Thank You and My First Sample for Karen

I want to thank you so much for all the lovely good wishes that you sent us yesterday for our Wedding Anniversary, we did have a lovely day and the weather was gorgeous, so hot I didnt even have to wear a coat. We went to the Mall in Bristol and visited several shops both of us like to visit, like Maplins for hubby to treat himself to a new computer which he built himself, and me Hobbycrafts to buy a few crafty bits, I didnt go to mad as weve got a couple of craft shows in the furture that I would prefer to go mad at. Anyway we did go to John Lewis's for our dinner and that was lovely, so thank you again for your good wishes for us, we both appreciate that very much.
Anyway todays card has been created for a very special friend of mine, Karen Sayers of Crafty Ideas by Kaz :-

Ive known Karen for a couple of years she used to regularly appear on Create and Craft, but is now running her lovely craft shop in Wiversfield in East Sussex, and you can guess I do have a wonderful time spending when I visit her shop, shes got some really gorgeous things on offer, and she doesnt charge you postage and packing so its certainly worth giving her shop a visit.

Karen is now promoting some Christmas stamps on her website and has asked me if I wouldnt mine previewing them on some cards, so how could I let her down and heres my first sample, I do so hope you will enjoy and like it.

Ive used this beautiful image of a robin on some holly for my first card, Ive stamped him onto some smooth white card and coloured him with my promarkers popped lots of glitter all over the place and even some glossy accents on the berries, then cut him out with the new Nestabilitie Die Label 15, Ive used the die to draw around for the mount, before sticking them together Ive used a red catseye inkpad to distress the edges, the sentiment is yet another of Karens stamps and Ive used a couple of smaller label dies for this.

The base card is a 7"x 7" white easel card, and I used two papers from the new "Noel" Dovecraft Paper pad, this is a red and gold stripe this has been mounted onto pieces of red card. The inside one has been finished with a red tartan ribbon wrapped around and stuck to the back of this first mount and the sentiment stuck in the centre (though I do see its not quite in the centre, sorry about that).

The outer mount is made with exactly the same pattern as the inside but with a strip of green paper with silver glittered xmas tress on Ive used the holly border punch on both edges, this is one of Martha Stewarts punches. I then used the large Marianne circle die to create a second mount for my image this was then stuck on top of the second layer, and my mounted image positioned in the centre. To finish of Ive stuck three poinsetta's at the top, one large white and two smaller red ones, and some red gems on the two opposite corners.