Up and running for the first Rudolph Day Challenge of 2018

For those who don't know, Rudolph day is the 25th of each month, when we are encouraged to make a card, or other Christmas related item, to help us build a stash and avoid a panic at the end of the year.

I have been out of action for best part of a month with the dreaded cold virus, but I am beginning to feel 'human' again, so I wanted to find my mojo and get some crafting done. So here is the first card I made.

Last year I fell woefully behind my target of 12 Christmas cards each month, and I want to do a bit better this year. I needed something fairly straight forward to get me started, so I browsed some fairly old craft CDs, really to see whether I need to keep them or pass them on to someone who would make better use of them, and I came across one called Romany Christmas, which I have never used. The images on it are sort of 'folk art', very simple and muted. There were some sheets of toppers, with six designs to a page so I printed off two each of two pages. The images ranged from robins to Christmas trees, from puddings to snowmen, and even old Rudolph himself. Here is another one made into a card. Very simple but quite effective.

Because of the type of images they were, I felt it would spoil them to add too much embellishment to them, so I found various pre-cut cards from my stash, and several dies for frames. Then I decided which shape worked best for each image and cut them out with a corresponding mat.

Then I used snippets of patterned paper from my Christmas offcuts box, digi scrapbook papers sized down to a fit a square card, and printed off some of the matching papers from the CD, and between all of those I made a backing paper for each card and added the relevant topper.

Then I used oddments of sticky ribbon, die cut lace borders, and elements salvaged from old Christmas cards (I found a bag of these from years ago in one of my scrap boxes!) to add some interest.

I used my misti to position a sentiment stamp on each design and stamped them.

So now I have a collection of 25 cards! WOW. That is a great start to my collection for this year. Just in case you don't believe me...

Sorry the photos are a bit dark. This may be January, but we have unseasonably bright sunshine in the mornings here this month. I am not complaining, but it makes photographing cards quite difficult.

So I will link these up to Scraps of Life by scrappymo, for the Rudolph day challenge.

I won't keep up the momentum of twenty-four cards every month, but I do hope to get some smaller runs done, so I can stay on target this year.