Non-traditional Christmas colors

This week's Off the Wall Craftiness Challenge (OTCW30) uses the colors of brown, white and green (you can see the inspiration photo below). I used them to make a Christmas card in somewhat non-traditional colors. The card is also a CASE of this week's Queen for the Day at SCS.

The stamps are really old ones -- the tree is from SU and the other a cheapy from Hobby Lobby. I used winter wonderland (sparkly white) EP. I love how it shows up on dark colors, and I use it a lot instead of white ink (which I have no luck with). The lace is an adhesive paper lace from K & Co. and the snowflake is actually a button.

Early holiday card

To me, it's really WAY too early to start thinking about Christmas (even though I end up doing a bunch of holiday-themed writing assignments about now every year). However, I kind of got in a Christmas groove for VSN over the weekend at SCS. I used the current CPS sketch (CPS 189) as the layout for one of my VSN cards.

I went with a silver and navy color scheme. Angels stamp is Stampabilities, and the stars are an SU background stamp. I used a detail silver EP, though I got a little more stray dots than I like. The ribbon is a quick way to work in a sentiment.

In a way, this echoes one of the first Christmas cards I made after I started stamping. I used the angel stamp and the star background stamp for it, and there was blue involved. I think I stamped the angels in navy blue, matted on navy and then matted with white stamped with navy stars. (Back then, I did production style Christmas cards, but I find that boring and make everyone different now.)

In honor of fall

It's finally starting to feel like fall, my favorite season of the year. A couple of different challenges inspired me to make a fall-type card.

This week's inspiration colors for Off the Wall Craftiness (OTWC28) were goldish yellow, white and brown. (See the inspiration photo at right below.) And this month's SmArt Word challenge is "brown" so those colors immediately made me think of doing fall leaves.

I used this week's CPS sketch (CPS188) for the layout, which made me want to use a quote in the center. I chose this one from SmArt Works -- it's actually part of a birthday set, but "revel in the gift of time" seems so appropriate to fall to me. The sentiment is stamped in chestnut roan chalk ink

I stamped the oak leaf (SU) in cadmium yellow chalk ink repeatedly on white paper, then cut the curves. I decided to distress the edges, both to add texture and because hand-cut curves look, well, uneven.

I stamped another oak leaf in the chestnut ink, colored it with pencils and added gold microbeads to the acorn. It's cut out and popped up (see detail photo).

Piercing to the rescue

This week's Off the Wall Craftiness (OTWC27) challenge colors are light blue, and medium and light brown/tan. Awesome colors -- seen in the inspiration photo below.

I used the colors in a card I CASEd for the Queen for the Day challenge at SCS. The stamp is by Hero Arts -- isn't she cute? I got the ribbons ages ago in a fiber swap, and actually was able to find them right away when I wanted them. (Can't tell you how unusual that is.) I had finished the card and taken photos of it, but I kept thinking that it looked unfinished. I decided to add the piercing around two panels. Piercing to the rescue, once again. It's a great way to finish a piece, especially when layers aren't matted. Just my 2-cent advice for the day.