Merry Monday

 

Yesterday I set myself a goal of creating five Christmas cards and I succeeded.  It was quite a stint in the craft room, but I'm glad I did it.  With the help of Merry Monday it was actually quite easy to get them all together.

This morning I checked out Always Playing With Paper to see the new sketch but she's taking a break this month and the challenge is to use any old sketch.  Well, I just happened to have done that already!

 

In an effort to clean out my paper stash a bit I've been going through my giant stack of retired DSPs and I have quite a bit of this one left.  Winter Post is also retired (much to my extreme disappointment), but I have enough of it left for an upcoming Christmas card workshop.  If you live in my area, the workshop will be held in my craft room on Tuesday, June 10th, at 7:00pm.  Drop me an email to register.

On a completely unrelated note, my craft room is a separate room in our garage.  Right now my husband is cleaning up the garage and listening to gangster rap.  Not what usually fills the air when I'm out here crafting.  I think he's pretending he's 19 again.

A La Card Monkey Sketch

As I sat looking out into my backyard this morning sipping a cup of Christmas Blend (and a touch of Hazelnut syrup), I thought about how much I love winter in the Cariboo.  I don't love that it lasts until April, but winter here, cold as it may be, is still sunny.  There are only a few inches of snow in the yard right now, and it's definitely chilly, but the sun is shining as brightly as it does on any day in July.  The smell of wood stoves is drifting through the neighbourhood, and I'm getting set to haul out the ornaments and put the tree up.

I wanted to make another Christmas card (my list seems to be getting longer each time I look at it) but wasn't feeling terribly inspired.  I headed over to the Card Monkey blog and used it to get the juices flowing.  I don't love Riding Hood Red, so I felt like I needed to give it a chance to shine.  I think it worked out quite well with this little sketch.

Spare Time?

It's fall break.  That means that I have a week off.  What I should be doing with my time is marking essays, reading some good books, drinking lots of tea, taking long baths, etc.  What am I doing instead?  Having classes and making stuff for ANOTHER craft fair.  This past weekend I had craft fair 2 of 3.  It went pretty well and I made enough money to not feel so bad about spending $250 on more stamps and supplies for myself.

In the past 2 weeks I've done 3 workshops, 2 kids classes, a craft fair, have more workshops tomorrow and Thursday morning, as well as my monthly stampers club on Thursday night.  And I have 4 teenagers and an 8 year old girl coming with their moms to make altered journals at my house tomorrow night.  

So this afternoon I sat down to work out what cards my monthly stampers were going to make.  I discovered that I have used up all of my white cardstock, and have a very limited amount of vanilla remaining.  Oh.  Crap.  Time for a challenge!  Who needs Connie and Mary, or Mojo Monday when I can whip up a challenge for myself anyways?  (It doesn't matter that it was out of necessity, it's still a challenge.)  How can I make 3 different Christmas cards with no neutral stamping base...  And here's what I got!

The top card is actually a piece of vellum over a layer of Bashful Blue.  You can't really tell here, but I've also added some Dazzling Diamonds to bling it up a little.

The second card makes me want white brownies with white chocolate chips and cranberries.  It's an emboss-o-rama (both the snowflakes and the greeting are heat embossed with white & Cherry Cobbler).

This final one is my favourite.  The picture in no way does it justice, so please copy it and make one for yourself so you can see how exquisite it is.  The embossed tree gives it some nice texture and looks sort of vintage.  (Learn how to selectively emboss here .)  I added some rhinestones to give it a little sparkle, and used the Winter Post set to add some lovely vintage images to match the feeling of the tree.  I worked in a Christmas store when I first moved out of the house, and there was a room with a decadent tree covered in gold and pink ornaments.  I like pink, but not enough to have a tree covered in it, but this fulfills my need.  However, I like it so much that I don't really want to give it away now.

CARD 1:
Paper:  Night of Navy, Bashful Blue, Vellum
Ink:  Bashful Blue
Stamps:  Winter Post
Extras:  Northern Flurry EF, Organza ribbon, Dazzling Diamonds

CARD 2:
Paper:  Crumb Cake, Cherry Cobbler, Chocolate Chip  (that sounds rather yummy...)
Ink:  Versamark
Stamps:  Snow Swirled, Four the Holidays
Extras:  White embossing powder, Cherry Cobbler embossing powder, Cherry Cobbler seam binding ribbon

CARD 3:
Paper:  Soft Suede, Blushing Bride, Very Vanilla
Ink:  Soft Suede, Blushing Bride
Stamps:  Winter Post
Extras:  Petals a Plenty EF