Design Team Work - December - Layout

For this months layout I was given Echo Parks Seasons Greetings paper line.  The challenge was to come up with a winter based themed as opposed to last month's Christmas theme.  Once I got to thinking about it I decided to try to find out if there were things about winter that I didn't know.  Interesting facts so to speak.  Turns out I learned some amazing things about snow flakes, if the internet is 100% believable that is....  Who knew a snow flake could be that big - 15 inches by 8 inches!  I am only 64 inches tall.  That snowflake is giving me a run for my money.  I always thought snowflakes fell softly but at 5ish feet per second I may rethink this theory!

On with the details, for the basic page background I really tried to use more of the paper pages.  I used the flip-side of 'vintage santa' (sort of a taupe with small repeating white flakes) along with the blue strip of white snow flakes from the top of the 'borders' page - cut in half.  I added the strip of red on red snow flakes from the middle of the 'borders' page to the center.  This red on red piece was layered on top of the smaller blue with white flakes pieces (part on the top of the red strip and part on the bottom).  This layered bit was plaeed on top of the taupe with white snow flake piece and brown card stock.  Next I used the 'journaling cards' page to create some journal boxes to write on.  I cut out 'traditions', 'the nice list', and 'making a list' from the journal page itself, then cut the titles off each of the journal sections (I trimmed up the bottoms as well).  The green and blue edged journal pieces were layered on top of the flip-side of 'small poinsettias'.  The red edged journal pieces were layered on top of the flip-side of the 'borders' page. 

I used various snow flake punches from Martha Stewart to punch flakes from the following Echo Park pages, 'swirls' (the flip-side), 'Christmas Ads', and 'Christmas Ads' (the flip-side), 'ornaments', and 'ornaments' (the flip-side).

The black raised block snow flake letters were from American Crafts.  For the snow effect, I used 'snow cap' dabber from Ranger towards the bottom of the letters. 

For the middle snow flake, I hand cut a flake out of regular copy paper.  I used the thirds-fold process found on the internet when you google/yahoo/bing/etc cutting paper snowflakes.  Once I created a flake I was happy with, I used Rangers embossing ink and sprinkled some dark blue, light blue and white embossing powder.  I heat embossed that.  Once it was set, I used embossing ink again, and added some UTEE (ultra thick embossing enamel) with some of the embossing powders left over.  I heat set that mixture and added one final embossing layer.  Once it was all cool, I cut the snow flake in half with a paper cutter.  I cut a translucent small button in half to use for the center of the snow flake.  I was pretty geeked with how it turned out. 

Lastly I used some Christmas Red (or as the bottle says xmas [so sorry for typing that Mom...] red) Stickles from Ranger on the center of the strip of red snowflakes on the background.  I also used a wee bit of crystal Stickles on the center snowflakes tips. 

Thanks for looking!