Christmas, New Year and Winter

Happy New Year 2024

Happy New Year friends!

I often feel drawn to bright colours, glitter and a dark card base for my New Year’s cards but this year I ended up creating cards with a white base and softer colours.

Here’s the card that I made for my lovely mum. I was inspired by this card by Karin. As I was thinking of trimming sprigs from the Poppystamps’ Fairhaven Oval die, I realised it would work very well with the card design. I coloured the image with distress inks and I added a bit of vellum that I had covered with Tumbled Glass distress oxide ink which I felt was softer than a card-based background. The background die is by Pinkfresh Studio and I used an alphabet die by My Favorite Things to create the greeting.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

One wood block stamp, two New Year cards

Hi there!

It’s that short time of year when my cardmaking attention turns to New Year cards. Ordinarily I use a lot of die cuts but today I wanted to use a pretty wood-mounted stamp that I’ve had for AGES plus some newer products kindly sent to me by Penny Black.

The stamp du jour is called Falling Stars (3890H) – mine is dated 2008 (I think I may have bought it in 2010) and is still available online at the Penny Black store. I know many people are nervous about stamping with wood-mounted stamps, but they leave a beautiful impression – I will always love all mine! I do a few practice impressions when I’m stamping multiples of the same image, like I did with these cards.

My first card uses minimal supplies – the stamp, a sentiment from the Smile All Season stamp set (30-516), some versamark ink and glitzy embossing powder. I also used a frame from the Stitched Frames die set (51-709).

It’s a product explosion on my second card! I used the same stamps from my first card, plus a tag die from the Tagged set (51-007) and dies from the Peaceful Pines set (51-705) and Little Ornaments set (51-090) (bow) plus a tiny bit of branch from the On A Limb set (51-749). The beautiful embossing folder is from the most recent colllection and is called Filigree (65-010).

I’m going to enter these into Amy’s December Woodblock Wednesday challenge.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Cabin Snowglobe

Happy Festive Friyay everyone!

It’s almost the big day and I just couldn’t resist playing along with this week’s 52 Christmas card challenge where the theme is snow globe.

I used the Poppystamps Cabin Snowglobe pop up easel die set for my take on the challenge theme. Unfortunately, a couple of the tree dies were missing from my set when I bought it but I used my brand new Layered Evergreen Trees die set by Memory Box instead. I coloured all my images with distress inks and the sentiment is also by Memory Box.

I’m also going to enter this into the Poppystamps Cool Yule challenge.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Sparkle and Twinkle

Hi there!

Today I’m finally using a beautiful cling stamp called ‘Snowed In’ (40-916) that was kindly sent to me by Penny Black.

I sometimes feel intimidated by landscape stamps and I had originally planned to colour this stamp with different Tombow markers. But then I stamped it with Speckled Egg distress oxide ink as a practice and loved how it turned out – so I ended up working with that! I masked off the image and blended Tumbled Glass and Stormy Sky distress ink for the sky. I then cut the Snowman Joy die (51- 272) from white glitter card and added some colour using my alcohol markers.

I cut into the landscape and tucked the base of the snowman between the card and adhered the image to my card base. I added a sentiment from the Song of Peace mini set (30-999) and lots of glitter, which I hope you can see in this photo!

I still felt the card needed something else… first I tried to lift some of the ink from the sky but it wasn’t successful (this was due to the cardstock which is different from my usual card). So I adhered some small snowflakes from the Snow Family die set (51-395) cut from different colour holographic card – it was only when I was photographing the card that I realised that the smaller flakes from the Snow Shimmer Stick and Shine sheets would have worked just as well!

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Golden background challenge

Hi there!

Today I’m playing along in the Color Throwdown challenge which has a wonderful festive combo of green, purple, blue, and gold.

I used my new Simon Says Stamp Fancy Ornaments embossing folder and die set – this is a beautiful set and I was so chuffed to pick it up in a recent sale! I coloured the ornaments with distress inks. I adhered them to the amazing Sparkle 3D Texture Fades embossing folder – the impression is AMAZING on the mirror card… but a real challenge to photograph!

To complete my card I added a sentiment cut from white glitter card.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Flurry of festive wishes

Hi everyone!

Today I’m playing along with this week’s challenge at Freshly Made Sketches using products kindly sent to me by Penny Black.

I’ve been wanting to use the beautiful Winged Pair cling stamp (40-908) for a while and when I saw this week’s sketch, I knew it would be perfect! I coloured the image with my Twinkling H2O paints and masked off the birds as I sponged a little distress ink across the background and added some splatters.

I used my new Blizzard embossing folder (65-013) for the background strip and sponged a little white ink to highlight the snowflakes – they are so pretty! (I’m not sure why my cards are appearing darker at the bottom – it must be the lighting – I need to look at my set up… maybe I’ll do this over the Christmas break!)