Doe a deer a golden deer

Anyone who knows me will know that I love red.  The obsession started about 5 years ago when I split with my ex-husband and moved into my friend's spare room and suddenly, for the first time in many years I was able decorate exactly how I wanted (ex hated red!) so I went a bit mad!  Painted a wall red, bought red bedding, red candles, red dreamcatcher... loved it!  I've done quite a bit of crafty stuff in red too, but as it's not everyone's cup of tea, I have had to tone things down a little and not use it as much as I'd like.  Then I found a challenge which was to use the opposite colour on the colour wheel from what you usually like, so for me it was green!

I've never been a great lover of green, unless it is lime green so I needed to try something new.  I started making some papers using my trusty starburst stains (holiday wreath set) as I had some lovely greens in there.  I added a few splashes of red and squished it around and dragged it about and left it to dry wrapped in clingfilm.  When it was dry, I covered the front of the card with it and trimmed to size then made a piece of green card sparkly with gold starburst stain and whilst it was still wet sprinkled some gold embossing powder onto it and heated it up with my heatgun and it set really nicely.  I love experimenting!  When the card was dried I cut it with my deckle rectangle nestie.

For the stamp, I used a stamp which my Mum had given to me ages ago but I had never got round to using, it's from Anita's but I am not sure what it is called or even if it is a reindeer or a deer, but I think it will pass for either.  I stamped it up with clear embossing ink and then embossed with gold embossing powder.  I don't use gold very often and I have a huge tub of it but it's a shame I don't use it more as the effect is really nice and looks gold plated.  When it had set, I coloured the body with cinnamon promarker, adding a bit of depth and shadow in places, then cut out again using my largest nestie.  My local art shop had some bags of offcuts of nice Christmassy papers on sale for a quid, so I availed myself of those last week and have used the holly embossed shiny card from that pack to create the panel across the centre of the card.  The green deckle rectangle I placed on top of that and the reindeer/deer panel offset on top of that.

It's a good job I have so much of the gold embossing powder really as the snowflake in the top right hand corner was done using the smallest nestie from the deckle set and a piece of cornflake packet then triple embossed and stamped with a snowflake.  At the bottom I put some tartan red and green ribbon then to finish, I stitched a gold bow in the bottom right hand corner.  I picked a bag of these up about a year ago and have never used them!

The more I look at this card, the more the red and green background looks like a forest when it's not quite light but with the gold there is a little sunshine coming through the trees as the sun rises or sets.  I think it looks quite magical :-)

I would like to enter this for the following challenges:


The Stampman - Take Any Three Colours Christmas Theme
Ladybug Crafts - Caz's color wheel (my usual is red so I used green mainly)
Passion for Promarkers - Old and New (Stamp is old, triple embossing new technique)
The Corrosive Challenge Blog - Things That Move (The deer is running lol)
Rainbow Lady's Challenge - Christmas Animals