Paper Pros Challenge - Holiday Cards

Welcome to this month's just for fun no pressure challenge with the Paper Pros. Caz Counsell set the theme this month as Holiday Cards.

Before I share my card, let me take a moment to talk about craft idea inception. I am blessed to be surrounded by amazing crafty ladies who combine and style my dies in clever ways. When I designed the Katherine Label Pop-up I always had a window card in mind. I am a huge fan of pop-up cards where you can see the item in the closed position and then watch it move as the card opens. The Katherine Label lends itself well to that idea because of the way it lifts up. 

The first step in the idea inception for today's card came when Karen Aicken had the brilliant idea to swap out the Katherine label shape for a circle, creating a window card, but round. She made her fabulous Ghost Wreath Card

Karen's card sparked an idea in Fran Sabad, who mentioned how inspired she was by the circle idea and promptly created a delightful Phantom of the Opera Card with a rising chandelier.

Fran's card inspired Shelly Hickox, who immediately envisioned a circle window card with a rising moon and then came up with a clever idea to attach clear strips to the mechanism so that, as the moon rises in her G-G-G-Ghost Card, the ghosts (attached to the strips) rise up from the graveyard. 

Which brings me to today's card, which is a combination of all the clever circle-Katherine ideas before me. My idea was to create the stacked snowman from the Snowman Twist Circle and then use the Katherine mechanism to make the snowman expand as the card opens.

The card measures 5" x 5" in the closed position. The patterned paper was sitting on a big untidy pile of random older papers on the floor and happened to be on top of the pile. I thought the little asterisks on the side reminded me of snowflakes, so I chopped the paper into three 4.75" squares and got to work. (Echo Park "Scoot" collection, paper name Helicopter #SC41010, from 2013)

I used the Nature Edges to add drifts of snow to the bottom of the paper squares, stopping the snow when it reached the borders. The two largest circles in the Twist Circle were nested together to create a thin ring to surround the opening, made with the second-largest circle. I added a piece of transparency between the paper and the card to act as a window pane.

As the card opens, the Katherine Label mechanism rises up. The head of the snowman is attached to the top of the mechanism and the middle circle is suspended halfway through (and yes, I know I need to do a video on this technique, so stay tuned!) and the large stitched circle is attached underneath the mechanism. 

It's not easy to see in this photo, but the snowman's arm is attached to the mechanism so it rises up like he's waving. A ribbon scarf and some glitter snowflakes complete the scene.

The greeting is two layers stacked for dimension from Word Set 3 - Holiday.

Make sure you check out the other cards by the Paper Pros:

Caz Counsell
Karen Aicken
Raquel Mason
Frances Byrne
Fran Sabad

Here are shopping links for the dies I used on my card.