A Joyful Christmas

Hello folks,  many thanks to all of you that left me birthday wishes yesterday which were much appreciated.
I got some lovely pressies too, the main one being a stamp maker which I can't wait to have a go with as I'm looking forward to being able to turn some of my scribbles and doodles into stamps. The James Bond Skyfall was very good too with amazing stunts and a somewhat creepy villain (or at least I thought he was), so if you haven't yet seen it, I can thoroughly recommend it.
Now enough waffling and on to the reason for the post which is to tell you about our new challenge for the next fortnight at Fashionable Stamping Challenges which has been chosen by our newest fashionette Esther and is the theme of Musical. Lots of ways to interpret this one and to me, music immediately shouted birds so I've made another Christmas card for my collection with my favourite Christmas bird.

I stamped the cute Stampendous robin on thick cartridge paper and coloured him with Aquamarkers. I die cut the image with a Papermania die and then added snow with the Decoart snow writer and sprinkled it with Glamour Dust.
I made the background paper using my watercolour crayon technique and Neocolor 11 water soluble crayons (if you click on the tutorial page at the top, you'll find a link to the relevant technique if you'd like to know how to do it. I used several colours of green and the paper started out like this:

You can see the end result on my card and after using the technique, I stamped on the music score (Forest Moss Distress ink) and poinsettia (VersaFine Vintage Sepia) from the Tim Holtz mini holidays 4 set.
I embossed a panel of kraft card with the Cuttlebug musical folder, sanded the raised areas and then added green and brown inks to distress it a little.
I assembled the card as you see, adding hessian weave and ribbon, a poinsettia (Nestabilities) and fir (Marianne Design) and punched holly together with my favourite sentiment from the set and some tiny pearls.

We'd love to see you enter but please remember that as we are a stamping challenge, no digis are allowed and we must see stamping on your entry.

Have a lovely Sunday.
Hugs, Fliss xx

Some challenges for my card:
Raise The Bar - Anything Goes
Paper Crafting Journey - Ribbon and/or Twine
Fab 'n ' Funky - Die Cuts/Punches
Nutcrafters - Ribbon/Twine