Season’s Greetings {Rachelle Anne Miller Creative Studios}

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a sweet little Christmas card to share today, featuring the Christmas Tree image from Rachelle Anne Miller.

I colored up just a portion of the image and made it into a polaroid by using a polaroid frame die from My Favorite Things that I love. I die cut the frame three times from white cardstock and glued them together for a stacked look.

I decided to stamp a sentiment onto the polaroid frame using Blueberry Sky ink from Papertrey Ink. The sentiment is from a stamp set from Inky Wings.

I decided to put my polaroid frame on a blue card base. This blue cardstock is Blueberry Sky from Papertrey Ink, the same color as the stamped sentiment. I used an old snowflake frame die from Memory Box that I diecut from white cardstock.

I cut down my card base to make a 4 bar card. I like the smaller size, but don’t make too many cards this size, so I thought I’d change things up a bit. Once again, I have no graphic to show what Copics I used, but hopefully I’ll have my template remade in a few days.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas {Purple Onion Designs}

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a new Christmas card to share today, featuring some awesome images from Purple Onion Designs.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of penguins and polar bears, and even though their habitats are on opposite sides of the globe, they’ve come together for this card. I mean look at them; that cute cub with a scarf and hat and that penguin sitting on a present with a candy cane in his hand – just too cute to pass up.

The little polar bear’s name is Icicle, and the penguin’s name is Merry, I love that these characters actually have names! I put Merry on a sled, masked everything and stamped the frozen pond horizon behind my cute critters using fadeout ink from Inkon3.

Here’s a bit of a closeup. I swear the bear has some color, even though he looks very one dimensional here. I stamped a sentiment from the Holiday Blurbs II set in blue ink, fussy cut that with a thin white border and popped it up on the front of my card, making it look like the penguin is wishing you a merry Christmas.

Once I finished my coloring, I took the largest of my A2 Stitched Rectangle STAX dies from My Favorite Things to create a nice edge on my scene. I sprinkled on chunky white embossing enamel from Stampendous, heating the panel from the back until the granules melted. I glued my panel straight onto a top folding card base I made out of Papertrey Ink Blueberry Sky cardstock.

I wish you could feel the texture of the embossing powder once it’s melted. It’s raised, and kind of like braille, it’s really cool. The Gina K foam tape adds a little lift to the speech bubble, but doesn’t add too much bulk, I love it.

The Purple Onion Designs holiday sale starts today and lasts till the end of next week. 25 % off rubber stamps is a really good deal, and nothing stamps better than rubber stamps, I love them so much!

I still haven’t redone my template for the Copic graphic I usually share, I’m hoping to have time to do it next week, I know there are people relying on it to choose colors!

Super simple gift tag {Hobbykunst}

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a super simple gift tag to share today. This was so quick to make and can easily be mass produced, if that’s something you’d be interested in doing.

I had a leftover piece from a card I made earlier this year, so the dark blue base and the texture paste snow falling down are elements that were both already there. My initial plan was to make that particular card a regular, landscape A2 sized card, but the design didn’t really work for the format, so I chopped off about 1 1/4″, which was the perfect width for this bear. All I really did for this one was stamp, color and fussy cut the bear from the Bitty Bears stamp set from My Favorite Things before, before using foam tape to pop him up a little bit from the rest. Because the base of this was once part of a card, this gift tag stands up on its own. I haven’t even punched a hole through it, I think might be enough to slip it over the ribbon on a present.

Gift tag time {Mo’s Dream Team}

Hi, everyone! Christmas is less than a month away, and it’s about time to get the gift tags done, so that’s exactly what I have to share today. This one features Got the Wreath, which is one of many favorites of mine from Mo Manning. I’ve colored it a few times in the past, but this is my first gift tag with this one.

I decided to go for a teal and gray color combo today, and white berries on the wreath instead of red ones. I just used a gray colored pencil to trace around the outline of the berries, everything else is noline colored using Copics. I used a stitched tag die from My Favorite Things to create the actual tag.

