Sparkly Snow Cards

While I was working with the book cover material to decorate the Harvest Lanterns I posted yesterday, I had an idea for another project.  I would need clear book cover material to try this idea.  So, today we had to get new ink cartridges at Staples and, as usual, I checked out the clearance section.  Well, it must have been meant to be - in the clearance section there were rolls of clear bookcover material for only 50 cents!

I used this element from the Graphically Speaking cartridge.  It is designed to be a square image  but I used Design Studio to change the proportions for an A2 card topper.

Here you can see the changes I made - the original image is on the left.  There are some detail cuts in the original that I hid for my card topper so you need Design Studio to make this project since it is not possible to hide cutting lines on the Gypsy yet.

I made several trial cuts - in two sizes and two different cardstocks.  The top piece of lighter blue is Bazzill textured cardstock and the bottom piece is Coredinations "vintage" cardstock.  The second trial cut for each is slightly smaller than in the screenshot above - 3.75 x 5 inches.

I cut a piece of the bookcover material large enough to cover the cut out areas of the design.

I adhered the cut piece to the back of the card topper so the sticky side was exposed in the openings (it may be a bit hard to see in this photo but the areas behind the letters and snowflake are the sticky side of the bookcover material.

I then found this glitter that I bought last year after the holidays - it has a interesting texture and is coarse but very sparkly.

I dumped glitter all over the the exposed adhesive.  It is very fine and sticks to the adhesive backing easily.  I used my fingers to smooth down the glitter and then applied a second layer.

By rubbing on the glitter you can flatten the pieces so they stick securely to the adhesive.  You can feel the little bits standing up on end and they will flatten as you smooth over the area with your fingers.

I tried several variations for the cards - you can see them above.

For the first card I rounded the corners of the card base and added a dark blue layer below the light blue topper.  The sparkle of the glitter against dark blue is pretty but I thought it lost the "snow" effect.

For the other versions of the card where I added a dark layer below the topper, I inserted some white paper so the snow would look more like "real" snow.

This version uses the larger version of the topper directly on a dark blue base with the white paper liner between the two.

For this card I put the layer directly on a white card base so I didn't need an extra layer.

I think this is my favorite version - but I have a few more variations in mind to try...