Hello stampers! Today I want to share with you a Toile Christmas blue jay. There was a card I was planning to recreate that I had seen at our Twin Teams gathering made by the talented Marion Greenlund. When I was finally ready to make this card I realized I was missing some key components, the most crucial of which was the Peaceful Boughs Bundle. That is how the card for today has come to be!

Toile Christmas

Do you know the meaning of the word toile? It is actually a fabric and is derived from the French word meaning “linen cloth”  or “canvas”, particularly cloth or canvas for painting on. In this case it refers to a type of repeated surface decoration traditionally printed on the same fabric. If you look at our Toile Tidings designer series paper you will see just that. Old Victorian wallpaper also looked just like that with a repeated picture or design.

The bird image in Toile Christmas is a cardinal which is a very popular bird in North America, but it can also be interpreted to be a blue jay. I don’t have any cherry cobbler or real red ink pads with me here in Holland, so I decided to make a blue jay. I combined it with the Feels Like Frost designer series paper for a look that I am really, really pleased with if I do say so myself.

The Card

Once again I really wanted to showcase the beauty of this paper without having to cut it down so I made a big 6 1/8″ square card. Of course that means that I will have to custom make an envelope to go with it but we have our envelope punch board to make that a relatively easy process.

Can you see why I am so happy with this card? The card itself is basic black and the panel on the right uses the full piece of 6″ by 6″ paper. I then cut a 2 3/8″ piece of the same paper (there are four sheets of each design in the pack) and I turned it upside down to get a bigger sky feeling. You can also see that it is a Z-fold card which allows the branches to overhang the one panel.

Here you can get a good look at the sentiment. This was also a stroke of genius inspired by necessity. I had no embossing powder so I used the Delicata copper ink pad and the stamparatus. That way I was able to ink up three times to get a nice bright image.

Two of the dies in Toile Christmas do not have coordinating stamps so I cut them out of shimmery white cardstock and coloured them with ink and an aqua painter. I added them to the stamped and coloured branch for some variety. After some close inspection I decided that something was missing. There was an extra branch laying on my stamp table just begging to be put to use, so I cut it up and added it in sprigs to the branches on the left. Do you like this version better as well?

I had more pictures of this version of the card but we had some major computer issues so these pictures are not currently available to me right now. It is imperative that I finish this blog post today so I don’t want to get bogged down into fixing computer issues, after all, here in Holland it is already late Friday afternoon.

To be totally honest, I am beyond thrilled with how this card turned out and I am also excited to share that  I figured out how to paint a cardinal without using cherry cobbler or real red. He will be the feature of Monday’s blog post.

The Measurements

If you are like me, you find it most helpful to be given the dimensions so that you don’t have to guess and mess it up or waste paper, so here you go!

Card base: basic black 6 1/8″ by 11″ scored at 6 1/8″ and 8 5/8″

Feels Like Frost designer series paper:  6″ x 6″ and 2 3/8″ by 6″ (tow of these) one on the front of the card and one on the opposite side.

Thank You

Thanks again for stopping by to read my blog, I hope you were inspired by my creation for today. Stop by again on Monday to see how I made some beautiful cardinals. If you live in Canada and don’t already have a demonstrator, I would love for you to shop online with me or if you are local to Chatham, Ontario then come to a class some time. To stay connected you can subscribe to my newsletter, that is where I promote my classes as well as on my business Facebook page which you can find here.

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