ZooBalloo for Christmas (!)

I have been on the road since last Sunday - returning my son to college and visiting family. I have not had much time to get to the computer and limited internet access but I thought I'd try to get a quick post up today. Many people tell me that they check my blog daily and I think you must be getting bored seeing the pine branch card over and over!

Everyone seems to be trying to economize these days and, since acquiring more and more cartridges can be very expensive, I'd like to encourage you to take a careful look at the cartridges you do have - you may find some surprising uses for them! There are three Christmas cartridges available (and they are all wonderful) but I found a way to make a Christmas card using only the Zooballoo cartridge.

This file cuts a 5 x 7 card and I have also included an additional cut to do an overlay of the trees on page three of the file. Cut the card from page one. Page two is just for previewing the file. For most of these cards I used a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 cardstock centered at the top of the 12 x 12 mat - you can buy a ream (500 sheets) of this cardstock quite reasonably at an office supply store.

There are many possible variations to this card - here are just a few...



Here the card was cut from green cardstock and I cut a piece of vellum to back the opening behind the trees and added stickles on one side to suggest snow on the trees and the ground below.



In this version I added a piece of blue cardstock embossed with the Cuttlebug snowflake folder behind the trees.



For this one I backed the opening with plain blue cardstock and then also cut the overlay in green - offsetting it slightly when I adhered it to the card to get the snow effect. (Looking at this photo now I think it may be a good idea to trim the right side of the overlay a bit).



Here is the card done in "white on white" - very simple but effective. You can add score lines, stickles and other details around the design to give it more dimension.



Here is a closer view of the image - I only adhered the backing at the edges to be sure that the actual trees would be slightly raised creating a nice shadow line. I also was careful to have the snowflakes "start" at the top of the opening but you could place the embossed piece to have them partially cut off - it might look more like it was actually snowing.

Obviously, none of these cards have had sentiments added yet and there are many more ways to vary the basic design or embellish the cards.



I hope you can use this design and that you will check your other cartridges to see if you can find some Christmas images hiding in unlikely places!

Tree Front Card