Category Archives: Christmas

Shimmering snowscape

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Vellum is a versatile craft product. You can use it to see through or into something, such as for “snow globe” or “shaker” cards. Vellum also can become a screen for something behind it, softening the impact of a bold pattern or giving a satin finish to shiny silver cardstock, such as with this card.

I love the shine and pattern of this silver cardstock and wanted to pair it with the beautiful stamped image, but stamping onto the cardstock didn’t allow the image to stand out enough. Vellum to the rescue! It cuts down on the high shine of the cardstock and showcases the image. To adhere the vellum without the adhesive being visible, I applied adhesive behind the image and where I placed my sentiment.

To add more depth, I layered the vellum and silver cardstock onto glittered, textured and patterned papers, added rhinestones and used dimensional adhesive on my sentiment piece.

Merry Christmas!

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Colorful cheer

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I like to use retro and nontraditional colors on my holiday cards (as evidenced by my use of neon this year). Using glitter cardstock in colorful combinations really catches the eye, too.

For the past three years, I’ve turned to a colorful, striped holiday cardstock (seen in the first card) again and again. That paper first got me to break away from cards in traditional Christmas colors and craft cheerful, bright creations.

I may have gone a little overboard with these, and they may not be to everyone’s tastes, but they’re fun!

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Into the snow

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With a blizzard turning my region of the country into a winter wonderland, this card seems appropriate.

I created the hills of snow with layers of vellum, which softens the black-and-white snowflake pattern behind them. Sticking washi tape over the raised layers did not come easily, though. It had to be glued on to keep it from popping up.

After a little glue, a little drawing, a little bling and a lot of vellum, my snowscape was complete, and now the blizzard outside seems kinda pretty (as long as I don’t have to go out in it).

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Champagne wishes

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One large stamp can bring a card together quickly. In my 60-card project for the holidays, easy-to-assemble designs improved productivity.

The black cardstock on this card offsets the sparkle and shine of the metallic and pearlescent papers, glittery ribbon and platinum snowflake.

I have several metallic inks, and my experience has been that they tend to smear easily, so allow extra drying time and care. (I do not have any StazOn metallic inks, and I wonder if this is an issue with those. The method of those ink pads and the price have kept me from trying them out.)

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Hello, snowmen

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I tracked down a Hero Arts Decorate It! stamp set at Target for its cute penguin, but the penguin came with friends: two cute snowmen. Using this set has helped to add variety to the 60 cards I’ve made for the holidays this year. While I duplicated several designs to get to 60 cards, some are unique, such as these. These designs have numerous steps, including gluing 40 little letters. What would that card be without them, though?

These cards also involve a bit of precision cutting with a die-cut machine, in this case, the Slice. With the first card, though, an oval punch that works anywhere on the paper also could be used.

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Clear night

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Every year, my craft space is dusted with glitter as I make holiday cards. I’m all about the shiny materials. If there’s bling, it sings. Glitter, rhinestones, foiled cardstock, transparencies … I go all out.

For this card, I used an acetate thicker than a regular transparency. It doesn’t have the gritty surface found on ink-jet transparencies. You typically can find 12-by-12-inch pieces of acetate at craft stores. To stamp on it, you’ll need either StazOn or Brilliance ink. I used Brilliance white ink here. This ink takes much longer to dry. I let it sit over night.

A downside to using acetate is static cling. Unfortunately, this card is a dust magnet (grab your microfiber cloth), but the effect is too pretty not to create it.

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Big Red

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Sometimes, you just need to die-cut a lobster.

When I started this blog in February, my first post was “Lobster of love.” I made a Valentine’s Day card featuring a red glittered lobster next to the sentiment “I’m HOT for you.” My husband was the lucky recipient.

With 24 design cards for the Making Memories Slice in my possession, I can have a die-cut of just about anything. Pirate? Aye, mateys. Clown face? A bit creepy, but sure. Lobster? I have two: with legs and without.

So when it came time to make holiday cards this year, I crafted one featuring “Santa Claws.” Lobsters have claws … Santa Claus … get it? I’m not the first person who came up with the pun. Search for “Santa Claws lobster” on Google to see many versions of Kris Krustacean (see what I did there?).

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House of cards

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In a test of my sanity, I decided to make 60 holiday cards this year. My self-imposed deadline is today. When I started last month, I was excited. I had a lot of ideas in mind that I planned to duplicate. As this month began, things were looking dire. I didn’t have even a third of the project complete, and I’d learned that my tolerance for duplication maxed out at six cards. Some cards I found too involved to duplicate, so some family and friends will receive one-of-a-kind creations this year. My creativity still was flowing, though, and with lots of hot chai-tea latte, hours of listening to music on Pandora and hours of watching/listening to the Investigation Discovery channel (I’m an I.D. addict) with a few “Project Runway All Stars” episodes thrown in (ya know, for variety), I made my deadline! Woohoo!

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One-two punch

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I don’t own many punches because my craft area is small and, therefore, my storage space is restricted. I managed to make room for a new punch that I can’t live without, despite its large size: a two-in-one punch of striped half-circles by EK Tools. It offers two variations of the same design, which has an Art Deco look that I love. The best part: punching the pattern twice gives me a 5-inch length, the perfect size for my square cards.

After some practice (I found that this design requires the paper to be several inches long, for stability while punching), I created two different cards using the punch in different ways.

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