Day 25 at Beccy's Place - V is for Village

  I'm playing along with the

Ninth Annual Month Of Holiday Cards

at

Beccy's Place

Beccy's prompt for Day 25 is the letter "V"

(Beccy's post with "V" inspiration words and beautiful

embossed vellum card to inspire is HERE)

My "V" project is a Village ...

... a set of Gingerbread House accordion fold Christmas Village cards.

I confess, I haven't made or mailed any Christmas cards yet and thought I had better get started making some so that I could start sending them out in time ... kids activities will have to take a time-out for a bit.

I opened the cut file (details and link below) in Silhouette Studio and enlarged the village scene base to 11 3/4" wide.  I removed the score cut lines so that I could make smooth manual folds using my scoreboard and bone folder.  Enlarging this file has the smoke billowing from the chimney making it stand 6" high.  This is quite an ornate design and it took quite some time to cut and even longer to weed.  It was so fiddly and taking so long that I even considered scrapping them and cutting a new set but I was more than halfway done so I persevered.  I scored the folds for the bases, burnished with a bone folder, then adhered the ornate icing layers to the gingerbread houses making up this fun folding Christmas village scene.  I added a luscious layer of Frosted Lace Stickles to the chimneys, front and back ... you don't want to know why but I'm going to tell you anyway!  The first sign this set of cards would need "help" was when I adhered the second house panel in place ... yikes ... I had put glue over the entire panel but the "smoke" doesn't have any card base to stick on to ... that glue went so sticky on this hot day and didn't want to come off cleanly at all.  The second sign was when I had finished adhering all the panels in place and folded the cards to see how they looked.  EPIC fail ... remember the trouble I had weeding these delicate pieces from my cutting mat?  Well, the back of these panels was pretty messy, with some of the edges rough and torn.  This isn't usually a problem as you can't see it from the front side but because these panels fold together, the back of the smoke coming from three chimneys on each card was there for all to see and that was not good.  I didn't want to add sparkle, so I searched my stash and found Frosted Lace in my Stickles collection and it was perfect, giving a pretty texture with a subtle sparkle that covered all the blemishes and no-one will ever know.

   

I decided to add another "little extra" to two of the cards, I punched out some red hearts and popped them behind the hearty door windows, so the look pretty from the front and the back.

What do you think, add hearts to the other two?

The fun thing about accordion fold card designs like these is that they fold flat for mailing, they make a fun surprise when the envelope is opened and make a pretty display.

Even though we have a HOT summer Christmas and these cards look like winter snow, they are iced gingerbread, so I think it will be OK to make some more of these (using a NEW pack of cardstock).

*** INGREDIENTS ***

cardstock - white and brown

Silhouette Cameo

Silhouette Design Store - Design ID #235573

Gingerbread House Accordion Card by Nic Squirrell

Scoreboard and bone folder

liquid adhesive - Tombow Mono Multi