Yippee for Yana: Easy to Mail + Elegant Christmas Cards!

Hi friends! Happy Tuesday! If you’re anything like me, this gorgeous card design by Yana Smakula will make your jaw drop! Elegant, gorgeous, and honestly relatively easy to mass produce! The one-layer design makes it ideal for mailing too! Be sure to read on to learn more and enjoy! (Please note; our dear friend Yana is Ukrainian, to show support to our brothers and sisters in Ukraine, please see Yana’s post HERE.)

Hello, crafters, this is Yana Smakula for Simon Says stamp! Welcome back for another Yippee For Yana video! In this video, I am showing how to create elegant Christmas cards that are easily mass-produced and easy to mail, too.

I’m working with a new stamp set from Simon called Glistening Snowflakes. This stamp set is filled with beautiful snowflake imagery. If you want, you can also get a coordinating die set to cut these images out and I love that there’s a die for every single snowflake in this set. It makes it very versatile as you can use these snowflakes on many other projects.

There are no sentiments in this set, so I brought in another set, called Simple Holiday Greetings – just like the name says, these are simple font sentiments and they go well with the complexity of the snowflakes and complement them nicely.

My plan for these cards is to heat emboss the image in the center of dark colored cardstock panel using metallic color embossing powder and darken the edges of the panel using an ink blending to bring the eye of the viewer to the center of the card and the beautiful snowflakes.

First, I stamped the image in clear embossing ink and covered it with Antique Gold embossing powder. I love this color of powder from Simon, I come back to this color every time I create Christmas cards. Next, I warmed up my heat tool and heat set the powder to melt it. The trick is to keep the heat tool moving otherwise if you keep it in one spot for too long, the paper might warp affecting the look of the finished card. Mine warped a little bit, it is expected when you do this kind of technique.

Next, I gave the powder a few seconds to cool off, you want to make sure to do that, otherwise, you might smear the hot powder on the paper, I have done that many times because of my lack of patience. Once the powder is cool, and it takes just 5 seconds for it to cool off, I used my pencil eraser and removed and leftover anti-static powder on the panel.

To add wow to this card, I ink blended dark green and black ink around the edges of the panel, staying away from the embossing.

Next, I wanted to add gold embossing around the edges to make it look as if the panel was dipped in gold paint. I love this technique, it always gives very beautiful and elegant results. When doing this, you don’t want to pour the powder directly onto the panel because it will stick to any area that is wet. Instead, add a little bit of powder onto scrap paper, and then just dip the panel into the powder. Imagine you are dipping the panel into the paint. And you can control how deep you want to go in, meaning how much or how little embossing powder you want to get on your panel. And you can also use a paintbrush and knock any excess embossing powder if you feel like you have too much there.

Next, I used the heat tool and heat set the powder in place to create that beautiful gold-dipped edge. Lastly, I want to decorate my card with gems – I added Opal Gems from Spellbinders to the center of each snowflake and colored some snowflake section white using a white pen. Have fun stamping!

WATCH THE VIDEO:

SUPPLIES:

Simon Says Stamps and Dies GLISTENING…
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Simon Says Clear Stamps SIMPLE…
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Simon Says Stamp Cardstock 100#…
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Simon Says Stamp Cardstock 100# SOFT…
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Simon Says Stamp WHITE A2 TOP FOLD…
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Ranger ANTI STATIC POUCH ink62332
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Simon Says Stamp Embossing Ink Pad…
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Simon Says Stamp EMBOSSING POWDER…
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Popular Wagner Precision Heat Tool HT400
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SCS-195 Spellbinders OPAL MIX Color…
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Simon Says Stamp Blending Brush SET…
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Simon Says Stamp Premium Ink Pad…
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Simon Says Stamp Pawsitively…
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Sakura CLASSIC WHITE Gelly Roll Pens…
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Bearly Art THE BUNDLE Precision Craft…
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Ways to support Ukraine:

If you are looking for ways to support Ukraine, we encourage you to visit this page on Yana’s blog:

Thanks so much for stopping by, and thanks to Yana for being our guest!

  1. Beautiful card, Yana! I think the 3-4 layers (5 with card base?) would end up costing extra postage but they sure are pretty!!
    Praying for your safety………
    Lori S in PA

  2. I appreciate the balanced approach you took in presenting both sides of the argument. It’s important to consider all perspectives, and you did a great job of doing that

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