Christmas, New Year and Winter

Day 2 – 25 Days of Christmas Tags

Hi there!

I’m playing along with Tracey McNeely’s 25 Day’s of Christmas Tags event this year.

The sponsor for Day 2 was Newton’s Nook. I love Newton so I had a lot of choice when it came to choosing supplies for this tag! The inspiration tags were fabulous – there were so many that I could have chosen for today, but as soon as I saw Larissa Heskett’s tag, I knew I had to use that as my inspiration! I loved the background she did and was so pleased to see that she had explained the technique on her blog post.

Here is my take. I stamped an older Newton’s Nook image and then masked it off to work on the background. Following Larissa’s instructions, I took a stencil (the one I used was by Altenew) and inked over it with various distress inks before applying a layer of versamark. I then added clear embossing powder before blending some distress oxide and distress ink over it. So happy with the way it turned out! I will be using this technique again!

Anyway, I coloured Newton and his snowman with Twinkling H2o’s and then added a piece of ribbon to finish off the tag.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Day 1 – 25 Days of Christmas Tags

Hi everyone!

I love to make tags for the gifts I give at Christmas but I must confess, while I am usually pretty good with Christmas cards, I am often finishing my tags early on Christmas morning!

I’m so happy that I found out about Tracey McNeely’s 25 Days of Christmas Tags! This event is so inspirational and I hope to keep reasonably up to date – provided I do, I should have at least 25 tags done by the end of the month. Each day has a sponsor and I am going to try to use products from each sponsor wherever I can.

Simon Says Stamp was the sponsor for Day 1 and I must say all the inspiration tags were amazing. In the end, I took Jo Nevill’s beautiful tag and put my own spin on it using stamps from Simon Says Stamp. The main image is from a Simons/Clearly Besotted collaboration for Stamptember 2014 – isn’t it fabulous? Anyway, both the image and sentiment are embossed in gold sparkle powder so this tag is really sparkly in real life.

I’m also entering this into the current Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge – ‘Christmas Gift Tag’.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Pretty Christmas cards

Hi everyone!

I attended my first card making class in the UK for a long time yesterday and it was great fun! Kay Carley was running an all day class for the Craft Barn in Lingfield. Side note: the Craft Barn was where it all began for me many years ago – where I experienced the magic of embossing for the first time, learnt so many techniques and made friends with fellow crafters. I virtually lived there every Saturday and was heartbroken when the owner decided to close. The store was rescued and changed hands before relocating to another local town. It’s now an online-only business but I am glad it still provides some classes at the local community centre. It was sad to go back to Lingfield and see the ‘old place’ all boarded up, but that’s life I guess!

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me and that trip down memory lane. back to the cards…

Kay showed us how to make two cards using her new stamps from Paperartsy. When I saw samples for this class online, I thought the backgrounds had been made using distress inks – we actually used Paperartsy’s Fresco Finish paints. Totally outside my comfort zone but great fun to use and some beautiful colours!!

 For the first card, I followed Kay’s sample colours. I was a bit nervous about outlining the embossed images using distress markers, but that black line really makes the images pop, don’t you think?

 

 

 

 

Kay’s second card followed the same colour theme as her first one, but I decided to try a different palette. Some of these shades remind me so much of distress inks (especially Seedless Preserves and Broken China).

I enjoyed making the backgrounds with the paints – it was great to stamp on the backgrounds and then water colour the images… now I just need to decide if I want to explore this medium a bit more! I particularly like the metallic paint we used for the tree trunks (a bottle may have made its way into my basket!).

Thanks Kay for a great class, and great inspiration!

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

Deco Trees

Happy Saturday everyone!

Not too much time for card making today as I have been batch cooking. Spent a long time in the kitchen but I know it’s totally worth it!

Anyway, I did manage a very quick Christmas card using this fabulous Memory Box deco tree die. I used a remnant from Distress Oxide/Color Burst background I made a few weeks ago for the inlaid die cutting and a Darice embossing folder for the background.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

So many merry snowmen

Hi there!

I fell in love with Mama Elephant’s ‘So many Snowmen’ stamp the moment I saw the sneak peak on Instagram and snapped it up as soon as I could! I can’t believe it landed on my doormat a week ago and I am only just getting round to stamping it up!

Anyway, it was just as fun to colour as I imagined. I used my Twinkling H2O paints and also my Nuvo Aqua shimmer pen and this card is so shimmery in real life! The die is from Mama Elephant as well and I used ‘Christmas’ from a Simon Says Stamp set.

I’m going to enter this into the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday challenge – anything goes.

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG

Merry Making – Wrap Up Day Coloured Cards

I love that Online Card Classes always include more techniques on their wrap up days and this class was no different! I will be trying them all at some point and will hopefully update this post when I do so.

In the meantime, I chose to start with Kelly Latevola’s card where she combined distress oxide inks with coloured pencils! Parts of this card were totally outside my comfort zone (loose water colouring, anyone?) but I totally loved making this!

I used the gorgeous W Plus 9 Christmas Rose stamp and a selection of my favourite distress oxide colours. It was fun to watercolour with them. I loved the effect created after the distress oxide was down, and was quite nervous about the coloured pencils, but I like the effect – more practice needed again, of course, but still great fun!

I finished off the card with some splatters of gold perfect pearls and sentiments from Simon Says Stamps!

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.