Recycling for the Rudolf Day Challenge #February

 As I said last month, my January post for this challenge is usually cards I have made by recycling some that I have received, but this year I didn't get them made in time, so here are some now. I only recycle shop-bought cards, not hand-made ones as that wouldn't seem right, and I always try to make them as different as possible from the original, so that I feel I can say I have honestly crafted them myself.

Robins seemed to feature quite prominently this year. but most were just a big robin filling the card front, and they don't lend themselves to re-using, but smaller ones can be cut , framed, and mounted in a variety of ways. So here is my first one, along with some doves, a couple of church choirs, and a warm home scene, which worked very well.

Of course there were far fewer cards sent this year because of the Covid virus, but I had a nice one from one of my sons, again featuring robins, which seemed to have a lot of potential. So I started by scanning it into my computer.

The centre robin didn't fit into any of my plans so I die cut the pair on the right, and the left hand one on its own, and made these two cards with them.

I do like to add a bit of bling to my Christmas cards so all the snowflakes are cut from white glitter card and the gems are deep blue. There is also some glitter glue dotted on the robins as snow.

I have used oddments of card from my stash, and a variety of embossing folders and dies to make these cards, so I am not listing them all here, but if anyone wants to know what any of them are, do drop me a message and I will do my best to let you know.

When I am not under any pressure to produce a card by a given date, I sometimes like to just play around, designing new cutting files for my Silhouette machine, and using Youtube videos to learn how to get more from Adobe Photoshop.

So I decided to have a play and practise some of the skills I am trying to master in Photoshop. So I chose a sheet of scrapbook paper from a digital kit.

Then I cropped the line of robins I used above,  to just include the three on the right and added them to the paper. Next I tried a new trick I have discovered to blend a photo into a background without leaving hard lines around it. 

I cropped it down and resized it  to fit the front of a B6 card (11.5 x 17cm), and printed it out twice.

It looked unfinished so I turned to my favourite Silhouette cameo machine and designed a wavy line of script similar to the original, plus a larger sentiment that seemed to fit, and cut them both from dark red vinyl. The tiny print was fiddly to do, and I had to be very careful weeding out the tiny ares between the letters, without losing any of  them. I used transfer tape to add the script and the sentiment to the cards, and finished them off with some glitter glue snow. It took me a while to do all this, but it was good practice and I have two more cards for me stash.

I was quite pleased with how they turned out, glad that I had mastered the blending technique, and, of course, I now have the digital card front and cutting files on my computer, so I could replicate them any time if I want to.

So now it is time to link up with the Rudolph Day challenge for February, on Scraps of Life by Scrappy Mo, and go over to see what everyone else has made.

If you have started making Christmas cards already, why not join in the fun.