just the color I was looking for. You will notice that one side of the snowflake appears lighter then the other and this is because I used a sludge technique. While the paste was still wet I sprinkled a little crystal glitter on it to give the snowflake some sizzle. When the snowflake was dry I used my large stencil brush and just brushed in a little bit of the iced spruce distress ink around the edge of the card. I backed the layered background and the image with a darker card stock and the using mounting tape popped the snowflake off the background. This is a very clean and simple card to do, my very favorite kind of card. I urge you to play with the regular embossing paste and the Metallic F/X and see what colors you can come up with. If you want us to see your creations go to the Dream It Up blog and use Mr. Linky and don't forget to visit the blogs of my Dream Team sisters to see what they have come up with this week.