JOY Christmas cards

 A few more Christmas cards!!  I started with the half trees that were left over from cutting out trees for these fabric collage cards and stitched the eight half trees into four whole trees by zigzagging them together down the middle.  I added a zigzag garland in red and then used straight stitch to attach gold sequins over the garland.  I was looking for a cool but subtle background paper for them in my stash and eventually resorted to creating my own using*" leftover paint paper".  I added some music notes (SU) at the top and bottom and a script (IO) in between in a beige coloured ink.  To give it all a bit of a collage look I stamped a portion of a collage stamp in the upper left hand corner - just enough to get a bit of colour up there.  Really happy with the way the background paper turned out!!  I stitched my trees to the background paper using green thread and then added a gold sequin with a gold brad to top the trees. I used a sharpie marker and scribbled in a trunk.  I stitched this element to my red card front on my sewing machine using beige thread.  That really worked out well!!

I added JOY in little red punched out letters.  My daughter had this punch set - one handle along with 30 or so little punch inserts - she was liquidating from a lot she purchased a while back.  They were the perfect size for this card!!  I will be hanging on to this set!!

 I love my little imperfect fabric trees on these lovely subtle backgrounds and the perfectly beautiful little red JOY!

*What is "leftover paint paper"??  I always apply any leftover paint from any project to paper - either clean white paper, the insides of bags or papers, junk mail or newspaper or any other sheet of left over paper I happen to have on hand.  This particular one was created when I was painting trim in our last house.  I just brushed out onto the paper as much paint as I could from my brush then cleaned up the brush.   I keep adding paint to the papers until I am happy with them and then they get incorporated into art.

Therese