Poinsettia card

Christmas cards are all in the mail including this one to my sister made from Tim Holtz Sissix dies, paper and distress inks. 

A Christmas Birdie Bag

What could be more fun than a little holiday birdie? A little birdie on a bag just big enough for a gift card!

This started out just playing and exploring with the new Tim Holtz Mint shifter stencil. At first I found it confusing then realized it's designed to leave blank or white lines in between the thick and thin lines of color.

I used Distress Oxides in Twisted Citron and Candied Apple on mixed media paper.

Then I used a pattern found by a Google search for a gift bag to cut and score the sheet to make a small gift bag.

The finished bag is only 4 inches tall.

Then for a bit of holiday whimsy, I colored this little guy from the Tim Holtz Bird Crazy stamps using Distress markers.

I had previously spent a very productive few hours die cutting an assortment of festive greens, rustic trees and snowflakes, which then came together quickly for a background.

All I had to do was add a bit of embossing powder for a bit of sparkle and voila! Done!

Thanks for visiting!

Snowflake Joy

Got on a roll today, and put this card together in less than 30 minutes! Of course, the snowflakes were already covered in glitter and die cut -- left over from another project. But I'm learning to cut multiple items at once and then have quick access when I want them.

The blue panel was colored with Distress Oxide in Faded Jeans, Salty Ocean and Black Soot. Then spritzed lightly with water and stamped with Faded Jeans snowflakes.

Next I assembled the elements I wanted to use -- glittered snowflakes, die cut JOY, red and white butcher string from my stash and red snowflake pattern paper from the 2018 Tim Holtz Christmas paper collection. Plus dusty blue card stock for the actual card.

Everything got trimmed, tied and layered. Easy peasy.

The final product -- now I just have to decide who to send it to -- that's if I can part with it myself! I have a habit of collecting these things. :)

Cheers!

Oh, I'm also entering this in the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge:  Let It Snow  

JOY - Snow Play

Snowflakes and reindeer and everything Christmas! I started working on my Christmas cards -- and I was inspired by the Simon Says Monday Challenge -- Let It Snow! My background was inspired by one of my favorite card and craft bloggers, Kath Stewart.

My card combines dies from my stash and some of the new Tim Holtz Christmas papers and Festive Funkie dies. I've always loved this prancing deer and was so glad to have an excuse to use him playing in the snow!

I started off inking a panel with Distress Oxides in Faded Jeans and Black Soot then lightly spritzing with water. Then stamped snowflakes in Faded Jeans and white embossed a few snowflakes.

Since this is one of what I hope will be many Christmas cards, I die cut a bunch of festive greens for about an hour!  Then die cut prancer here, covered him in white acrylic paint and dusted with fine white glitter.

I die cut the word JOY three times and stacked them to give the word some extra depth and die cut the small poinsettia and edged with some fine white glitter.

Then layered the blue panel atop a panel of red stripes and fixed the whole thing to a dusty blue card and voila! My first Christmas card for 2018!

I'm entering this in the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge:  Let It Snow  

Christmas Past

Before delving into my stash of new Christmas items, I decided to warm up the creative juices by playing around with some of my old supplies and created a couple tags. Glad I did, as I really wasn't sure what I was doing and played around for a while to come up with a couple simple tags that will most likely find their way onto a present sometime in December!

This little guy was my favorite of the two. I used Tim Holtz blueprint snowman plus the festive foliage die cuts. The snowflake background is an old stencil I had in my stash. It took a bit of guessing and fussing with some things. I started with these two elements.

Then fooled around with different elements. The snowman by himself seemed like he needed something so I tried adding some pine boughs behind him.

It wasn't quite right, so added some bows. Too many bows.

Then I remembered the set came with this Merry Christmas sentiment stamp so I ditched one of the bows in favor of a simple label. Done!

Here's the second tag - very simple. I've been struggling with how to best use the scribbly Christmas tree stamps I bought a while ago. What do you think? Have you used these stamps? Would love to see what you've done with them!

Gears Alot Birthday Card

My brother has a birthday coming up and it's always a bit of a challenge to come up with masculine cards -- until I fell in love with the gear 3D embossing folder from Tim Holtz.  My brother loves cars -- and has since he was just a toddler so, I created this gear card for him.

The first step was to emboss the gears on blue card stock sprayed with just a tad bit of water. On my first attempt, I mounted the panel onto tan card stock for the actual card, but it warped horribly when I used matte gel, so I redid it and mounted with sticky tape instead.

Next I rubbed the embossed panel with just a bit of metallic rub on cream that I've had in my stash forever. Loved how this gave it a slight metallic look.

Next step was to add to die cut black gears -- also from Tim Holtz. Though I loved the look, in retrospect I sacrificed readability when I added the Happy Birthday.

I die cut the letters and gave them a metallic rub as well, but they just didn't seem to stand out enough.

So, I lightly dabbed the letters with Broken China Distress Paint. This improved readability but only slightly. I didn't want to start over completely as this needs to get in the mail tomorrow in order to reach him in time!

I'm entering this into the Frilly and Funkie Impress Us Challenge -- it was fun doing this and working with the embossing folder.

http://frillyandfunkie.blogspot.com/2018/10/impress-us.html

I just received a bundle of Christmas dies and stamps -- looking forward to diving into them next week!

The Wicked Witch

Back today with two cards for Halloween! First a card I made for my daughter for Halloween! We both love Halloween (maybe even more than Christmas). Even though she's 1500 miles away in Wisconsin, I wanted to contribute to the festivities for a Halloween party she's hosting. I used the Tim Holtz Distress Oxides for the background with the spritz and smoosh technique and a few of his Halloween die cuts and stamps! so much fun!

I'm adding this to the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge for  Spooky Halloween ! 

Here's a picture of the second card I made for a friend:

I just added this to the Wednesday challenge as I don't think I posted correctly to the Monday challenege .... still trying to figure this blog thing out!

https://www.simonsaysstampblog.com/wednesdaychallenge/

Scarecrow Tags

These two scarecrow tags started out as an experimental background using Halloween words cut out from a tag to reveal a stamped and distressed tag beneath.

Here's how they started out:

Then, I added some stamping on top of the distress inking:

Next, punched out some words and backed with some Tim Holtz distress paper. 

Then I coated the tags with a thin film of watered down gesso.  This really knocked back the layers in the background more than I anticipated.

The tags in the end with their scarecrow die cuts and details added.

Halloween in Black and White

Seems stranger things do happen around Halloween. I had been pondering doing something in black-and-white with the Halloween witch and then - pow! - Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge announced a monochrome challenge. So these two creations came to life.

Backgrounds were created using a mix of black soot, pumice and hickory smoke stains and distress oxides. I combined those with some chalk acrylic paint splattering, smooshing and spritzing.

On the tag I embossed the spider webs in white and on the panel embossed black script. Then on top of the spider webs scraps of paper images of the top hat skull and title were black embossed and mounted.  

The witch was die cut from black card stock and mounted atop the black script and edged with black-and-white washi tape before a final mounting on black card stock.

Beware the Witch!

I created this as a card as part of the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge for using multiple stencils. There are three stencils on this -- a brick stencil that I used with texture paste on the background. A swirl stencil on the green panel and a diamond stencil on the witch's dress.  I posted on Instagram and entered the contest -- just learned this morning that I was featured as a winner for this!