Cards, Cards, Cards - Christmas - doilies

Christmas cards!!  We met this morning to create Christmas cards and get a head start on that process.  It always feels great to have your cards made and ready to go when December rolls around.
I have been loving the lovely cards I have seen on Splitcoast Stampers that feature the dainty Doily stamp from SU and really wanted to make a card with that lacy look!!  For this large class it means a lot of thermal embossing to get that look so I decided to see if I could find a digital solution.  Hooray!  I found one.  On the Avant Garde Collection CD (SU) there is a paper collection called Flirtatious and one of the papers is a large doily!!  I brought the image into Photo Shop Elements and replaced all of the white areas with transparent in a few clicks of the mouse following instructions from the internet.  I cannot seem to locate the exact tutorial I used but there are lots of different ones on how to do this.  I was also able to change the colour of the doily in PSE using the paint bucket so I created a white and red version to use on these Christmas cards!!    I imported the images into Corel Draw, duplicated them so I had four doilies and then  laid them out so they would each be off the page in each corner of a 8.5 x11 page.  I created a box of colour beneath the two white doilies to show them off nicely and added greetings.  Once I had them sized and positioned by eye I printed one page to see which circle punch I would need to create the centers.  I had to resize the doilies a bit so that the 1 3/8" punchies would leave a nice scalloped edge visible.  I printed these on white cardstock using a colour laser, cut them apart and trimmed them to 4" x 5.25".  I layered a coordinating circle punchie in the center of the doily, added a fiber snowflake and used a brad to attach them all together.  This element was glued to a coordinating card front.  I embellished the front with glitter glue to add just a bit of sparkle!!  I used iridescent for mine but some girls at class today used silver on the blue one and red on the red one and that really looked very nice!!  I expect a spritz of shimmer spray would be really great too!!
So I encourage you to find your newest Christmas stamp, a sketch you like,dig out some paper and get creative!!  If you prefer digital stamps check out the next few post for links to some I used for this class.

Therese