Hi, crafty friends. This month’s release from Rachelle Anne Miller is a fun one. It’s a Christmas release, but not just any old Christmas release, it’s Australian themed!! I love creating cards with Aussie critters, and as usual, if there’s a koala, I tend to go with that first. Unless there’s a penguin (also very Australian, even though most people might not know it). There was no penguin, so I chose the Sweet Koala Christmas image.
The koala sitting on the pile of presents comes with a matching sweet sentiment (pun intended), but I chose not to use the sentiment for this card and decided to erase it from the image in Photoshop before printing.
I went with a fairly traditional (at least to me) color combo. Light blue is one of very few colors I feel works well with red, and I even colored the stars blue to avoid adding more colors to this than necessary in order to keep the design clean. I die cut my panel using the largest die in the Watercolor Rectangle STAX die set from My Favorite Things, added foam tape to the back and adhered it to a top fold card base I created from Periwinkle cardstock from Hero Arts.
Onto a scrap piece of Periwinkle cardstock, I stamped and white heat embossed a sentiment from the Christmas Wishes stamp set from My Favorite Things, before using the coordinating die to cut it out. I added two more die cuts behind it for dimension and adhered it to my card, before finishing off with sequins and star confetti from the Starry Night mix from Little Things from Lucy’s Cards.
The popped up panel, and the dimension to the sentiment add a little bit of extra interest to an otherwise fairly clean and simple card. I wanted the image to shine, which is why I kept the sentiment a fairly light color.
I feel like I restrained myself when coloring. I only used four colors for the red, as opposed to my usual six. I kind of went overboard with the green, though. Those holly leaves really didn’t need three colors, they’re tiny.