Dear Santa

We're still celebrating a holiday sketch at Jingle Belles.

This week instead of starting with the *circle* part of the sketch, I began with my central panel to develop my design by printing a digital image from the Christmas in Mulberry Wood CD-ROM. 

For those if you who haven't used the Crafter's Companion CD-ROMs, I wanted to give you a little peek into how they work.  I went to the section called *Toppers*.  Each Design has a single page of images to print (so no paper is wasted … I have a drawer where I save the rest of my digital images for future creations).  This image comes from Design 4.

When you choose the image, a PDF file opens.

Because the pages are sized for traditional paper sizes found *across the pond*, I use the Resize/Position button on the bottom left to make it fit on an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of cardstock.  You just slide each margin to the size you want (I used 3cm at the bottom and 1cm on each of the other sides)

The next step was to find some coordinating designer paper to use on my card.  One of the nice things about using the CD-ROM for both your image and paper is that they match perfectly.  

First you choose a pattern design that you like (don't worry what color it shows in the sample because you'll have the chance to change the color).  I liked the diagonal plaid in Design 9.

When you choose the paper, it then gives you multiple color choices for your paper design.

I chose the gray & red plaid to coordinate with my sweet little puppy dog and red mailbox image.

Because I'm not worried about the sides or bottom of an image being cropped when it prints, I don't adjust the margins for paper … that way my printer fills as much of the printed page as possible with the paper design.

Here's my finished card using both the paper and Mulberry Woods image.  Because of the size of my elements, I flipped the sketch layout horizontally for balance (I love when a sketch is flexible like that).

My sentiment circle from the Sentimentals stamp set called Jingle Bells (how appropriate) was stamped in Charcoal Chalk ink and punched out with a 1 3/4" circle (which is slightly smaller than the stamp, but worked well with my layout).  I finished with some red pearls to accent the snowflakes.

I'm also joining The Corrosive Challenge Blog where they're celebrating Animals.

We hope you'll have fun getting sketchy with us.