Hey there, friends! It's Angela here, back with a new project to inspire you to take part in this month's Pinkfresh Challenge. November is all about wreaths, and this just happens to be one of my favorite things to feature on a card!

To get started, I created a background panel with the Chevron foil plate and shiny silver foil. I use Hammermill 100 pound cardstock for all my foiling and card making these days, and truly find it to give me the best, most consistent results every time with my Spellbinders hot foil machine. After making the foiled impression on my white panel, I moved on to die cutting the Nested Chevron die, once from light blue cardstock, and again from navy. This gave me all the pieces I needed to create my dimensional background.

Next, I used my Wendy Vecchi Make Art Stay-tion to hold my foiled panel in place while I adhered the chevron pieces with foam tape. The magnets really help to ensure nothing slides around, and the Nested Chevron die cut pieces fit perfectly over the thick foiled chevrons on my foiled panel. Of course, you could certainly reverse the design using thinner Nested Chevron die cut pieces, exposing the thicker foiled chevrons rather than the thin ones as I've done here.

With my background complete, I moved on to the focal piece - the sentiment and wreath surrounding it. The sentiment comes from the Thrill of Hope hot foil sentiment set, which also comes with coordinating dies. Normally I'd use the same foil on my sentiment as I do on the other parts of the card, but in this case, picked matte over shiny because it tends to contrast against dark cardstock better - especially for photography!

For the wreath, I used my (very well-loved and hard-working) Curvy Leaves die set to cut out a bunch of leaves from white and shiny silver cardstock. When I was a newer cardmaker, I often struggled with getting my wreaths assembled the way I wanted them. However, I've learned a couple of tricks over time that really make it a breeze now. Here's what I do:

1. Create a circle that is slightly smaller than the one that the sentiment is adhered to, to work as a base for the wreath. You can't see this in the finished card, but it's there!

2. Lay out the leaves before adhering anything to get a general sense of how many you need, and how far apart they should be spaced. Depending on the card design, sometimes I use Press 'n Seal to temporarily hold the pieces in place, but I didn't need it this time.

3. On that smaller circle, apply some liquid glue around the perimeter, then lay the leaves right on top of this. The benefit of using liquid glue here is that it doesn't dry right away, and I like that it gives me time to fiddle around with my leaf placement.

4. Once the leaves are assembled and spaced the way you like them, adhere the larger circle and sentiment on top to hide that underlying small circle.

I mounted my wreath circle to the center of the card, then finished with a few metallic silver pearls and called it a day. As you can see, this card has plenty of dimension from the foam tape in the background, but you can add even more my fluffing up the leaves a bit after they've been secured.

Thanks so much for joining me today, and I hope my wreath-building tips will be helpful to you as well. Don't forget that you can still enter the November Challenge, and full details are here. Until next time, happy crafting!

- Angela