Rudolph Day Challenge # November

Well here we are at our last Rudolph Day Challenge of 2020. It has stood me in good stead and I have sufficient cards for this year without a panic making session now. But I have, of course, saved a couple for this challenge, and for these I chose a Layered Merry Christmas cutting file that I bought from Debs Cards Studio, etsy shop.

Her design was in red and green, but I decided to make my first one in less traditional colours, and used pale blue and deep purple. The top flower layer was tricky to cut, and even with a new blade in my Silhouette cameo, it didn't quite cut cleanly, but I managed to use my snips to tidy up any corners that needed it. I used a 12"x12" sheet of blue card for the base and top layer, and off cuts of purple and white for the two in-between layers. At the last minute I hand cut some holographic silver paper to go behind the flowers, but it doesn't really show in the picture.

I then cut it again using red and green, and this time I added red foil on top of the largest flower.

I added some silver glitter glue to the flower centres on the blue card, and yellow glitter glue to the red flowers.

As they went together fairly easily I made one more of each colour way, with the only difference being that I put some gold paper behind the red flowers, instead of red on top of them. So I have four more cards for my stash, and I think they are the last for this year.

So I will link this up to Rudolph Day Challenge # November on Scraps of Life by Scrappy Mo, and hopefully we will be back to do it all again next year.

Rudolph Day Challenge#October

My word, the 25th of each month sure comes around fast. I will soon have enough Christmas cards for this year, but I haven't done much crafting just lately so I wanted a fairly simple card for this challenge and I chose a cutting file I purchased from The Dreaming tree at 3dsvgcuts. 

I used my Silhouette cameo machine to resize it a bit and used mostly off cuts for the layers. There are four layers to the central panel and three to each side panel so it is a fairly heavy card and will most likely be used for one of my hand-delivered cards rather than a posted one. I always have plenty of cream off cuts, so the side panels were easy enough to find pieces for.(They look white in the photo but are in fact cream). For the background I used a piece of heavy card from an old Hunkydory set. More offcuts of black and brown made the other layers. 

The side panels are a white layer first, which is used to attach them to the back panel, and then a cream layer with the star cut outs added to the front. The script was cut from some offcuts of gold, paper-backed foil, which surprised me by actually cut very well, and because I didn't like the white stars peeping through the cut outs, I added more little scraps of the gold behind each group before gluing the two layers together.

Although there was a lot of cutting to do, and that is always a bit hit and miss with my temperamental machine, this time it went quite well, so while the machine was set up, I cut a second set. This time my only suitable background off-cut was half a piece of paper I printed ages ago, on standard printer paper so I needed to glue it to a stiff card back to make it stable enough. (No pun intended).

I was pleased with the end results so I may make a few more if I find I am short of any at the last minute.

Now I will link up with Rudolph day Challenge#October at Scraps of Life by Scrappy Mo. 

And as I have used so many snippets for these cards I will also link up over on Pixie's Snippets Playground.

A wish for Peace on Rudolph Day#September

Well for once I only have a single card to show this month. It has been too hot in my craft room in the afternoons for me to do much crafting, and I needed a few birthday cards more urgently than Christmas ones. But here is today's offering.

I bought the Heartfelt Creations stamp recently in a sale bin of an online store. Having stamped it I tried to find a die-cut frame that it would fit into, and eventually came up with these. I think the plain ones are from a Spellbinders set - labels 7 and the red layer is the matching fancy set, but I can't be sure as I seem to have lost their information card. The outer frame is cut from gold glitter card.

 

I coloured the image with alcohol ink markers, and mounted up the three layers.

 

I cut the 15cm base card from an A4 sheet of heavy white card and added the gold dots border top and bottom using my Foil Press. I love the effects you can get with this machine but don't find it easy to use. Even with no plates in my cutting machine, the foil press stamp almost cuts through the card. But I like the dots and want to try using them again in silver on a dark base card.

I used 1mm foam pads to mount the topper centrally and there we have it. A relatively easy and quick card to make. I may do some more, but with several of my social groups looking unlikely to restart before Christmas, I will not need so many cards this year. (As we live in rural Spain, we do not know the addresses of many of our group members, and some have no postal address and rely on sharing a box on a panel at the end of the street, so unless I see them in person, I am not likely to get a card to them). But I will probably make a few more yet. There is always the next Christmas to use them!

