Good morning! Emily Midgett here with you today… on July 24. I’ve been getting so many “Christmas in July” posts in my feed and email that I just had to pull out my own Christmas supplies and create a project! Luckily, both Hero Arts and our partner for the month of July, Winnie and Walter, have some gorgeous holiday stamps.

I decided to step out of my normal creative box and do something a bit more monochromatic with a chalkboard technique. To start, I heat embossed the two deer from the Hero Arts Deck the Halls mini set by Lia Griffith onto some black card stock. Next, I placed the beautiful sentiment and foliage sprigs from Winnie and Walter’s Merry and Bright with Evelin T Designs in the center, along with some snowflakes from the Snowflakes by Lia mini set from Hero Arts, and white heat embossed them all.

To create my “chalkboard,” I find that a combination of different strengths of white is important. I use white embossing, white pigment ink, white gel pen, and white colored pencil to create different depths on my card front. To my heat embossed panel, I stamped more snowflakes using white pigment ink, then added further little dots of snow using my white gel pen. I also added some little flourishes here and there with my white pencil. Finally, I swiped my white pigment ink pad around the edge of the black panel, then dabbed my finger in the ink and brushed it over the greeting and some of the snowflakes, to give the illusion that I’d erased something.