Rudolph Day is here again

My word, the 25th of each month comes round fast, but it was a bit of a shock to open my blog to write this, and see that I haven't posted since Rudolph Day last month! Hopefully I will do better after this one as I have just made some birthday cards to post while I am in UK, but I can't show them on here yet. 

So instead I turned my attention to making a couple of Christmas cards and here they are.

Both are made using a set of Hobby Art stamps that I bought last Christmas, but they have never been inked up before.

I tend not to go for 'Cute', and these are bordering on it, but I rather liked the simplicity of the figures, and they were not too challenging to colour. So as time was in short supply, I thought I'd give them a whirl.

I used masks to stamp the figures in two groups, and them masked them all while I dusted distress ink on the backgrounds. Then I used copic markers to colour the images.

I should have learned by now to chose my frame/mats before I stamp, but I haven't, so once again I spent ages going through my dies to find something that would fit my arrangements. In the end I chose the outer layer of Spellbinders labels 46, Decorative Elements for the top one, hand-cutting around the second size for the image, and Nestabilities Decorative labels 8 and the matching plain one, for the lower card.

I cut the frames from mirri-card and also used some for a border on the blue card. The lines from a carol are from a set of stamps by Our Daily Bread.

I couldn't fit a word stamp on the second card so I added a banner from a set I was given many years ago.

Both backing papers came from my Christmas snippets box so I will take these cards over to Pixies snippets playground. 

I am flying to UK early tomorrow morning to attend my brother's funeral, which is a sad occasion, but it does mean I will get to spend the weekend with my sister Jean, and also meet up with distant relatives whom I have not seen for many years. So I will  publish this a little early, and do my best to link it up to the Rudolph day Challenge on Scraps of life by Scrappy Mo, when I arrive.