Christmas Decorations

Christmas is over and we have the new year to look forward to so just to finish off December's Christmas themes, here are a couple of things I made for my Mum for Christmas. Both were inspired by trips to the Craft Barn demo days and both used Tando Creative products.

For this winter scene I used acrylic paint for the layers and some sparkle Mod Podge on the mountains. The windows and doors are drawn with a black micron pen and the title stamped and covered with glossy accents. The background is Tim Holtz tissue paper.

These Tando Creative stockings were fun to make, a made a few for friends and relations and kept one for myself. This one is painted with PaperArtsy Fresco Finish chalk acrylic paint in rose. This paint is opaque and so easy to work with, I think I might need to build up a collection of these paints, they are so versatile and the colours are fab. 

The swirl stamped image is from Personal Impressions and stamped using colorbox ink and embossed with fine clear embossing powder. The stocking is then triple embossed and some Perfect Pearls powder added with a small paintbrush before embossing to make an irridescent shimmer on the stocking. The same technique is used for the top of the stocking which I painted in black adding blue mica powder.

I hope you all had a happy Christmas and wish you all the best for the New Year.  

Julia x

A Voyage of Discovery

Christmas cards completed and ready to write and post so it was a nice change yesterday to make a birthday card for my Uncle.

The stamp is by Crafty Individuals CI-295 Discovery.

I used pastel chalks to colour tint the background in aqua and light brown and stamped the image twice so I could cut out the ship, colour it with distress markers (broken china and old paper) and decoupage it to add some dimension. I mounted it on kraft cardstock and punched holes on the side and cut into the card to make it look like a page torn from a book. The birthday wishes sentiment is from Craftwork cards, colour tinted with chalk to match the background.

I hope he likes it.

Hope you are all having a great weekend and not getting too stressed out about the Christmas preparations!

Christmas Sparkles

A couple of last minute Christmas cards finished last weekend that I have been meaning to post all week.
I will call this one "SnowFlake Magic";

White card embossed with dots for the background.

The sentiment is from an IndigoBlu Christmas set stamped in Midnight Colorbox Cats Eye pigment ink and mounted on blue velum. Add navy blue velvet ribbon and a wooden snowflake inked in the same colour with a gem in the centre for sparkle.

The sentiment reads "When the moon shines on the snow at the eve of night and everything is silent, listen to the sound of pure magic." 

My second card is not an original idea as it was inspired by an example I saw at The Craft Barn recently. For this card I used a Dreamweaver penguin stencil and Imagination Crafts Sparkle Medium in Antique Bronze. This is mounted on copper mirri card for the border.

The challenge at Less is More this week is Week 95 Recipe : Glamour and Glitz so I think I will enter my penguins for that challenge, its glitzy with the sparkle medium and I think the penguins look quite glamourous in their sparkly outfits.

12 Tags of 2012 : November

Its the last Saturday of November and I have managed to find some time to have a go at the techniques used on Tim's November tag. This one was great fun and I bought the autumn gatherings die last time I went to The Craft Barn so it was a good excuse to try it out. Thanks to my clever friend Sally for suggesting that it can be used in the Cuttlebug without those extender plates, it works, money saved.

Go look at Tim's blog for the step by step guide and all the inspirational examples posted there.
I love the faux batik effect and fortunately I have an encaustic art iron so didn't have to ruin my regular iron in the pursuit of art!
Here is my autumnal November tag.

This is a great technique so I made a Christmas tag whilst the crafty bits were out, I might make more tomorrow. I hope you are all having a great weekend and staying dry if you are in the very wet UK. 

Happy Saturday X

Two Colour Twinchies

This fortnightly challenge is Challenge #10 : Use two colours on the twinchies.

Yesterday I popped in to Hobbycraft and found one of their £1 clear rubber stamps that I thought would work really well on a twinchie. I like the Scandinavian Christmas designs and this one reminds me of knitwear, you know, those jumpers that people wore at Christmas in the 70's and surprise surprise, they are back in the shops again now. 

I made a set of three using pearlescent crimson Brilliance dewdrop ink to stamp the image on white cardstock and the same around the borders of the squares. The baubles are cut using a Sizzix die, masked and stamped using the same stamp and mounted with mini foam pads. I added pearls as accents on the baubles to finish them off.

I hope you like them. 

Thanks

CASology Week #19 : Thanks

The cue card for the CASology challenge this week is Thanks so having missed the deadline for last week's challenge I was determined to make sure I photographed my entry in time to post it here. It seems an apt theme given that this week I received a lovely box of chocs from a friend as a Thank You for giving her a lift to the station earlier in the week, she didn't need to do that but I do love chocolate. I've not opened them yet, planning to share them at work!

The recipe for my card:
Paper Flair Laser Words "Thank You", I cut the roses off the image and used them as corner embellishments as I wanted to customise it a bit.
Blue paper background.
Mounted on white A6 card stock.
Doodled lines and dots to finish it off in blue and added a turquoise gem accent to the exclamation mark.

I hope you are all having a good weekend and get some time to do a bit of crafting.

Less is More : Houses

This weeks' challenge at Less is More is a one layer card with the theme being Houses. Here is my Christmas card showing the London skyline including the Houses of Parliament. The stamp is from Crafty Individuals and I have stamped it in black archival ink directly onto the white card added the black Happy Christmas sentiment and red gems to brighten it up.
This is an easy card to make and I love that London image, should be OK to send through the post as well so maybe I'll send this one overseas.