Christmas Kickstart Challenge #77 - 'Elves'

I'm back as Dotty Jo's guest designer for the month of August - over at the Christmas Kickstart Challenge - HERE!  As always, it's a joy to be asked and I do love sticking to a theme - especially when it's a Christmas one.

This time, it's 'Elves' and I had the perfect set of dies, waiting in one of my NBUS baskets for its first outing! Perfick timing.

This is the result:

I used: 

- A6 white card blank, side opening

- a snippet of white card, embossed using the Crafts-Too 'Merry Christmas' embossing folder - then trimmed to leave an eighth of an inch margin around all sides 

- glued the embossed panel onto the card front

- die cut the 'elf' from two layers of black card and glued them together for stability - the dies on the card are all from the Sizzix Tim Holtz 'Santa's Helper' set of dies

- glued the elf at his jaunty angle onto the card front - using a glue pen

- then the fun began! I sat with a pile of red, green and gold snippets, my mini Altenew die cutting machine - and almost went crazy working out 'which die did what' to make the Christmas presents but I succeeded in the end. The trick, at least it works for me, is to cut and assemble ONE present at a time - it takes longer but is a lot less confusing - and also to add a further layer of card behind the main part for both stability and dimension 

- glued the presents and their ribbons together individually as I progressed until I had them all lined up in front of me ready to roll. At that point I discovered I was missing the fully assembled flat shaped present - it was like a man-hunt in here. I'd just swept the little scraps into the waste bin so had to up-end that for a search. Then, I suddenly wondered if I'd accidentally cleared it away with the tiny scraps of unused double sided sticky pads I'd been working with to prepare the presents for sticking onto the card front - and there it was leering at me through the poly bagl Big sigh of relief here

- so the final steps were to add the presents to the front of the card then glue the huge bow onto the top present - using two snippets of thin foam pads on top of one another to bring the level of the top of the bow up to the same as the present box itself

Many thanks to Jo for inviting me to be a Guest Designer over at the Christmas Kickstart Challenge and I'd really love it if you would come along and join in with the challenge - this is the LINK. It's open until the end of the month so you have plenty of time.

I'd also like to enter this card into Darnell's current NBUS #53 challenge for August - HERE. The 'Santa's Helper' set of dies are my NBUS - and they might well remain as 'almost NBUS' for the foreseeable future too!