Pink and Green Trees

No post last night because I was holding a stamp a stack at The Art House. We had a great turnout and everyone had so much fun that they wanted a second class. So we're holding another Christmas card workshop on Wednesday, December 2nd. This is a sneak peak of one of the cards we'll create in that class. I used Heather Scott's Monday sketch challenge this week. I've noticed that pink and green are trendy colors for this season, and I thought I'd try my hand at it.



My card uses Ki Memories's Joyful Twinkle paper and The Angel Company's stamp set Holiday Cheer with snow flakes from Winter Tags. The pink ornaments in the tree are colored with my RV02 Copic marker. I couldn't find a light pink paper that would match properly either, so I just colored the edges of a piece of white paper with my RV02 marker too and now it matches perfectly.

I will post the Christmas cards from last nights class later, but, fall is my favorite season, and I'm not ready for it to be over before Thanksgiving gets here, so I'll post those cards after Thanksgiving.

Vintage Santa Sketch Challenge

This week I had a chance to play along with Heather Scott's sketch challenge. This week she's giving away Blog candy, but that's not why I participated. I'm a big one for sketches. I'll make my own sketches before I start a project, I'll use sketches others post online, or I'll see things in magazines and make the sketch from a card someone else created and then store them away for when I get a chance to play. It seems to make my creative time more efficient.

My card is made with the Vintage Santa and Trendy Greetings stamp sets, combined with Reece patterned paper.

Because Vintage Santa is a collage stamp, this card comes together very quickly, and let's face it, sometimes those are the cards that you really need.

Same Card But Updated

Last year I went completely overboard with my Christmas cards. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I must have originally been planning to send cards to an army. I made a ton of the same card. 75 of them went out in the mail to friends and relatives as intended, but that still left oodles of them in my craft room. To solve that problem, I thought I'd use them as trades at The Angel Company's Escape retreat in January. But I still came home with more than 50 of them. Were they multiplying in the dark or what?



The original card was made using Ranger's Cut n Dry Foam Pad. I put all of my snowflakes from the retired Snowflakes set on one large acrylic block and stamped it on the Cut n Dry Foam Pad. Then I added several colors of purple re-inkers. That custom pad lasted me for all of the cards I made! So that was the background. Then I used the snowman from the now retired Fun Filled Holidays set and colored him with Aquacolor Crayons and my water brush. The stars and his nose were colored with Prismacolor Pencils. Super simple! And away they went (except for the ones that stayed and bothered me because they seemed to have been wasted).

This year, with the craft show coming up, and the folks at the Art House offering to sell cards for me again, I needed to come up with a bunch of cards. So I looked at the old snowmen cards and tried to figure out how to update them into something different, but without adding too much additional work.

What I ended up doing, was cutting the front panel off all of the original cards, cutting them down by 1/4" on the top and bottom, and cutting the corners out with a corner punch. Then I added a few Crystal Stickles, and voi la! The same card but different. No waste, and I'm a happy girl.

Broke my punch

I've been busy making Christmas cards for the Shepard Craft Fair. For one of them, I'm using up some paper I had left over from the Basic Grey Blitzen Collection. I cut the scraps I had into strips and used them on the card below. Then I embellished them with layered snowflakes made from my graduated sizes of McGill snowflake punches. I was using the small and medium sized punches and apparently punched so many times, I broke my medium size punch. I've been looking all over for one and couldn't find a replacement. So I had to get the QuicKutz snowflake die instead and figure out how to run it through my Big Shot. Worked fine after adding a few shims. Here is the result.

Reece Reindeer Christmas Card

I've been making a bunch of cards this week, first in anticipation of my Stamp a Stack yesterday and then because I'm hoping that I will be participating in one of our high school's annual craft shows. The show will be December 6th, and I should be hearing from them some time this week. So I have been and will be making up a bunch of cards, and will be posting some of them over the next few weeks.

