A sweet crafty friends has asked folks to make handmade holiday cards that she can distribute to seniors at a nursing home facility. I love crafting for good causes, so I knew I wanted to make some whimsical gender neutral cards that I could make several of without spending days on each card (my normal pace for card making — LOL).<\/p>\n

<\/a>I decided the cute Mama Elephant Arctic Penguins<\/a><\/span> stamps would be easy to color and fussy cut and the Lawn Fawn Stitched Hillside Pop Up Die<\/a><\/span> would be perfect to create some fast but fun cards. Of course I could have skipped the coloring altogether (since the stamps were designed with a distressed sketchy look), but I decided to add some simple shading and then to half of the penguins I chose to draw (with a Copic Multiliner pen in 0.1 pt) in a little division between the heads and bellies so that I could do some fun orange-yellow-white ombre coloring. Both ways of coloring up these cuties were fun and easy to replicate. These are the Copic colors I used: 0, W0, W1, Y11, Y15 and YR16.<\/p>\n

<\/a>I decided to use some card bases that I had in my stash from a Michaels Hot Buy (80 cards and envelopes for $5), but flipped the colored side to the inside of the card to create an easy sky for the scene background. Then for the background ground, I used the Lawn Fawn Stitched Hillside Die<\/a><\/span>\u00a0to cut out a snowy hill. I love how all the Lawn Fawn stitched hillside and border dies seem to work together so well. \u00a0The pop up hills are also really easy to create (the video below shows how), and if you position this Lawn Fawn Stitched Hillside Die just-so, you can get four of them cut out of one 8.5″ x 11″ piece of card stock with just bits and pieces left over (from which I punched out loads of snowflakes).<\/p>\n

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Then to continue on my mission to make these simple mass-produceable cards, I got out a bunch of my old Martha Stewart Snowflake Punches: Himalayan<\/span><\/a>, Aspen Punch Around the Page<\/a><\/span>, and Alpine Snowflake (currently on sale at Joann’s for 40% off!<\/a><\/span>). I used up various scraps of white card stock I had punching out loads of all these snowflakes and just topped them with Icicles \u00a0and Silver Stickles for a wonderful shine and sparkle. For the front of the card, I also added some beautiful blue Recollections dimensional snowflake stickers I had left over from my holiday crafting last year.<\/p>\n

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To keep the sentiments religion-neutral, I used the Avery Elle Be Jolly stamp set on the outside of the card, and the Avery Elle “Oh What Fun” stamp set on the inside of the card. I stamped all the sentiments using Momento Luxe Tuxedo Black Ink and used clear embossing powder to give them a nice shiny and slightly dimensional finish.<\/p>\n

The following is a video sharing the cards as well as a mini tutorial on how to use the Lawn Fawn Stitched Hillside Die:<\/p>\n