Catherine Pooler Home for the Holidays Stamp of Approval

Hi Folks! I'm super excited to participate in the Catherine Pooler Home for the Holidays Stamp of Approval release! Today we're having a hop on Instagram, but I thought I'd also do a blog post to show a few more details of the cards featured.

The collection comes with several stamp sets, including Festive Trimmings which features a giant tree that is pre-decorated for you : ) If only my tree in real life came pre-done with poinsettias, jingle bells and holly. The border on the card itself is from the Cozy Borders stamp set and can be used to add some tone-on-tone interest to all of your holiday cards.

After putting the tree stamp on my Misti, I inked it in a few different CP inks to get the gradient effect. In my mind that kind of takes the place of coloring each element differently, like the bells, poinsettias, etc. The sequins stand in for ornaments, and also make the tree a little more festive.

This card is very similar, in that I stuck with the same main tree image on the card in gradient shades of the same ink. Instead of curving the sentiment around the top of the tree, I used the amazing new Merry Christmas Layered Word dies for the scripted sentiment. What an attention-getter! And that font!!!

Wanting the focus to be on this gorgeous sentiment, I kept the rest of the card clean and modern, only mounting it as a panel onto the card. The top of the tree is crowned with a poinsettia cut with the Festive Trimming dies (sold outside of the collection).

The final card I made with this festive tree features a forest. I love when one stamp can be repeated several times to make a bigger impact on your card.

To lower the contrast between the white of the paper and the ink on each tree, I used a sponge to blend a bit of that color in the middle of each tree.

Are you all as excited as I was to see the rest of the collection?! Stay tuned, the entire design team, along with some special guests, will have a lot more to share with you in a blog hop tomorrow. Then in two days we have a video hop, and in three more days (Wednesday, September 19th) the Home for the Holidays collection will be released! So much going on!

Thanks so much for joining me!

-Kelly