Christmas cards: Gold edition

I am at last getting my Christmas cards done... Last weekend I made green, red and gold backgrounds on A3 watercolour paper, and all week I've been experimenting on different stamped images to use with them. Since I don't like throwing stuff away, I expect all the experiments to end up on the cards one way or another: Green, red and golden Christmas cards!

The golden background was made with Antique Linen Distress Ink, Teastain Color Bloom spray and salt. When the A3 sheet was dry I cut it in 8 pieces suitable for A6 cards and added brown Distress inks to the edges.

I experimented quite a bit with Flitterglu and Megaflakes in the colour Morris Dance, using solid images from Chocolate Baroque ( the sets are Winter Edges and Punky Flowers). The gilding wasn't as easy as I would have thought on basis of the videos I checked out before buying the flakes... These are the best images I got (its hard taking a picture with all that shine!).

The snowflakes were done using the Phat foam (that came with the starter kit) to spread the glue on the stamp. I found it was difficult to see if there was enough glue on the stamp, which led to uneven coverage (as can be seen on the larger snowflake image to the left). Wanting to have more glue on the stamp, I tried spreading the glue on an even surface with the spatula and "kissing" it with the flower stamp in the middle card. This worked well enough, the image is full and clear... But it still feels a bit sticky as if it could use some more flakes ( I tried adding them, but it didn't help) 

It also turned out that cleaning the glue from the stamps was a pain. I did as was told, and cleaned them before spreading the flakes. I scrubbed them with soap and warm water and a toothbrush (which was the advice in the package), but they were still sticky. I used different stamp cleaning mediums (including the one that came with the gilding set) and a stamp scrubber... And still kept finding sticky spots especially on the low areas of the stamps! I did the gilding at some point, and then returned to scrubbing my stamps. I probably spent more time cleaning my stamps over and over again, as doing the rest of the gilding... and I still expect to find some stickiness on the stamps next time I look at them. This annoys me quite a bit, and will certainly make me think twice when I consider experimenting with new stamps.

As with my other cards in green and red, I also used Mini Christmas Trees from Crafty Individuals too. This time I embossed the detailed fun tree with golden embossing powder. These are pretty and were really fast and simple to make, so I ended making several.

I am entering this card for the SimonSaysStamp Monday Challenge (Holidays) and the SimonSaysStamp Wednesday challenge (Holidays and Christmas)