I will now link up with Rudolph Day Challenge# September and see what everyone else has made.

How far is it to Bethlehem? :Rudolph day Challenge#August 2020

Well here we are again at the 25th of the month so it is time to show a Christmas make.

Last month Woodware released their Christmas stamps and although I am trying not to buy too much new these days, one stamp really caught my eye. Apparently everyone else liked it too as it sold out on the first day! So I signed up to be notified when it came back into stock and before long I got my one through the post. It is not a stamp you can do an awful lot with, but I immediately thought of a little stack of DL cards that have been in my stash for at least 15 years! (I know  I brought them with me when I moved out to Spain nearly 12 years ago).

So I dug those out and found I still had a few in pastel shades of cream, blue, green and lilac. So I stamped my image a dozen times, and added  a light dusting of colour all over it, with a yellow area around the star. Then I distressed the edges and rummaged through my snippets box to find matching colours to mat the images.

I used three of each of the base colours from my DL cards, and had no trouble finding three blue and three purple mats. I had some pieces of a jade green which went well with the green cards, but I didn't like yellow mats for the cream cards so I used shades of orange/brown.

Once they were all mounted up I used a little matching colour on the stable scenes, and used a gold pigment pen on all the domed roofs. Finally some gold glitter glue on the star gave them that bit of Christmas sparkle.

Inside I used a sentiment stamp which came with the main image, and a small stable digistamp from my library, with a simple greeting on the other side. 

So now I have another set of 12 cards to add to my stash, three each of these four colourways. (The card on the right is pastel green though it looks like another cream one in the picture).

Now I will link them up with Rudolph Day Challenge #August at Scraps of life by Scrappy Mo.

Rudolph Day Challenge #July

My the months are rushing by aren't they? I can't believe it is 25th already, and time to post another Christmas creation for the Rudolph day Challenge.

I am trying not to buy so many new craft items now, as I am not making so many cards, but I did indulge myself recently and decided to use my new purchases for this month's cards.

The background is from an Hunkadory Christmas pack from a few years ago.

The arch is a Heartfelt die - Starry Night, with its centre section cut away.

The hanging part is a Memory box die - Nativity drop, cut twice to give the contrasting insert.

The sentiment, I think, is a Britannia die.

I was pleased with the way it turned out. The gold mirri-card is a cheap one from a local 'todo' shop but it cut very well, and I made my own 15cm white card base.

While my Big-shot and the dies were out, I cut three more sets, so I have four cards to add to my stash.

So I'll pop over to Scraps of life at Scrappy Mo's and link this up to the Rudolph Day Challenge for July.

Rudolph Day Challenge#June 2020

I always feel bad when it comes round to 25 of the month and I realise that I haven't posted any cards since the previous Rudolph Day. The trouble is that, with the current postal delays, I am making my birthday cards to post about a month ahead of the date, in the hope that they will arrive on time, (some do and some don't. So I can't write about them on here until the birthdays have passed, and by then I have almost forgotten about them. But at least this challenge is always completed on time and can be shared right away.

There is no 'batch bake' this time, just a single card but I do have two more cut out ready to be coloured and assembled.

The stamps used are Pink Ink and I do like her quirky designs. There are three separate penguin stamps, so I had to do some stamping and masking to make this trio.

I coloured them with copic markers and cut them out.

Using my Misti stamping platform to keep the placing right I stamped my group six times - three for the background and three for the toppers.

I dusted the background with Memento inks in Summer sky and Lulu lavender, and did an extra few scraps to print the sentiment on.

Then I made a very basic error which I am sure you can all see - I ran it through my Bigshot in my snowfall embossing folder the wrong way round so my snow is debossed instead of embossed. I decided to run with it anyway.

I carefully lined up my cut image with the printed one, and glued it in place, so the extra 'swirls' that were too fine to cut out, would show. And mounted the whole thing onto a white base card.

A little glitter glue and a few peel-off snowflakes completed it. 

Now I must get on with finishing the other two, but first I will pop over to Scraps of Life with Scrappy Mo, to link up with the June Rudolph day Challenge.

Lots of Christmas stamps and dies are appearing online this week (well we are exactly halfway to next Christmas!), so if you have been tempted by any of them, do join us and show off what you have made.

