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.

Rudolph day Challenge 2021# January

Well it has been a strange year, and I didn't get around to entering the extra challenge in December for anyone who had posted every month, although I did qualify. But I am going to try to do it again this year so here is my first card of 2021.

I have cased a card made by Liz Smith. I can't give you a link as it was on a closed group which I am a member of. Her's was done using a robin image.

This uses a metal stencil from Sweet Poppy stencils. I am not very clever with stencils but I was advised to try some  Sweet Poppy brushes, (almost identical to  much cheaper make-up brushes available from Amazon), and they did make a huge difference.

I needed to cut a circle frame the exact size of the stencil first to stamp my image in - reindeer and trees by Chocolate Baroque - and then a mask for the image and also the moon, while I dusted DI over the entire stencil.

I wasn't happy with the stamped image so I added some extra colour using a water brush and DI ink.

I stencilled two little trees in the bottom corner to hide a smudge of ink!

The sentiment is from a set by Hero Arts, stamped with Distress Oxide evergreen bough, and I added two tiny stencilled snow flakes in the same colour. I added a little glitter glue to the snowflakes and trees and around the deer's feet.

It was a bit of a fuss to do, but I think I'll be trying it again with a different, and perhaps a bit smaller, image.

So I'll link this up with the Rudolph Day Challenge over at Scraps of Life with Scrappy Mo. I hope it is the start of a good year of Christmas card making.

As the stencil was new at the end of last year, and inked for the first time, I am also linking this to the NEBUS Challenge. (Never Before Used)

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.