Plaid Holiday Tree

Jean here sharing a CAS card for the holidays. Plaid stamping has been trending, and there have been some terrific examples posted right here on the Neat & Tangled blog, including this tutorial from Design Team member Pamela Ho. I decided to give plaid stamping a try with a CAS holiday card using stamps from the September Neat & Tangled release -- the short border strip from the Santa’s Tags stamp set and a sentiment from Just for You.

I tried several combinations of inks and colors. The card shows one of my favorite combinations -- green dye ink with Encore’s silver pigment ink. I used a Fiskars stamp press so that I could easily keep my lines straight. After stamping the crisscrossed lines, I cut out the tree with a die. You’ll notice that these lines are not stamped at ninety degrees, so perhaps this isn’t technically “plaid.” I wanted the lines to both fill in the shape of the tree and look like garland going around the tree.

I adhered the die-cut tree to a panel stamped with “Celebrate” and added a die-cut silver star.

For a variation on the theme: There’s a short border strip in the Just for You set, which is a titch skinnier, that would be fun to combine with the thicker strip I used.