Getting Ahead for Christmas

So as you know, we have friends staying this weekend, so I had to make sure I had my projects made ahead of time this week as I won't be in the craft room this weekend - I'll be flying kites and playing football golf instead!

So whilst I had the Avery Elle Christmas release on my desk the other week I went ahead and made a couple more cards in my effort to not be making Christmas cards on Christmas eve this year!

Firstly I was itching to get the two part greenery and sentiment set Peaceful Pines inked up, you've probably picked by now that for me Christmas cards have to be quick to make and I generally don't have time to "colour" images so I do love a quick stamp and go set that has lots of impact and this set does it for me!

I stamped it with a dark green ink directly onto a white 6x4 card leaving a little space to add some patterned paper (from the new Merry and Bright pad from Simple Stories which is simply divine but I forced myself to actually cut it up!) above and below.  I then used a slightly lighter marker and did some quick flick strokes over the top to give the pines some extra depth and then went to town with some double embossing on the sentiment and berries.  I embossed them first in a standard red powder for colour and then stamped and embossed them again on top with red glitter powder.  I find you get more impact that way as the glitter powders don't have enough solid colour for my taste.  You could just stamp in red first then add the glitter embossing on top but I like the depth you get from double embossing.   A couple of tiny strips of red glitter then tie the whole card together.

For my second card I went for something even quicker!  One of the trees from Quirky Christmas as a focal point over an ink blended stripe.

I was inspired by the sentiment in the set and wanted that to be the focus so trimmed the tree with scissors the white border I got from die cutting didn't look right when I wrapped my "tinsel" around the tree.  The tinsel in this case is actually a glittery pipe cleaner which you can find quite inexpensively in most kids craft departments or on that big online store that used to only sell books ;-)  I used some gel glue to stick it to the card then stamped the sentiment up close to finish.

Hope that gives you some more ideas for quick and easy Christmas cards that have a big impact.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• This week we will have a very large delivery from Hero Arts with the entire Winter catalogue available.
• We will have the latest release from Sugar Pea Designs too.
•  Stamping Bella's winter release is coming shortly and our order is in so watch this space for that in a few weeks - fans of the new odd balls will not be disappointed with the new winter characters!

Enjoy the rest of your bank holiday weekend.

Tara