Twelve Days of Christmas - Day 12

Well, here we at the final day of my Twelve Days of Christmas challenge - it's hard to believe that there are only a few days more sleeps to Christmas.

As this is the last card I'll be sharing with you using Magenta's My Christmas Tree / Mon Arbre, Ive made one with real impact - an explosion of colour - like all the twinkling lights festooning the houses in my neighbourhood. This technique is called Faux Carnival Glass and its bejewelled appearance belies its simplicity.
I began with a piece of black coreboard the shape of the tree which I coated with Versamark Watermark inkpad and a layer of Franklin Opals embossing powder. In this technique you keep adding layers of powder and heating in between until you have a smooth surface and then you add pieces of Fantasy Film into the molten Opals. I like to give it another burst of the heat gun at this point so that the Fantasy Film warps a little and intensifies in colour. Then add another coat of ink and more Franklin Opals to make sure the Fantasy Film is covered before stamping the inked tree into the surface. What an impressive tree!

This turned out to be another one of those tricky cards to photograph with reflections from the glossy Franklin Opals making it difficult to see the tree stamped on the Opals so here's a photo of the tree before the card was assembled.The background of the card is copper mirror board embossed with the Cuttlebug. Mirror board is so shiny that it sometimes needs toning down and I did that by painting the whole surface with black acrylic paint and then wiping most of it away with a tissue before it dried. Too easy - looks like antiqued copper!
The letters are epoxy alphabet stickers attached to a deckle-edged strip of mirror board. Sitting on top of the embossed background, it looks like a piece of copper sheeting. The finishing touch is a couple of lengths of ribbon layered underneath the tree to help anchor it to the card.

Thank you to all of you who have followed me during this challenge. For those who have left comments and those who have emailed me privately, it has been lovely to have you along for the ride. I hope you've enjoyed my daily offerings - it has been fun (and challenging!) to make 12 different cards with the one stamp. Each one is so different and now I can't decide which is my favourite so I'll have to leave that for you to decide.

Don't forget that today's post is the last one to leave your comment on to register for the blog candy draw. I'll be taking a couple of days break from blogging and then I'll be back before Christmas to announce the winner. Until then..... good luck, and Merry Christmas to you all.