Batch Baking again for Rudolph Day #May

Although I have 30-40 Christmas cards in my stash, that is well short of what I would like by this time of the year, so once again I decided to make a run using similar images.

I chose another LOTV digi stamp from my library. It is very simple and I felt it would spoil it to add too much colour, so I just coloured the little robins, ran a grey/brown pen over the tree, and added some glitter glue for a bit of sparkle. 

For my trial run (I usually make just one before deciding whether to do a whole batch), I found a Gina Marie die cut frame, trimmed the image to fit it, and then rummaged through my Christmas offcuts for a piece of backing paper. I don't often choose to work with grey, but I liked it with this image so I cut and mounted a piece to cover a 15cm square, added the topper and then sorted through my borders and sentiments for something that would show up against this background. I eventually settled on a white peel-off, decorative sentiment.

Happy with the result I filled a couple of sheets of good white paper with the same image, varying its size to fit where necessary. Next I found die cut frames to fit each one, and added the same colours as before, using alcohol ink pens.

It was a challenge to find enough grey papers and I was short for the last couple of cards, but I found a sheet of black with tiny gold flecks in it so I used that with cream base cards for those two.

I realised that some of the smaller framed images would fit on a 13.5 cm base card, which is my preferred size for posting internationally, and I had plenty in my stash, so I used them where I could.

I didn't have a lot of plain grey snippets to chose from for the frames, so I did some in white for the darker backgrounds, and some in glitter and mirri card. For the images on the white frames, I distressed the edges with Memento London fog, so they would stand out more.

Once they were all mounted on a card, I went though my motley assortment of embellishments and added a sentiment and something extra to each one. I even added a little red to two of them.

In the end I had seven smaller cards, seven larger white ones, and two larger cream ones, so sixteen cards to make a good addition to m stash.

Now I am off to add them to the May Rudolph Day Challenge at Scraps of life by Scrappy Mo. You don't need to 'batch bake' to join in. If you have made just one Christmas card recently, come on over and join in the challenge. You have until the end of the month to post your card.

Rudolph Day Challenge; April 2020

I often turn to my Silhouette cameo for card making these days as my hands are not as nimble as they were, but this month I decided I wanted to do some colouring so I downloaded some cute images from LOTV.

I printed each one out well-spaced on white paper and used my alcohol markers to colour them.

Then I raided my folders of dies, and my boxes of off-cuts, and found different ways of using each image. These are the three images I chose.

I somehow ended up with three of the top image and two of each of the others. They were all mounted differently so I have a group of seven unique cards all ready to go.

I used some peel-off and printed sentiments, and stamped and embossed others, and each card has some glitter glue or other sparkle on them.

I enjoyed doing the colouring, and am pleased with how they turned out.

I will now link these up with Rudolph Day Challenge #April,  

Pixies Snippets Playground #Challenge 376, and

Happy Little Stampers Christmas Challenge; Festive animals

Layered Mandala

While Spain is in lock-down, I am making the most of my time, putting my new Silhouette Cameo 4 through its paces.
Yesterday I made this layered mandala using a cutting file by the designer Olga of Clean Cut Creative. (It can be found on fontbundles.net if anyone is interested).

It comes as seven layers all grouped together, so I resized the group to fit an 8" shadow box I had in my stash, and then un-grouped it.

I went through my stash of plain card and found seven pieces of toning colour sranging from a dark burgundy to a pale peachy-pink.

I cut one layer from each sheet and carefully stacked them with 1mm foam tabs, making sure the pattern was layered correctly each time.

I put it into my deep frame, and to ensure it sat securely I added three layers of bubble wrap behind it to fill the gap, and then fitted the back panel so now it is ready to hang.

It was quite tricky to cut and some layers had to be cut twice. It would seem that my autoblade has failed, despite only being used a few times, so I reverted to an older style of blade fitted into a converter holder supplied with the machine, and that worked fine.

Rudolph Day Challenge # March 2020

If you glance back at my previous post you will see I have been putting my new Silhouette Cameo 4 machine through its paces so I decided to keep with it for my Christmas cards this month. I bought a few cutting files from svgcuts.com and this was the perfect opportunity to try them out.

This is the one I made. It is a box card which folds flat to go in an envelope.

