Holiday Card Boot Camp...no way to catch up...

I will forever have access to this online class...boy am I grateful for that!  These last two weeks have been very stressful..in one of my card postings several days ago, I mentioned my MIL being near death.  Well, she quietly slipped away to her eternal peace this last Monday...we could not have asked for a better ending.  We were all  by her side, we showered her with our love and dear thoughts and then she stopped breathing for maybe two minutes, then she would take three deep breaths, repeat this a total of three times and then finally no more breaths...so calm, no pain, so easy...Our Lord is indeed merciful!

So even though I will not be able to catch up with the card class and post pictures for critiquing or for entering into their contest, I can at least use their instructions to make some very fun cards.  The first card I want to show you is one that Jennifer McGuire demonstrated...and as usual she uses Distress Inks.  Now I did not have the colors she was using, but that is okay, go with what you have and I like how it turned out...I kind of skipped a step because I did not like how it looked when I did follow her instructions...so let's take a look at the card first:

First I took a piece of white card stock and I stamped the Christmas tree (Hero Arts) with versamark and then embossed with white powder...I took some eclipse paper and tore a piece off and laid it below the tree.  using the Ink Blending tool, I inked up both the dusty concord and broken china distress ink for a very pretty sky...then I spritzed it with Perfect Pearls.  I mounted the picture on white cardstock and then using a technique that Jennifer showed, I took another piece of white paper and inked up the edges with the dusty concord so that I could compliment the picture with one of the same colors I used to blend in the sky for background paper.  The card itself is a tri-fold card...paper cut at 5.5 x 8.5, scored at 2.25 along each end...
I used a blue cardstock for the card itself and stamped a Text Background on it...here is the inside of the card:

This was a very fun technique...Jennifer took it a couple more steps, she used the eclipse paper and placed it at the exact spot, but covering the top portion of the card, then she inked up peeled paint and little bit of the purple and blended it into the bottom portion of the card. I liked how it looked with just the white...reminded me of snow on the ground, and since the tree was all white with snow, I decided to just leave it as is...