Festive Friday Challenge #18 - Element Theme

Good morning friends.  Hope you all had a great weekend.  A little wet here in my "neck of the woods", but it made for some great stamping time!  And as a result, I finally got a card made for the latest Festive Friday challenge.  It's a element theme this time - to use a star:

A star?  Christmas?  Should be easy, right?  For some reason I had a hard time with this one, and I think that's why it took me so long to come up with a card for this challenge.  But inspiration finally hit and I really, REALLY like the card I came up with!  Take a look:

Make sure you click on the picture to enlarge it so you can see the 3D look of the stars.  I have seen a few cards lately where they have had snowflakes and ornaments hanging from tree branches, and so I thought, why not stars hanging from a branch?  I also wanted to try a technique I had seen awhile back where you score all the angles of the star to make it look 3D (you can check this out on Betsy Veldman's blog here ).  I started by stamping the pine branch (PTI's "Peaceful Pinecones") and sentiment (PTI's "Winter Hills") on kraft cardstock, and then embossed using PTI's Herringbone plate to give the background a little definition.  I poked a couple holes through where the pinecones should be stamped, and then threaded gold cord to hang the stars from.  Before scoring the star shapes (Spellbinder star dies), I stamped them with a flourish from SU!'s "Priceless" set with Cherry Cobbler (SU!) ink.  I used pop dots under the stars to make them stand out a bit and then finished with a few gold sequins and a white card base.  Not really a quick card, but I love the look of the 3D stars hanging from the pine branch and that made the time put into this card worth it! :0)

That's all for today friends, but I'll be back with more inspiration tomorrow.  Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful Monday!  (It's so cool here today I feel like I should go make a loaf of bread! :0)