The layers can all be cut from one sheet of 12" x 12" card, and I used some from a pack I bought off Amazon a while ago. The fascia was run through a wood-effect embossing folding to add some texture, and I raided my snippets boxes for oddments of green and red card to cut the wreath. You can see how the layers fit together here.

There was a file to make an arched frame for the back which I stamped with a holly background stamp, and an inner piece which I edged with the same ink pad - Archival fern green, and stamped with a simple sentiment by Stampin' up, leaving just enough space to write on.

To finish with, I added some glitter glue sparkle to the roof edges to represent frost or snow, and red perfect pearls for berries on the wreath.

The files also included one for an envelope which I made as the folded card did not fit in any of my standard size ones.

The card folds very flat and should not be any problem to post.

This is a cute little church so yesterday I cut out three more which are now waiting to be made up.

And while the machine was set up I also cut two sets for this simple card. (Files also purchased from svgcuts.com, probably a couple of years ago). This was a good way to use up some white and green snippets and my only addition was some very pale colour added to the dove's tail and wings. The original card was completely round which wasn't very practical so I decided to trim across the lower part so it would stand. And this one will fit into a standard envelope so  no need to make special ones.

With the likely-hood of me being able to post any birthday cards for a while being almost zero, I am concentrating on Christmas while in lock-down here, so my stash should be building up nicely.

I am going to link up now with Rudolph Day Challenge#March, and Pixie's Snippets Playground, and make a start on next month's entry!

Rudolph Day Challenge #February

Here I am with my cards all made and ready and I nearly forgot to write a post about them. I don't seem to get a reminder of your post in my emails any more Mo.

Anyway, I am an avid user of copic markers for colouring stamped images, and my main reason for choosing them is because they have a soft brush tip. I have had a full set for several years but sadly some have now dried out so last week I replaced some colours with the newest Spectrum Noir alcohol markers which also have a soft brush tip. I am quite pleased with them. They are lovely to use but the colour on the caps bears little resemblance to the colour of the ink, nor do the colour tests images on their web site. That said, I was keen to try them out so I went to my digi stamp collection and chose two small images by Inger Harding. When I first got into digi-stamping I bought a lot of random examples, many of which have never been used, and this is two of them.

I printed each one off twice, and also printed off a mask of them onto eclipse paper so I could cover them and dust some DI tumbled glass onto the background. I then coloured each in two colourways and cut them out.

I mounted them onto some pre-cut scalloped-edge cards embossed with small dots, which I bought when a local craft shop closed down.

The frame is one I bought as a cutting file from the silhouette store and cut on my Cameo machine from holographic silver vinyl.

The frame around the 'blue boy' has a couple of bad cut pieces which I deliberately placed in the lower left corner and then I made a stamped sentiment to cover them. I cut it out using a small hexagon label die from a Bright Rosa set, and added a little blue ink around the edges. It seemed to finish the card off well so I did the same for the other three cards, so now another set of four are ready to add to my stash for this year.

So now I will link them to the February Rudolph Day Challenge at Scraps of Life by Scrappy Mo. Come and join in the fun and start to build up your stash too. By next December you will be glad you did!

Rudolph Day Challenge; January 2020

Here we go again folks. If you need a push to help you prepare some Christmas cards in advance, then why not join us in this challenge and make at least one card every Rudolph Day (25th of each month).

As is usual for me, my first post of the year is a set of cards made from images, backgrounds and other elements salvaged from the cards I received this year. If I don't do it straight away, then I don't do it, so here are my makes for this time. 

There are two sets of four cards; four featuring Mary with baby Jesus, and four random ones.

I used some precut 13.5cm cards with envelopes that I always keep in my stash as I find it a very good size to work with, except for the green one which I cut from an A4 sheet of card and embossed all over with a vine EF, but the embossing doesn't show in my photo.

I designed these cards using a variety of dies - too many to name, but if you want to know what any of them are, please ask. I also used off-cuts of mirri -card and glitter card, and other oddments from my stash.

I always try to make my recycled cards look as different as possible from the originals, and I think I managed to achieve that this time.

So that is a good start to my new year's collection. I'll just link it up to the Rudolph Day Challenge on ScrappyMo's blog, and hopefully I will see some of you over there.