Flying in for the Final Rudolph Day of 2016

For the last Rudolph day challenge of the year, I have used a little Christmas owl digi stamp from Aurora's wings. He has been in my library since last year, so I thought it was time I used him.

I knew I needed one more set of cards in a hurry so I printed him eight times and coloured him with copic markers, and fussy-cut round him. 

I also wanted to try out a new frame die by Amy Designs. So I found eight oddments of Christmas Backing paper, and eight toning pieces of card to cut the frames from. I distressed the edges of the BPs with a distress ink that matched the frame, and layered each set up on a white 15cm base card.

I liked the frame except for the top left corner which has a rather solid looking poinsettia on it, so I covered these with a double layer snowflake cut with two Marianne dies, and added a gem stone to the centre.

To finish, I added liquid pearl as the fur around the owl's hat, and some glitter glue to the snowy scene at the base of the frame.

I coloured all the owls in the same way, but used a variety of backing papers and frames, according to what I could find in my snippets box.

So, that is another eight cards for my pile, and now I will take them over the Rudolph Day Challenge at Scraps of life by Scrappy Mo.

When is an Angel not an Angel?

When it is a Star-Angel Sprite !!

I have been having fun  this week making the last few Christmas cards that I need for my local friends, and for these I turned to my library of digistamps and chose two.

The first is LOTV Christmas Angels - Praying. I printed her out six times. Then I chose Aurora's Wings, Star-Angel Sprite, and printed her five times (the sixth one wouldn't fit on an A4 sheet with enough space for a die-cut frame if I wanted one).

I then had a couple of evenings with my copic markers, adding colour to the images. This is so therapeutic!

Then it was time to make them into cards, and for speed I went with one design for my angels.

(I will say at this point, that we are actually having some much needed rain this week and the house is very dark, so all these photos were taken with artificial light and the colours are not good!).

I made six 12cm square cards, raided my Christmas snippets boxes for some backing papers, and on even smaller scraps of each one I stamped the sentiment heart (a SeeD's stamp) and cut it out.

Next I cut one layer of the Tonic Studio Star bauble die set from mirri-card; The one above is gold but it doesn't look it. I made a template for the angel and cut her out and layered everything up, finishing with a scattering of star stickers.

I made this card in three colourways.

Time for the second image. I must admit I do not usually go for this style of image, but I have rather fallen for my Star-Angel Sprite.

I again chose three colour schemes and this time I decided to fussy-cut the sprite. I made four 12cm square cards and one that was a little bit narrower because my snippet of backing paper wasn't quite big enough for the 12 cm card. I managed to find more pieces of backing paper in my snippets box to match or tone with each image.

Again, it doesn't show on the picture, but she is very sparkly because I coloured over the main star, her wings and her head-dress with the new Leonie Pujol Glitter Brush Pens. (The jury is still out on these pens. They are a lovely set of colours and are very sparkly, but the ink is a little too free-flowing for me so you have to be careful not to make blots, the brush is very soft, so precise colouring is difficult, and once dry, much of the glitter rubs off - though there is still plenty left on the image. I need to use them more to see if I can improve my technique).

The star crescent frame is also coloured with a light copic pen and then the pale blue glitter pen and it sparkles beautifully IRL. I have lost the packaging for the die and I can't remember the make, but feel free to say if you know please.

The sentiment is a really old Stampendous stamp. On some of the cards I used a different stamp by Penny Black. So here is the set I made of these.

As I used so many snippets for my backgrounds, and some of my huge collection of white snippets for the star crescent frames, I am going to link these with Pixie's Snippets Playground.

Holiday Robins

I have just returned from a week's holiday in Clonikilty, S.Ireland, and while there, I took quite a collection of bird photos. But the one I really liked was this perky little robin who sat on a dead thistle head right by the rail where I was leaning to look out over the sea at Inchydoney Bay.

So I decided to use it to make some Christmas cards. (I am way, way behind this year and need to do some big batches fairly fast!).

I chose a Winter background paper from a digital scrapbook kit, and in Adobe PS I cropped the robin and added him to the background. I resized it to fit a 15cm square card and printed it, cut it out and made a base card in plain white.

Going through my frame dies I settled on the second layer of Spellbinders fantastic ovals, and used a plain oval die to remove the centre. Then I glued it over the robin and masked any lines where the photo met the paper with stickles silver ice. I should have blended the photo into the paper before I printed it, but with time being of the essence, I didn't start again! I also added some glitter glue to the plants in the photo to give it a more Wintery feel.

For the sentiment I used a Joanna Sheen Signature die. It is larger than I usually use for a sentiment, but it worked well on this fairly plain background. I cut it from silver mirri-card to match the frame.

Happy with the result I then printed off more of the images, and made a set of six cards. Unfortunately when I came to make the frames and sentiments I found I was just about out of silver mirri-card, so I had to scrabble through my metallic snippets box to find pieces of dark silver (pewter?), and various holographic designs, for the other cards. As long as the frames and sentiments matched on each one, it was fine.

I then decided to try something else with my photo so this time I used another digital background and a Winter cluster png file also from a scrapbook kit. This cluster had a space for a photo so I slid my robin in and sized it down to fit, and again I printed off a 15cm square copy, and glued it to a plain white base card.

This time I used another quite large sentiment die by Creative Expressions - a Sue Wilson design. Again I had to find snippets of shiny card for these. The one in the photo is very holographic, but others were plainer, but at least I have used up quite a few of my oddments. Now I will have to tour all the todo shops and see if one has some silver mirri-card! I finished it off again with glitter glue on the foliage and the larger snowflakes from the cluster frame.

Again it seemed sensible to make a set of six of these, so I now have a dozen cards to add to my collection.

I had to change two toner cartridges mid-way through the printing and as you can see, the backgrounds are different shades, but I felt they were all quite acceptable. (None of them are as pink as they look in this photo!) The one good thing about my new laser printer is that there is no colour change when I add the stickles like I sometimes had with the inkjet prints.

All those bits of shiny card mean these two can wing their way over to Pixie's Snippets Playground #254.