Easy to Mail Christmas Card

I want clean, fresh, contemporary, bright, and above all -- easy to mail -- Christmas cards this year. (I am not going to pay extra postage or have a card returned because of a brad or ribbon! I'll save those for hand delivered cards and gift tags.) When I'm looking to meet those criteria, I turn to Memory Box! Love that company! (In addition, I think Stampin Up has some really nice bright contemporary white red and green paper this year.) I made this card with the Memory Box Holiday Brights papers and Memory Box Lime and Cranberry solids. (Since the solid paper is white on the inside, I have a dark outside card with a professional white inside. I love this!) I did not have a stamp of a row of trees that I wanted for this card, so I cut out the trees in the Stampin Up Figure of Speech set. It is part of a square stamp and I just cut the trees right out of the middle of the stamp, slapped them on an acrylic block and stamped 5 times in a row in Memories Black dye ink. If you look closely, there is a cute lime scallop layer under the circle. The words and frill both come from Papertreyink. The nice thing about prismacolor pencils (or really any kind of marker or pencil) is that if you look around, and are willing to blend a bit, you can usually find something to use to match your patterned paper. In this case, SU doesn't have a green that has enough of the right yellow in it to pass for Lime. And I love Memory Box's lime cardstock! My favorite for Christmas this year. I grabbed all my red and green prismacolor pencils and made a little mini chart to use with this paper before selecting the ones with the closest match. The owner of Memory Box, Dave Brethauer, is a prismacolor pencil fanatic so not surprisingly, his paper coordinates quite nicely with the prismacolor line of papers and markers (yes, alcohol markers!!) (I'm taking his class on watercolors and on colored pencils next month!!). In the next few weeks, I will be creating a chart that aligns Stampin Up colors with Memory Box and Prismacolor colors and a few other companies' products as well. It might take me a while, but I think it will be worth it. It makes mixing and matching among products sooo much easier when all the grunt work has been done beforehand. Have a great day!!