Walking in a Woodlands Wonderland

Hello, crafting friends!

With all this ice and snow around it seemed a good idea to make a Christmas card! Any Christmas cards made now mean less rushing about at the end of the year and that makes sense to me :)

To start, I tipped the contents of my snippets box out onto the table and picked out some items I'd made for other projects but not used - a deer (from Stampin' Up's retired Winter Post) that was stamped and fussy cut; the number 25 (from Stampin' Up's retired 25 Days) that was in a star shape but I cut it out with a circle punch; a couple of tiny snippets of designer paper; and some die cut snowflakes (which I later put back as I decided to stamp my flakes instead.

Before arranging my elements on the card, I stencilled in a background. I held a homemade rectangle stencil off centre and sponged in sky/snow with Tumbled Glass distress ink. Over that, I held a stencil made with the Tim Holtz Woodlands die set and inked in some fir trees.

Then I was able to build up a collage with the snippets of paper (one of which I scalloped for a bit of interest), the deer and the 25. Finally he sentiment and the snowflakes (both from Funky Fossil's Christmas Characters) were stamped and I added tiny details to the snowflakes and deer with a Posca white paint pen.

EDITED TO ADD AN AWARD

So lovely to be show-cased at The Snippets Playground with this card :) It also won a Cut Above at The Paper Players.

CHALLENGES

The starting point for this card was Joanne's exciting sketch at The Paper Players so I'm linking up there; I'm also joining in with the Stamplorations Stencil Challenge where Anything Goes using stencils; Such a Deer is the theme at the Christmas Kickstart challenge and of course it's time for the Rudolph Day Challenge too (where anything |Christmas goes from the 25th to the end of the month) so I'll link up there too.  And last but not least, I shall trot over to The Snippets Playground with my snippety make, if my deer doesn't mind giving me a lift!

AND IN OTHER NEWS

It's been lovely having the snow for Eva to play in and the day of intense blue sky and sunshine really gave my mood a boost too . But snow turns to ice which isn't what you need when recovering from a hamstring injury, especially not when in charge of large excited dogs!! The thaw has set in now - it's drizzling as I type -  and it'll all be gone by tomorrow leaving... oh heck, more mud :/

Sending hugs,

A sparkling new year

Hello crafting friends!

It was a wonderful sparkling frosty day when I started writing this post, which was all the more beautiful for following the dark, grey rainy ones of November. Suddenly those rosy-cheeked skaters, frost-rimed winter foliage and Santas arriving in a flurry of glitter seemed right - and I could even think of a shiny new year too! Come and see:

Letterpress Winter is a retired Stampin' Up stamp set that I'm SO glad I managed to hang on to! I use it all the time for all sorts of occasions and I think its vintage style is an enduring classic. Today, I've used it for a new year celebration card. Can you see how sparkly it is?!

The '2020' comes from another retired set that I find very useful, called 25 days, which was intended for making advent calendars but which I often use when I need interesting-looking numbers. For this card, I used the number 20 twice, inking up with versamark and heat embossing with gold embossing powder. The 'happy new year' greeting is from Clearly Besotted's Cityscape and fits the year rather neatly :)

The beautiful frame from Letterpress was stamped last using Memento black ink. I coloured in some of the frame with a gold marker and added gold Stickles for a really sparkly look. The panel was mounted on gold mirror card using dimensionals.

CHALLENGES
I'm enjoying joining in with the Festive Friday challenges - it's NOT about making festive cards (unless you want it to be) but more a device to give you an inspiration list to kickstart your creativity. Today I chose Vintage, CAS and Black and White from the list. I'm also linking up with another favourite challenge: CAS on Friday where the challenge this week is Black and White with one colour.

AND IN OTHER NEWS
The house diagonally opposite ours is home to several professional young people. They always decorate their house to the nines at Halloween, which amuses me,  but at the weekend, they showed that they could get excited about Christmas too. I don't think I've ever seen quite so many flashing lights, reindeer, icicles and fake snow in one place in my life! I was thinking of putting my simple red berry wreath up in the next day or two - but I'm not sure anyone will notice!

Thanks for coming to visit me today. Have you got your decorations up yet? Are you a 'Whole of December, got to make the most of it' person, or is your view more 'What do you mean? It isn't Christmas Eve yet'? Do let me know in the comments below :)

Hugs,