Hi Everybody! Kim here and today I am using A Winter Gnome by Picket Fences which brings cuteness with just a face. I don’t know how they have managed to accomplish this but I’ll take it because this little gnome head is just adorable and without even seeing his eyes he screams Winter! I knew when I pulled this stamp set out to play with…er I mean work with it that I definitely wanted to use Kraft cardstock. I also wanted his beard to be very white and I thought the Kraft cardstock would work well for this. Originally I was going to adhere the naked trees down on top of Kraft paper but while making another card with Carta Bella’s Christmas 6×6 paper pad the snowflakes on top of woodgrain sheet caught my eye and I thought those trees would look perfect on top of that paper instead.

I heat embossed the image on Kraft cardstock with detailed white embossing powder after stamping the image with Versa Mark ink. Blues of course work for winter, I was going for an ombre effect so I started with Navy and worked up with lighter blues by section. Coloring with Derwent Inktense pencils I guess I just forgot that they don’t resist water in any way and thought I could wipe the color off the white embossed areas with a baby wipe but that did NOT work the way it did in my head. So I ended up fussy cutting the image out and using a label punch to punch out the sentiment.

Instead of the white embossing powder which I had already embossed by the way resisting the blue it looks like it just absorbed it. Not what I was going for but it certainly became what I was going with (insert wink emoji here). After adding some sequins with Multi Medium Matte I then used a white Signo pen to trace over some of the details in the gnome’s hat to make them look whiter. I also decided that his beard needed some of that white Signo pen treatment as well. All in all I am happy with this card and per usual seeing about a dozen other ways I would like to use this stamp set.

Thank you so much for checking out the blog today, I hope you take some time for yourself and get crafty.

Keep on crafting,

Kim 🙂