The first one is this card I made for my Stamp a Stack yesterday. We used The Angel Company's Reece Soar With It paper collection and stamped the main image from their Christmas Season stamp set. The image is colored with watercolor pencils, which made it super quick and easy. I ran the edge of the red mat through one of the Cuttlebug border embossing folders and cut around the embossed edge. Then added a ribbon for a little more detail. All in all, this card is very quick to make, and you can get 9 of them from the patterned piece of Reece paper (12 if you make the patterned panel 1/2 an inch smaller).

Card Candy

I know I've talked about Card Candy before, but I don't think I've ever posted any pictures. Card candy is something that Rita introduced to us at Diamond Island this summer and it's addicting. Basically, card candy is anything made from layering various punched out paper layers, some raised with pop-dots, accented with stamped and colored images and Stickles.

We used card candy as our make and take at the St. Charles Scrapbook Expo, and it was such a hit that we'll be using different designs for our make and take at the Rubber Stamp and Scrapbook Expo next weekend. We'll also have some stamp sets available at the Rubber Stamp and Scrapbook Expo that lend themselves really well to making Card Candy: Christmas Circles, Sweet Goodies, Christmas Minis, Wee Ones and Food Family & Friends. And if you buy and of these sets at the show, you have the choice of purchasing an add-on pack that comes with two bottles of Stickles, kits to make two different card candy images using the stamps, plus a photo for reference. There is a different add-on pack for each stamp set. Here is a sample of one of the card candies that will be available with the Christmas Circles add-on pack (it was one of our most popular from the last show).



Card candy can be used for all sorts of things, images on cards, embellishments on scrapbook pages, decorations on gift wrapped packages, or tags. Here's a card I made using our Angelee paper and the card candy principle.



Last weekend I went to Target and found some Mickey Mouse Ears silhouette punches in different sizes. I used them to make these card candies with magnets on the back for my sister to decorate her metal door with when she goes on her Disney cruise in a few weeks. They're a little blurry because my camera couldn't focus on the detail well enough, but my scanner was putting too much shadow around them because of the pop-dotted layers. Hopefully you get the idea.








Hopefully these will give you some ideas.

Who knew what scraps could do?

Here's another Christmas card that I made using some square cards and envelopes that have been sitting in my closet for years and scraps of Amelia paper left over from other projects. According to The Arthouse, a little frame and gift shop that is selling my cards for me this year, these are the cards that are the most popular.

Two More Christmas Cards

Last weekend my computer wasn't working, and I wasn't able to publish any Christmas cards on my blog. So this weekend I'm putting up two for your viewing pleasure.

The card with the trees is made with green/beige double sided paper, with the green torn at the bottom to show the beige inside. The stamps are Mountain Scenery and just the Merry Christmas portion of Faith, Hope, Love. The ink is Giverney Green palette. I also covered the tree panel with a light coat of glitter.

The Joy card is one of my favorites. I sent it in as a contest entry for TAC. Part of the reason I like it, is that it's really simple to make. I used black card stock and the mottled red pattern from the Amelia Soar With It paper collection. Inside is a piece of white cardstock with each corner cut with a decorative corner punch, so I can write on the inside. The rest is just our Ornamental Joy stamped on the focal point black piece, and then stamped around the edges of the Amelia paper. You can use perfect pearls and perfect medium to get the gold, or you can use Encor Ultimate Metallic Gold ink.

Give these cards a try. They're really not as difficult as they might look.

Christmas Cards (already)

Well, I know it's not even Thanksgiving yet. But you know what happens once Thanksgiving rolls around don't you? Things get BUSY! And have a tendency to stay that way until the beginning of the New Year. That's why last week I offered my most popular Christmas Card Stamp a Stack for my Angel Company customers. We made 12 cards, four each of three designs. And I've got more ideas for other Christmas cards too. So if you're looking for ideas, I'll try to post at least one card here a week from now until Christmas to help get your creativity flowing.

Here's the first of the Christmas cards.

To make this card, I used the green mottled pattern from TAC's Amelia collection, some white, red and green cardstock, The Angel Company's "Christmas Joy" stamp set, Landscape Green Palette ink, Noir Black Palette ink, Christmas Red Stickles, colored pencils and red ribbon.

Check back here for more Chrtistmas card ideas in the coming weeks, and have fun making your own.