the coast is clear...

...at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ where we are still making holiday cards that have at least one "see through" element, such as: glass, a transparency, vellum, acetate or "ghost" shapes, clear stickers, lucite buttons, shrink plastic, or, well, whatever else you can come up with! here's what i made this week:

"joy to the world" in 'porcelain' font printed on highland brand inkjet transparency film; thick acrylic snowflake of unknown origin, painted lightly with white craft paint; heidi swapp "ghost shape" snowflakes from years and years and years ago; patterned paper: craft and you design + lilybee + deli paper stenciled with tim holtz snowflakes in liquitex modeling paste, layered over vintage sheet music; florals and foliage: petaloo, prima, making memories, recollections, imaginisce; pearl brads and stickyback pearls: eyelet outlet; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, gluedots, sewing machine

one of my favorite tricks for adding custom sentiments is to computer generate the text, in one of my favorite fonts, sized to exactly the dimensions i require and print it on the correct media. for interior sentiments i love to use the clear shipping labels made for inkjet printers, which i buy from my favorite office supply store. i format and print an entire sheet at a time, so that i always have common sentiments in a few different fonts on hand; and on a white or light cardstock background, all but the text is nearly invisible. for exterior sentiments, one of my favorite tricks is to print an oversized sentiment on to a transparency sheet made for inkjet printers.* sometimes i'll add digital brushes or other elements to incorporate the sentiment in a frame or collage; sometimes i just print the words on their own. this card has an example of the latter technique: "joy to the world" is rendered in  a font called 'porcelain' (which was free from dafont.com) and then layered over a pretty scrap of paper, then loaded up with florals, festive greens and some pretty eyelet outlet pearl embellies.

i've used the sketch half of the current fusion card challenge a bit ummm... "maximally?! but i *think* you can still see it, right?

stephanie has another clearly awesome card to inspire you and there are some very cool examples in the readers' gallery at the bottom of the original post, as well! all of these goodies are-- you may have guessed --over at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ darlings!

*for more information on this technique, here is a post i wrote a couple of years ago with some pretty good info, if i do say so myself. (which... apparently... i do, lol!)