Merry Christmas!

I am sure I am not the only one who does this, but when I am 'up to my eyes' with so many things I need to do that I don't know where to start, I often go off and spend half a day doing something completely non-urgent and irrelevant. So this week, as I checked through my Facebook page I saw a photo of a Christmas sign, painted on wood and hung amongst some greenery. The lady who posted it wanted to know what font was used so she could make a similar sign with her Silhouette machine. The general consent was that it was hand painted but I thought it should be possible to make something like it with a bit of messing around. I can't resist a challenge. So I used a combination of Corel Photoshop, my scanner, my ancient light-box, good old Windows paintbox, and a bit of imagination, and finally the trace function of my silhouette software, and I did it! I now have a cutting file for the words Merry Christmas, that while not being identical to the original sign, is a very close approximation. I had 'wasted' many hours, but had great satisfaction from doing it, and I was then able to get into gear and tackle the things I really needed to do!

So last night, I decided that the least I could do was to use it, so I off-set the file to make two layer mats and cut them all out of bits from my snippets box, using my Silhouette of course. (I think the middle layer is a rather confused design, but the plain white on top does show enough to read what it says. A rather larger snippet was used to cover the front of a DL card, having first matted it onto olive green card, also from my snippets box.

And here is the card I made. It really is white and green, though it looks more like pink in the photo. It was a little bit plain for me, so I finished it off with a line of glitter glue along the writing and some on the snowflakes in the background. It is amazing what a difference a bit of sparkle makes!

I don't like that photo at all so I have tried doing another one. This shows the colour and sparkle much beter, but I cut the end off! take your pick!

When is a snippet not a snippet? To me, once I have cut into a sheet of paper or card, if the piece left is smaller than A6 size, it goes in my snippets box. But in each box(I have four colour coded boxes!) I also have a clear pocket full of the real tiny pieces. But when I find a piece in my box that is large enough to cover a card, I think, 'that wasn't really a snippet at all'! What do you think?

Anyway, I used up several pieces from my snippets box for this, so I am off to link it up to the Playground again. Then I have to go and make some chili and ginger jam. I ran out of it at my sale last night and took some orders, so I had better not procrastinate any longer.