Kaleidoscope Christmas Card

Hi readers well the long three day weekend is almost over. I spent a quiet weekend playing with software and created one card with another in the works.

With September here the holidays will soon be upon us. I won't be creating a lot of Christmas cards as I have some left over from last year but thought it would be fun to make one different from most cards. Here is my kaleidoscope Christmas card. I love how it turned out even though it took me the whole weekend. Some of it was waiting for paint to dry and waiting for the power to come back on.

The background that the flower and sentiment are on is embossed plastic. Alas the Sizzix ornament embossing folder has been retired but you could probably find a Christmas folder that would work. After I embossed the plastic I painted it with watered down Extreme Glitter paint and a sponge brush on the debossed side. That is also the side I decided to use. Once the paint was dry I coated the embossed side with Shimmer Creative Medium using a cosmetic sponge wedge and adhered it to my card base.

The sentiment is from the same vintage image I used for my kaleidoscope flower. It was easy to open the image in Studio and draw my rectangle and then crop. I inked the edges of the sentiment as well as the mat I adhered the sentiment to.

For the flower I started by opening Kaleidoscope Kreator. I used to use a plug in for Photoshop which allowed me to create Kaleidoscope images. Alas my version was too outdated to use with my new laptop and I didn't use Photoshop that much to justify the expensive. I will be honest Kaleidoscope Kreator is a little expensive but so much can be done with it. Also it is really easy to use. In my old age that is a plus.  I will be making some ornaments using it and it is something my grandchildren can have fun playing with.


I decided to use a vintage image from a Victorian postcard with Santa emptying his bag of toys and a flower along with the sentiment that I used on this card. If you were to look carefully at the flower you might be able to see the toys that were spilling out of Santa's sack.

The program comes with several different templates and I decided to use one of the lotus ones. After I got my lotus petal like I wanted it I saved the image and took it into Studio. If you don't have a cutting machine of course you could hand cut the printed images. I could have easily resized my petals in Kaleidoscope and  then printed it. But then I would have had to scan that into Studio. So instead I replicated the petals and sized them to the sizes I wanted in Studio. After the petals were printed and Cameron my Cameo cut them out I used "stickles" on the edges. After the "stickles" was dry I used glue only in the center of the petals to form my flower and using my fingers carefully shaped the petals so they would be curled upwards. Then I adhered my flower with adhesive foam squares to the front of the card.

Now on another note Claudine has started an altered playing card challenge. Click on the  button on the right for details. There will prizes and all you need to do to be entered in the running for the finale prize is to comment twice a month. Of course if you want you could play along. I think the altered cards would be fun to use on cards or even a scrapbook layout. O.K. I'm off to find a deck of playing cards to alter. Wishing you Happy Frugal Crafting till we meet again!