Another Christmas card for next December

Confession:  Today's card, and yesterday's, were made several days ago.  I knew once I got back to work there would be days like this, days when I work late and am too tired to do much creative in an evening.   Going forward my plan is to make extras on days when I have those creative bursts, and also plan some activities, like coloring images for use later, that I can do on autopilot.  After all, there is a new season of Downton Abbey just started up!

Anyway, today's card is another one for the January CCC goal of eight cards.  This one makes six so far, woot!
Here it is:

You can see that the cool blue retro snowflake paper is down to tinier and tinier pieces, but I love that design so I'm determined to use every bit of it!  I actually made several of this card but used most of them as New Years cards to finish up 2011's holiday cards, so I won't count them toward the challenge.

The base card is kind of a blue/gray speckle of unknown origin.  The stripe and snowflake papers are from a DCWV Christmas paper pad from several years ago.

The real origin of this card was the desire to blow the dust off the old resistance technique, where you stamp and emboss an image, then brayer the background in various ink colors, then wipe the wet ink off the embossed image, leaving it to *POP* against the background.  In this case I used a Blue Breeze Kaleidacolor ink pad which had 5 shades of blue.  I didn't want the clear lines between colors showing up so I did a lot of brayering and then finished everything off with a layer of light blue chalk ink to blend all the colors together.  I really like how it all turned out.  I did one big sheet with five of the stamped images embossed in white powder and brayered and blended all of it before cutting it all apart for the separate cards.  It was a lot of fun working out exactly how to get the effect I could see in my head.

The stamp is from Stampendous and it is one that I discovered while digging through a separate box of just Christmas and Chanukah stamps.  I had never used it!  So I guess this will count for the S2S challenge as well (really need to figure out the whole ledger aspect of this challenge if I am going to keep making cards for it...!)

Although, as you can tell from my other cards, I often like to go monochromatic or with a fairly strict color combination, I found myself wanting a little contrast to finish off these cards.  That's where my Jolee pengin stickers came in!  I love the unexpected "HI THERE!" of the green or pink-clad penguin wandering through the bottom of my otherwise sort of classy card.  This design was a card for the close family members, can't get too high-falutin' there!

Here's hoping I get out of work quickly tomorrow and have a chance to do a little puttering around after I get home.