Happy Saturday!  The weekend is here, and it’s time for another 52 {Christmas} Card Throwdown challenge!  This week my fellow team member Louise has a color challenge for us – black, white, and metallic gold.  I ended up making two cards for this challenge.  I wasn’t thrilled with the first one, so I made the second one… and then after making the second one, I liked the first one better!  Go figure.  🙂

So here’s the first card.  My sweet sons’ Christmas present for me was a gift certificate to Oozak, and some of the things I bought with it are Memory Box dies.  I love snowflakes, so I couldn’t resist the die I used for this card.  I thought gold would be a fun, unexpected color for a snowflake, and I do like the way it turned out.  I ran the gold cardstock through my Xyron machine before I cut the snowflake, thinking that would be the easiest way to add adhesive to the snowflake.  However, it seemed like the die had a hard time going through the backing on the adhesive.  That was discouraging.  I tried adding shims and finally got it to cut all the way through.  I used Stars and Stamps sketch #41 for the layout, substituting the snowflake for one of the rectangular panels.  As I was editing the photo of this card, I had the thought that I should have used textured black cardstock for some additional but subtle visual interest.  Oh well.

I actually thought of gold bells before I thought about using the snowflake die, but I was having a hard time figuring out just how I would carry out that thought.  I’d already shared one bell card with similar colors just a few months ago, and I didn’t want to copy it.  When I saw this week’s Freshly Made Sketches layout, I thought it might work with another bell stamp I own.  I didn’t want the black panel to be just plain, and one of my swirly embossing folders coordinated really well with the bell image.  But I didn’t want the deep texture that the embossing folders give.  So I embossed the panel, took the cardstock out of the folder, reassembled the “sandwich” with the cardstock out of the folder, and ran it through my Big Kick again.  That actually worked to smooth out the texture more than I bargained for, and it was really hard to get the embossing to show in the photo, so I had to do more tweaking than usual with my photo editing software.  I made one small change to the layout, moving the sentiment to a place where it would be more visible.

So there they are – two cards for this week’s 52 {Christmas} Card Throwdown, and two more for my growing stash of cards for Operation Write Home.  What kind of Christmas card will you create with black, white and gold?  Please be sure to share it at the 52{C}CT site by Friday, March 15.

Supplies for the snowflake card:
Stamps: Sincere Salutations (Stampin’ Up)
Cardstock: Basic Black, Whisper White, Brushed Gold (SU)
Ink: Tuxedo Black (Memento)
Other: Bianca die (Memory Box)

Supplies for the bells card:
Stamps: A Greeting for All Reasons (Stampin’ Up); Holiday Lane (Lizzie Anne Designs)
Cardstock: Basic Black, Whisper White, Brushed Gold (SU)
Ink: Tuxedo Black (Memento); Gold (ColorBox)
Other: D’Vine Swirls embossing folder (ProvoCraft)