 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok, and today I'm going to make a retro sleigh ride card. And it was inspired by the stamp set itself, because it is so retro, and I'm using Just Inks to do this. The stamp is called Sleigh Bells Ring from Pinkfresh, and it's got a beautiful retro sleigh, little characters you can put in it, packages you can put in it, different combinations of things you can create your own scene with. And I'm starting with Nina cardstock, and you can use whatever you like to blend on, and whatever kinds of inks you like to blend the background with, and then just start the stamping. I'm going to begin by stamping the sleigh at an angle, so he's sliding downhill. And I'm doing so in Catherine Pooler's Twilight Ink. And that's because I want my sleigh to be black and gray. I want the color pop to be in the background, because that's kind of a retro thing. The way that they used to make a lot of designs, they kept colorways really simple. And I'm going to be using a bunch of Eclipse tape for different portions of this card. And it's about the stickiness of a post-it note, but it's all over the whole back side of it. You can tear it down to whatever size you want. So first I'm going to make a mask that I'm going to use to create a two-color sleigh. And you can just make a one-color sleigh and make this a lot easier on yourself, but I'm going to make a two-color sleigh by just having this little mask. I'm going to cut off that top bar across the top. There's that white area in between, and I'm just cutting carefully down that curve. I could not find my detail scissors, so I'm using my big honking scissors for this project. I don't know where they are. My studio's a mess. Don't tell anybody. I'm hoping to get a chance to just clean things up here soon because I can't find anything. But at least for this part, the hacking off with the scissors wasn't too bad. And I'm going to place the top and bottom parts of the mask to block off the top section in the bottom section so the body of the sleigh can be black. And like I said, I wanted it to be black because I wanted all the color to be in the background. You may notice when you look at the green card later, I made the body red. I used the same technique, but I stamped red over the gray, and that just made it a darker red so you can do that if you want to change the color of the sleigh itself. But there we have a two-color sleigh, really fun and easy. Now the next part of this, I'm going to put in the top half of my MISTI so I can make several of these cards. I just have to make sure I put a little sticky over top of wherever the sleigh might actually touch the paper so I don't have any straight ink going over it. And I'm going to put a couple of packages in here because I need to make a mask and I need to know where the top of the pile of packages is going to be. I can add more in by hand down below, but I need the top of it to be maskable. So I'm stamping in black the little deer and my two packages. You can do this over and over, make a whole bunch of these, and then cut your mask to create the mask and cut the mask to create the mask. That didn't sound very good. Cut the mask to be able to make one for the background. And that's what I'm going to do now. I've trimmed the masking paper, that eclipse tape, so that it's perfectly square in one corner. And I can line it up with that bottom right corner and along the bottom because I'm going to need to align the mask perfectly with the paper that's already stamped. So I'm going to stamp first the top section and then the bottom section, both of them in the gray. You can stamp them in whatever color you want to on your mask. That's entirely up to you. But you need to have both parts stamped so that then you can cut around them to make the mask for the background that you're going to create. And I'm going to draw a line with a pencil. So I have an idea where I'm going to cut my hillside and cut the hillside. I'm just going to tell you above the little bottom part of the sleigh. You don't want to be trimming around that little tiny sleigh part. That's not a smart thing. And this is going to require some fussy cutting. But with the style of these retro cards, they used to make these masks by hand in the old days. They were cut with this. Well, I could get into a long description because I used to do that when I was a graphic designer at the very beginning before computers were a big thing. We made a lot of masks by hand using exacto knives and that sort of thing. So the shapes around it don't have to be perfect. And you can see I've cut a little bit into the center behind the deer's head. But you don't have to do that either. You can make it just one big blob in that area and not trim it out quite so much. But align that mask right at the bottom. And when you press it down, hopefully it's going to be perfectly centered. There's no way to tell. I guess you could try to use a light box and see if it's perfect. But I'm just going to hope that it's going to be good and apply the ink. And you can use whatever type of ink application you want to use. You could airbrush it. You can use the blending brushes like I'm doing. You can actually tap the ink pad itself onto the paper and do it that way. You can use different kinds of ink, whatever you want to do for your background. You just want as smooth a background as you can get. Because this is mimicking silk screen. That's how these kinds of things were often printed would be to have a flood of color. And they have very graphical shapes around the outside edges. But when they have any kind of wash of color, it was pretty straightforward, solid color. And it takes me forever to do any ink blending. And I did a really terrible job of this for the most part. But unfortunately it dried pretty decently. And I am going to put snow on it. So I'm going to call it good. I just had to do it in a lot of layers because I stink at ink blending. And what I then did was take a bunch of the stamps. There's lots of little stars and snowflakes and things in the stamp set. And I heat embossed them in white. And then I also heat embossed the sentiment and the little bird. I added with a white pen some more little snowflakes because I did get tired of stamping, moving, and then re-embossing each one of those little stars. They needed to have a few more in the set for somebody like me because I'm very lazy that way. But I did both my cards at the same time so that I could use the same masks. And on the package portion and on the little deer portion I joined his body. I made it, gave him little sides to his body and then filled in the section underneath of the packages that were already there. On this one I'm just going to do it as one solid package. You can see I left a little criss-cross of the ribbon on the red one. But it was a complicated card to figure out. But hopefully it gives you an idea for how you can use this stamp set or other ones to create something similar to this to give you a really graphical retro look to some of the stamps you may already have. Or you can just buy this one. It's linked in the doobly-doo and over on the blog if you'd like to purchase this set and make this card. And that is all from me. I will see you guys again very soon. Take care and have a wonderful, wonderful creative day. Bye bye.