I diecut a couple of pieces of scraps of patterned paper using the same die. I chose Julbukett from the Fröjdefull Jul collection from Maja Design and Good Cheer from the Christmas Magic collection from Fancy Pants Designs, which happens to be a collection from 2009, I have a lot of patterned paper. I stamped a to/from stamp from Norsk Stempelblad AS using Hawaiian Shores ink from Papertrey Ink straight onto the patterned paper. I made a hole at the top, added an eyelet, some twine and a bell, and my tag was done.

Usually, I have a graphic at the end of my blog post to show the Copics I used, but I accidentally deleted the template file I made to create my swatches, so I have to remake it.

Christmas hugs {Rachelle Anne Miller Creative Studios}

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a quick Christmas card to share today, featuring Santa Boy from Rachelle Anne Miller.

I wanted my cluster with the sentiment to be more to the right than to the left, so I flipped my image in Photoshop to make the boy and the dog look to the right instead of the left, it fit my card better. It’s one of the great advantages of digital stamps.

Once I’d colored in my image, I used my favorite faux stitch rectangle die from My Favorite Things to turn my colored piece into a panel for the front of my card. I added about half a tiny paper doily from Doodlebug Design, and some die cut scraps of Maja Design patterned paper, before adding a green strip with a word (Christmas hug) from Papirdesign using foam tape.

I added another little piece of the green patterned paper from Maja Design towards the bottom of the left hand side and glued on a few snowdrift sprinkles from Little Things from Lucy’s Cards, before adhering everything to a card base I made out of Soft Stone cardstock from Papertrey Ink. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?

I tried to limit the amount of Copics I used on the snow for this one. Only five (plus the blender) isn’t too shabby.

Greetings from the North Pole {Mo’s Dream Team}

Hi, everyone! Time for yet another Christmas card today. This could technically work as a regular winter card, too, and those cards are good to have on hand to send out during those dark winter months to brighten someone’s day.

I used Anyu and Nanook Igloo for my card today. They’re part of the Anyu and Nanook set. I set the opacity to 10 % in Photoshop and printed my image. I love the look of no line coloring, especially when doing snow and ice. I colored in my little image using Copics, and wasn’t too sure at first what I wanted to do with it. I debated my regular cluster with a sentiment in the top right corner, but felt I needed to do something different because I had so much white space below the image.

I used my trusty faux stitch rectangle die from My Favorite Things to turn my colored piece into a panel before stamping the perfect sentiment from Mama Elephant’s Holiday Messages stamp set using Enchanted Evening ink. I wanted to pick up the blue from the little girl’s coat, and this is such a pretty blue. I sprinkled on chunky white embossing powder and heated the panel from the back to create my snowy look, before adhering my panel onto a cardbase I made from After Midnight cardstock from My Favorite Things. I added a few snowflakes that I diecut using an old Marianne Design die that I absolutely love, and my card was finished.

Here you can see the effect of the chunky white embossing enamel. It’s nice and thick and adds a bit of texture to the card, it kind of feels like braille when you touch it, it’s really cool, not to mention quicker than drawing on snowflakes with a white pen, also with the added bonus of it being more random than you’re able to achieve on your own.

No surprise that I used mostly cool tones for this card, except for the skin colors and the ears and tongue of the dog.

Have a magical holiday season! {Purple Onion Designs}

I’ve created another card with the wonderful images from The Sweetest Little Town collection from Purple Onion Designs, illustrated by Stacey Yacula. This time I created a slimline card, albeit not the regular size slimline, if there even is such a thing. This measures 8 1/2″ x 4 3/8″, took hours to color and no less than 45 Copics. Lots of fun, though.

