These rustic mixed media Christmas cards add a fabulous element of country style to classic motifs.

As lovely as ornate, classic, traditionally designed holiday cards are, there is a true simple beauty to this idea for rustic mixed media Christmas cards made for us today by Natasha. We love her all natural color story and the way she’s built up her details in her layers is just gorgeous. Natasha says “Using my Color Fuse inks made creating the fun background super easy!” We DO love easy! Let’s check it out!

Start by making two backgrounds using watercolor paper – one for the card panel and one for the tag. To really emphasize the rich depth of all the details you will be adding, stick to the same basic colors of Color Fuse Ink on both with just a few touches of variation to make them each interesting on their own.

Create them by applying either a couple of drops of Color Fuse Re-Inkers in your chosen color palette or, if you haven’t picked them up yet, swipe your ink pad over a glass surface or gel plate to get some little streaks and pools of ink. Add a few drops of water and then press your watercolor paper over the ink, holding for a few seconds and then lifting up. Dry thoroughly with your heat tool. Wipe up any remaining ink with a paper towel and then repeat this process as many times as you like to add all the different shades of ink you want to use. (Natasha used colors from Sets #3, #11 and #12.)

When these pieces are completely dry, cut one piece with the largest die from our Nested Deckle Rectangle set and cut the other with one of the tags from our Tag Stitch die set and again with the smallest tag from the set. While you are die cutting, cut some colored card stock that coordinates with your palette with our Deer Family and Evergreen dies.

Take the rectangle piece and using one of the darkest shades from your color sets, stamp over your beautiful inked finish randomly with our Twas the Night and Winter Wonderland stamps.  Then randomly apply VersaMark to the edges of the die cut and heat emboss with a powder that coordinates with your ink colors.

Using a blending tool or sponge dauber, add some ink around the edge of the panel to crate a distressed look. Hearth Color Fuse from Set #12 is a perfect choice for this. Repeat this edge inking on the larger tag. When done, use the edge of your scissors or a distressing tool to distress all the edges of this larger tag.

Choose Color Fuse inks that are close to the colors of your die cut deer and trees and apply some over the die cuts to add even more dimension and shadowing. Splatter some water droplets over these pieces, blotting with a paper towel, to add even more texture. When dry, adhere to your larger tag with a varying thicknesses of dimensional adhesive. Add some splatters over the whole assembly with some white acrylic paint mixed with a bit of water and then, when dry, again with some gold metallic watercolor paint.

Now take your smaller tag and stamp the sentiment from our Merry Christmas Phrases Large/Small. Apply Hearth Color Fuse ink and distress the edges as you did with the other tag.

Now put it all together! Adhere your deckle die cut layer to a card base with your tape runner. Adhere the larger tag at an angle with more tape, and then the smaller tag with some dimensional adhesive. Loop some twine through the hole in the sentiment tag and you’ve got a little work of art ready to blow someone’s socks off!

We are super impressed with all the rich texture and depth Natasha was able to create just using our Color Fuse Inks and a little paint! And that she made it easy it just the icing on the Christmas cake!

Here’s what Natasha used today from our store:

If this style is something you’ve wanted to try out, this deign for rustic mixed media Christmas cards is definitely worth exploring! If you do make one of these, drop us a message and let us know how it went!