Bah!Humbug! Aperture Challenge

The gals at Bah!Humbug! are featuring apertures this week. WooHoo! I LOVE apertures. There are so many ways to do them. I decided to do mine in Cricut Design Studio using the Winter Lace cartridge I hadn't even taken out of the package yet. LOTS of pretty snowflakes! I decided upon an A2 card because I knew I'd want to emboss the front mat. First I made a 4 x 5 1/4 inch rectangle from George and chose a simple snowflake cut at 3 1/4". I wanted a larger border around the snowflake than the regular shadow provided, so I cut that at 3 1/2" instead. The snowflake opening need to be enlarged as well because I wanted not only a large enough aperture to fit a word inside, but also a red border around that opening as well. To do that I hid the snowflake contour of a larger flake and the inside contour of the 3 1/4" one and centered it. (The only bad news about this is that each time you open DS you have to hide the contours again because DS will only remember to hide contours when there is more than one hidden in a design. PITA!)

On a second page I made a 5 1/2 x 8 1/2" rectangle for the card with a snowflake center that would fit inside the one on the top mat and hid the outer snowflake contour on that one. To line them up perfectly, you'll need to place them on the mat layer first and them copy and paste it to the second page and then delete them from the mat page. Then you have to close the program because you can't hide contours on an image that's been cut and pasted (ANOTHER PITA!) reopen the project and hide all of the appropriate contours again. Bah! Humbug! I know this is Greek to those of you who don't use Design Studio, but I thought it may be helpful to those who do and would like to make something similar.

After cutting, I embossed the mat with a Cuttlebug folder from the Oh My Crafts Holiday bundle from 2009 (I think) and the snowflake with Swiss Dots. Both the snowflake and mat are raised with dimensionals. I loved the sort of asymmetrical embossing on the mat, but it left a void in the top left corner I filled with adhesive beads.

The inside sentiment was done in my Printmaster Pro program. Lining it was a bit tricky but I'm pleased with the results. It looked rather plain, however, so I ended up embossing that as well. Although my aperture is small, I think it's effective. Ann, Judith and Fiona came up with lovely examples so be sure to check out their inspirational projects and we U.S. followers still have all of today to join in. See you there.