I stamped and masked Woodstock (the fox), the mailbox and Wallace (the penguin) using Extreme Black ink from My Favorite Things, before stamping the bakery background using fadeout ink from Inkon3. I also masked off the left part of that and stamped the Frozen Pond horizon stamp, also in fadeout ink, to tie everything together.

Whenever I have background elements, I pretty much always start with those, and today was no different. I colored in the snow first, both on the roofs and on the ground, before coloring the sky and then the building.

After I’d also colored in the fox, the mailbox and the penguin, I added a sentiment from the Holiday Messages sentiment set, before sprinkling on chunky white embossing enamel from Stampendous and heating the panel from the back until the granules melted. I’m usually careful not to get any embossing enamel on top of my letters, but I went in a second time with more and forgot to remove a granule from one of the letters before heating and melting it. I decided not to do anything else to it, but just glued my panel straight onto a white card base.

Plenty of colors used, but there are a lot of images in this one.

Winter Present gift tag {Mo’s Dream Team}

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a gift tag to share today, featuring Winter Present from Mo Manning. It’s such an easy image to color, and for this one I went with blue. A lot of blue. I’ll let you in on a little secret: the blues were already out on my desk after my last project, making them so convenient to reach for and use.

I colored in my image using Copics and used a stitched tag die from My Favorite Things to turn it into a tag. I die cut another tag from a scrap piece of patterned paper from last year’s Christmas collection from Maja Design and glued the two together, offset a little bit for the patterned paper one to show. I added a tiny bit of a scrap of a doily to the bottom right corner of my colored tag and a white heat embossed sentiment on top using 1 mm foam squares. I punched a hole near the top, added an eyelet and used some Blueberry Twine from Whisker Graphics that I threaded through the hole.

On the back I used a to/from stamp from Norsk Stempelblad AS that I white heat embossed on blue cardstock from Maja Design. I used my cut align tool to make sure I had an even 1/16″ border around the stamped image. I love that tool, it’s the best thing ever.

Lots of blues used for this one. Another one, too, actually, I’ve made myself a B90 that I also used. What can I say, I love those blues!

Delivering a little holiday cheer! {Purple Onion Designs}

Hi, everyone! I’ve got a tri-fold card to share with you today, featuring many of the adorable stamps from The Sweetest Little Town collection from Purple Onion Designs, illustrated by Stacey Yacula. I wanted to create a scene with a couple of the cute critters (Chestnut the bear and Tinsel the squirrel) decorating the tree (Sparkle) and a couple of others (Flannel the racoon and Timothy the hedgehog) meeting to exchange gifts. I stamped the church horizon with fadeout ink, colored in the entire panel with my Copics and used a craft knife to cut everything above the horizon line.

When you open the card, the sky’s still there, but below it are the snow crooners and the snowy fence from a previous collection, stamped again using no line ink. I like using no line ink for the background elements, it makes the focal images really stand out. Open this panel to the right, and there’s lots of room on the inside of the card to write a personal greeting.

I also stamped a sentiment from the new sentiment set between the hedgehog and the raccoon, using Blueberry Sky ink from Papertrey Ink.

In this photo, you can see that there’s another layer of the card behind this panel with the singing critters.

A lot of Copics used for this one, and even 3 out of the 4 different gray families.

Giggling snowman gift tag {Mo’s Dream Team}

Hi, everyone! Not a card today, but a gift tag. I still have lots of gift tags to make for the holiday season, so I really need to get cracking.

This was a very simple one. I colored up Giggling Snowman from Mo Manning, fussy cut him and added him to a diecut circle made from Blue Breeze card stock from My Favorite Things.

I used a stitched circle snowflake die from Memory Box to die cut from white cardstock and glued that on top. I created a hole towards the top and pulled a bit of blue twine through.

On the back I glued a white diecut circle. I stamped a to/from stamp from Norsk Stempelblad AS using Blueberry Sky ink from Papertrey Ink. I also added a few snowflakes die cut from another Memory Box die, and my gift tag was finished.