Spectacular Santa for PP800

Hello friends!  It's an exciting day over at the Paper Players as we celebrate our 800th challenge using our very first sketch from back in August 2010!  The talented Ann is hosting and has recreated the original design from PP3. 

I was always looking for challenges for card making inspiration and I discovered the Paper Players in 2011, playing along my very first time with PP61.

But enough memory lane from me!  Here's our commemorative sketch!

Paper Players

I'm still working on building my Christmas card stash, so I used this sketch as an opportunity to play with a new Santa die.  

Isn't he cute?  He's the Spectacular Santa referred to in the blog title and he's rockin' his red and white spectacles, don't you think?  He's part of a bundle from Spellbinders with four different images.  Here's a link to a July blog post where I used the polar bear and penguin on 2 cards.  There's also a deer/reindeer but I haven't had a chance to play with him yet.

This card is sized at 5" x 7" so I could include all the sketch elements.  I dug through my limited stash of Christmas patterned paper and found the perfect design for the background.  After assembling Santa, he was popped up on a snowflake embossed panel, and a strip of green was layered below.  The sentiment is from the same bundle.  

To balance the design, the double layer snowflake was added to the left side of the green strip, and I used a trim die for the white scallop along the bottom.  The last step was to add Stardust Stickles to the center of the large snowflake as well as to all the snowflakes and snow dots on the embossed panel.  It added a lot of sparkle to the card.

Thanks for visiting and I encourage you to head over to the challenge blog to see all the fantastic cards by my talented teammates!  The challenge will remain open until Friday August 28th at 3pm EDT.  I hope you'll join in this week to celebrate such a big milestone for the Players!

Stef

• Spellbinders Spectacular Santa die set and Holiday Sentiments stamp and die set
• SB Sparkling Snow ef
• SB Ribbon & Trim die
• Simon Says Stamp Lea Snowflake die
• Honey Bee Stamps Gingerbread Village patterned paper
• Stardust Stickles