Continuing my goal to use up partial paper pads I pulled out the Cozy & Bright paper pad by American Crafts.  Since this was a larger 6×6 paper pad, 36 sheets instead of the usual 24, I knew I wouldn’t finish it but could at least thin it down some.  And, after the more muted tones of the Happy Pawlidays paper pad, the Cozy & Bright paper pad was a nice pop of traditional red and green Christmas color.

I like looking at card sketches and magazines for inspiration and pulled out an old Cards magazine (by Northridge Publishing).  I won’t be able to add the different layers and dimension featured on their cards (I need to keep my cards fairly flat) but I still find the magazine a great source of ideas.

I thought this layout would work well when using a busy paper for the background.  The size and the muted prints on the sentiment panel keep the holly pattern from being too overwhelming.  I also liked that the sentiment panel is easily modified to accomodate different sized sentiments.  I choose this sentiment as the font matched the whimsical feel of the paper pad.  It also worked for adding a small die cut heart, cut from red mirror cardstock and popped up with foam tape.

The paper pad has many cute prints including this Santa and elves.  The pattern would pair with almost any of the tone-on-tone prints but I went with my favorite, the red gingham.  Instead of just matting the printed paper, I used a punch to create the fun scalloped border.  A green satin bow added some texture and instead of matting the sentiment I placed it over the top of a die cut pine tree.

There were a few scraps of the Santa and elves paper left and I decided to pair it with green for this card.  The green tone-on-tone holly print was perfect.  The focal panel features a parentheses punched border, red satin ribbon and a few enamel dots.  As I was looking through my Christmas stamps for a sentiment, I realized I hadn’t used this snowflake stamp/die set.  I like that the snowflake is more solid and that I could stamp it to match the color of the sentiment.

As many of the cards will be donated, glitter is not allowed.  This card features two of the non-glitter pattern papers.  It is a very simple layout, but adding a trio of die cut pine trees adds interest.  Also, by popping up the trees with varying thicknesses of foam tape and including one tree die cut from green mirror cardstock there is nice dimension and a bit of shine.

With more paper to work with, I was able to make duplicates of some of the cards and multiples of all the cards just by varying the prints and patterns.  While this did slim down the paper pad there is still plenty of paper left to make many more cards.  I guess I’ll be revisiting this paper pad again next year.