12 Days of Stitchmas Advent Calendar | Day 1 with Mindy Eggen

Welcome to our 12 Days of Stitchmas 2023 Advent Calendar class! Join us and stitch your way through the season! We invited 12 guest artists to share inspiration with the 12 stitching surprises. Let's welcome Mindy Eggen as she shares inspiration with the Day 1 surprise! Hello crafty friends! This is Mindy Eggen and I am so excited to kick-off Day 1 of Stitchmas with you! I absolutely love countdown calendars especially when it’s fun, crafty stuff inside! Day 1 of Stitchmas is a cute little 3-tier tree that is the perfect focal point for a card, tag, or ornament. I’m going to be using the white and peach-colored cardstock from the 12 Days of Stitchmas Stitch Along Add-On kit to cut my tree from.

Watch video tutorial below or on our Youtube channel :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2KWJhDqQy8 To add shine to my tree, I’m going to be stitching with the Silver floss on the colored cardstock and the Peach colored thread on the white tree I die cut out. This would be fun to die cut out of green cardstock and then add different colors of gems to make it look like lights on the tree. I may need to try that!

I pulled a sentiment set from my stash that would allow me to create multiple sentiments at once since I was going to be making two cards. I’m using the Comfort & Joy Sentiments Hot Foil Pate. I can foil all the sentiments at once and then die-cut them all at once.

To give myself lots of options, I foiled the sentiments on white and the peach cardstock using Matte Silver and Matte Rose Gold Glimmer Foil. These trees would look beautiful on plain cardstock but I love to step up my backgrounds. I’m going to be using the Holly & Foliage 3D embossing folder and the Scenic Poinsettias 3D embossing folder. I’m sharing a great tip in my video about using embossing folders!

On one of the backgrounds, I lightly went over the raised areas of the cardstock with a white pigment ink pad and for the other, I added Golden Hour Solar Paste . The solar paste adds a beautiful subtle shimmer on the white cardstock.

Each of the trees is popped up with foam squares to add dimension and embellished with the gems included in the Add On kit . These were so quick and easy to stitch and put together! I can’t wait to open the rest of the calendar and see what fun surprise there is in store! Hope you enjoyed today’s inspiration for Day 1 of the 12 Days of Stitchmas . Enjoy and happy crafting !