Apple Blossom Snowflake Penguins

The Details

Where did it come from

Papercraft Essentials Issue 152

When did I get it

16th October 2017

When did I try it

19th November 2017

First quick impression

I love penguins and these look really sweet. If I was being a bit picky my thought was it is a shame the snowflakes are not an optional add-in because then the penguins would have all year round appeal but, of course, it is a free gift with a magazine so that is maybe unfair. I am looking forward to creating something with these and I also have a really funny story about penguins which I may just add in at the end of the post…

Cutting with the Dies

The first thing I did was cut the dies out from some of Linda’s Black Card (from Create and Craft). As always I use my Gemini Machine for this, you can find out why this is my machine of choice in this post. Crafter’s Companion has recently launched a mini Gemini if anyone has been unable to consider one of these because of the cost. Once I saw how these cut out I was inspired to do some paper piecing with them and cut another set from some light blue mirror card. I used the holly for one and the fish for the other. This is how things looked at this point:

An Idea for a card

At this point looking at the penguins an idea for the concept of the card came together. It all started when I looked at the Penguin passing the baby penguin a piece of holly and the carol “Deck the Halls” came to mind. I then thought about a carol with a food reference in and used my ScanNCut to cut out two squares and write the wording from the carols on the squares, which looked like this:

At that point, I decided that I wanted to create a card with four corner images. I looked through my Hunkydory Christmas Stamp Sets and settled upon these stamps. The ones on the left are from the Christmas Cuties set and the ones on the right are from the Stylish Silhouettes the outline is from the Sparkling Baubles and the Sentiment from Festive Foilage. I left the bauble just how it was in black and white and coloured the penguins and sentiment with my Spectrum Noir Alcohol Markers, using AB1 for the sentiment and accessories and BGR2 and BGR5 for the penguins. Here are these two panels:

The next step was to cut a piece of Linda’s Black Card to 19 cm squared using my Cutterpiller Pro. I then did the most stressful part of the whole card and attempted to line the squares up and stuck them down with some Collall All Purpose Glue which gave me wiggle room to get them as straight as possible. I am going with the theory that you don’t want it to look factory produced so any slight deviation is acceptable. In the long term though I really want to get a We R Memory Keepers Laser Square then I won’t need to make excuses  😀 Once the black panel was glued to the 8″ x 8″ card blank I decided to give the card some final finishing touches with my Sakura Clear Star Gelly Roll, which I used under feet and within the bauble for some subtle sparkle. Here is the completed card:

The Verdict

This is a completely new style for me, if you had suggested before that I would make a mainly monochrome Christmas card (with the exception of a scenic one like this from my Pinterest) I would have been really surprised. Even more so because it is quite modern. I really like it though and hope it has given you some inspiration for using the dies. They will most definitely be staying in my craft stash.

If you are new here and like what you see you may be interested that I test out and share my creations from magazine free gifts most Sundays, here are the ones that I have shared so far. Don’t forget to subscribe or follow me on one of my social media pages to be kept up to date with all my crafty news.