I hope that all of you have had a Merry Christmas and celebrated the New Year with a bang. This year, I decided to be brave and convinced my husband to take our sons to the New Year's Eve Family Fireworks display in the city. And so we did, along with an estimated 50,000 Melbournians enjoyed an early evening of festivities and carnival extravaganza until 9.30pm when the skies exploded in a colourful display of fireworks.
It was a lot of fun, the weather was pleasant at 30-33'C with a light breeze and no mosquitoes or flies. We had caught the special New Year's Eve free train service to and from the city and the crowds were so very orderly. I was super impressed with all the organisation of the whole event by the City Council of Melbourne and the Melbourne Metro Train service - all which made our first New Year's Eve fireworks experience very enjoyable.
This year, Chinese all over the world will celebrate Chinese New Year - the Year of the Dragon, on 23 January 2012. With all the Christmas and New Year festivities over, it is time to focus on our Chinese New Year greetings.
For today's post, I'm resurrecting a card I made for CNY last year. Apart from Christmas, sending CNY greetings is the next most popular card giving event (that I know of). When Stampin' Up! released the Aviary SS in last year's Summer Mini Catalogue, I immediately saw the potential for using the bird cage images as Chinese Lanterns, particularly this one below.
The centre image is the primary Aviary SS image I used to create these 3 lanterns. I made the 2 smaller lanterns on each side of the larger one by cutting the lower portion out. I also hand made the tassels as I couldn't find retail tassels small enough to suit. Check out Nezumi World for easy tassel instructions. Here's the project recipe.project recipe
ink: Encore Gold Pad (retired)
card stock: Real Red (106578), Brushed Gold (124917))
tools: Modern Label Punch (119849), Word Window Punch (119857), Jumbo Handle (103661), Heat Tool (106587)
the added pizzaz: Crystal Effects (101055), Gold Stampin' Emboss Powder (109129), Stampin' Dimensionals (104430), gold tassel cord
cardessence tips
- since the Encore Gold Pad is retired, I recommend using the Versa Mark Pad (102283) and emboss all images with the gold embossing powder;
- I recommend that you always apply Crystal Effects before cutting out the images because it is easier to hold on to larger pieces of CS than smaller ones.
Love the way you have used the Bird Cages in the lanterns Evelyn I think it is very clever and beautiful love Carolyn
ReplyDeleteThank you Carolyn. I got this set specifically for that one image to use as lanterns in Chinese New Year Cards. There were no Oriental themed stamp sets except for maybe Friends Never Fade which I used for this year's Chinese New Year cards.
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