No, it’s not Christmas yet, don’t worry, but I found a couple of year long Christmas card challenges and decided to make a card for them.
There’s Sweet Stampin’ Christmas who want a cute Christmas card and also Holly Jolly who want a clean and simple Christmas card. This one, where I envision Santa Claus looking in his closet for something to wear seems to fit both challenges.
I started by using watercolour paper and making the hanging pole using a ruler and a basic black stampin’ write marker and then stamped the santa image in stazon black. I then used the memento black to colour in the boots using my aquapainter. The suits were watercoloured again using my aquapainter and this time, real red. The sentiment is from the set Good Greetings and stamped in real red also. I then glued the watercolour paper to a base of real red. I’m pleased with this one, it makes me smile. And that’s always a good thing!
I really liked a Christmas card that my sister and I made at the fall crop last November. I decided to take the same layout and change things up a bit to create today’s card. It’s a simple card, but effective.
After using the embossing buddy (which I need to brush off the card before photographing it!) I stamped the upper sentiment in versamark on real red and sprinkled on the white embossing powder. It’s from the Yippee Skippee set. After heat embossing this, I stamped the sentiment from Good Greetings, also in versamark with white embossing powder. This top layer was a 4.75″ by 3.5″ piece of real red. The next layer is a piece of whisper white a quarter inch larger in both dimensions. This is all glued onto a base of real red in the usual half size of card stock which is a half inch bigger than the white and thus gives more interesting layers.
I haven’t done any challenges in a few weeks since I was in Spain without my carding supplies. So today I’ve created a card for this week’s Pals Paper Arts challenge and their colour inspiration.
It’s screaming for a Valentine’s card and for once, instead of being a rebel, I went for it. I’d been wanting to use my Stampin’ Up! Hearts border punch and this seemed the ideal time.
The pink pirouette is about 2 inches deep and I used the border punch for the top edge. I’d been expecting that it would punch the bottom edge and had a couple of cards designed with it but it looks as if I’ll have to redesign them! The sentiment is from the newly retired Good Greetings (hopefully most people snapped it up before its retirement, it’s a very useful set) and is stamped in rose red. I cut a 1/4 inch wide strip of basic grey and adhered that below the pink pirouette. I initially intended on adding another strip at the top, but it was too much. The base is rose red. Due to my dislike of grey, I would never have selected these colours but I actually like the grey with the rose red. That isn’t to say that there will be lots of grey and pink cards in the near future, but there may be one. Or two!
This is a supremely simple Valentine’s Day card, but none the less effective for it. I was playing with my Stampin’ Up! Perpetual Birthday calendar kit, which has a lot of extra pieces, when it occurred to me that there are far too many heart stickers for the calendar and they’d be good on a card.
I had an ampersand embossed piece of very vanilla cardstock on my desk and this card just fell together. Almost. First I had to redo the dry embossing so that there was room for the sentiment. I originally was going to use the blushing bride stickers and ink and card base but it seemed a bit too subtle. Real red it is then for both the card base and the ink. The sentiment comes from a just retired set called Good Greetings. It’s sad that it was retired before we even got to all the celebrations that it mentions!
My sister is doing Christmas with the “other side” of her family this year as well as attending her husband’s brother’s wedding yesterday. This means that she’s staying in the UK whilst the rest of the family is in the US so she sent us Christmas cards. I had had a preview of them, or similar ones, on skype but it’s not the same as seeing the cards in person. She was happy for me to share her cards on my blog – she has a blog too (although life has been getting in the way a bit lately including making 90 or so Christmas cards!) so do stop over and check out her work.
The card is 8.5″ by 3″ which makes me realise that almost every card I make is the same size. I’ll have to take a tip from my sister and try some other sizes. The base is real red with a matting of garden green. She used the wreath hanger from Wondrous Wreath with gold encore ink to create the hangers for the ornaments. Then she used the (sadly retired) ornament punch to cut out a variety of festive papers. These are all retired ones too – when we were at the weekend crop last month there were little packets of a few sheets of DSP and we both couldn’t resist. I think this is a great use of the papers. The sentiment is from the Good Greetings set which was added to the clearance rack today. I’m sad that it’s being discontinued because it’s an incredibly useful set and probably worth snapping up if you don’t already have it.
Caro also sent a card here for our parents and I’m impressed to see that she’s managed to create a card with – as well as part with – the snowflake ornaments (also now on the clearance rack). Mine get taken out of the container, looked at and put back!
I would never think to use early espresso as a base for a Christmas card but I think it works beautifully. Yet another tip to take from Caro. 🙂 This is another “odd” sized card; it’s a 4 inch square. The background is the All is Calm DSP which is a fabulous collection of papers. She’s threaded the All is Calm snowflake embellishment onto the lost lagoon silky taffeta ribbon – apparently this was quite a feat, cutting the ribbon on an angle helps, but it’s not a quick thing to do.
