Just saying hello

Such an appropriate title for my first post of 2016. I had intended to create and post at least one Christmas card per week, but sometimes life gets in the way.

On the first Sunday of the year, my husband was hit by an infection and this hit him extra hard because of his chemotherapy. The last treatment was supposed to take place last week but was postponed because my husband was too weak and yesterday it was decided to call it off altogether. So now he can concentrate on getting his strength back and regaining some weight. What he wants most of all right now is to be able to start walking the dog again, something I've been doing for the past couple of weeks.

I treated myself to the Altenew watercolouring class and have been playing around to create a few background panels, and last night I actually managed to finish a card. Yay!

I started by creating a wash of colour using Altenew inks (the first red I used was a trifle too pink to my liking so I added some darker red at the top) onto a panel of watercolour cardstock (Crafter's Companion). I then masked and stamped the flower and leaf images from Altenew's Henna Elements in Versamark onto a piece of vellum and heat embossed using white embossing powder (Simon Says Stamp) and fussy cut the image. I also heat embossed the sentiment from Altenew's Painted Butterflies in white onto a piece of black cardstock. I popped up the sentiment strip using foam tape and used this and a few drops of multi medium matte to adhere my flowers to the trimmed watercolour panel. I adhered my panel to a top folding card made from black cardstock (Crafter's Companion). To finish things off, I added a little shimmer to the black strip using clear Wink of Stella and adhered a few clear sequins (Pretty Pink Posh and Simon Says Stamp).

My card also fits the new theme at CASology, where this week's cue card is 'CLEAR'

And I'm just in time to link up to the ombre challenge at Simon Says Stamp.