May Flaum here, and I’m excited to be back with another holiday project how-to!

One of my favorite things to do at the holidays is to play with beautiful collage stamps to create unique cards, gift toppers, and tags for the holiday season. Today I’ll be playing with some beautiful Penny Black images.

First I stamped with distress ink and plenty of water to get a nice watercolor effect. Then I tore around the edges of my stamped paper and stitched it to a 4 1/4 x 5 1/2″ card.

Next up, to layer another image I stamped with gold ink and used clear embossing powder to add texture. The gold ink I used works well for embossing because it stays wet long enough for the powder to stick. Love this!

Now to get more texture going, I took three metal flowers and painted them white. Once the white paint base was applied I used red paint and ink to color my flowers. You’ll want to let them dry (in the photo below you can see one is still wet).

One more custom accent – use alcohol ink on pearls! I love this quick trick to color any rhinestone or pearl.

To complete my card and add more depth, I applied black and mahogany distress inks as well as some gold mist splattered onto the card.

What is so fun about combining all of these quick little techniques is that I can use them on a card, tag, mixed media canvas, or any other project that I would like! As a finishing touch on my card here, I used the main stamped image in gold to add some subtle accents around the edges as well.

Those little bits of detail, as well as all the fun details on this card made it a lot of fun to make and I hope you’ve enjoyed my creative process! I encourage you to get out your stamps and find new ways to feature them.

supplies used: