A festive tag

I don't make many tags these days, in fact I don't make enough tags, and never seem to have any to use at Christmas. Maybe my crafting resolution for 2017 should be to join in some of the lovely tag challenges I keep seeing.

Anyway, today I have made one, and I've also been experimenting with a way to display it, using a little slotted paperweight that I used to use when I was working, to hold a document upright while I was typing something related to it.

I printed the music paper from The Best of La Pashe 2012. This is one of the most useful CDs EVER - even if you aren't a fan of the La Pashe style of artwork, the massive collection of background papers alone is well worth the price of the CD.  I suppose now La Pashe is no longer selling them, it's going to become a collector's item so if you have a copy, take great care of it!

Apart from the music paper and the doiley, which I inked lightly at the edges, everything else came from my snippets box. I die cut the brushed copper metallic card with a Memory Box music die and the sparkly peach glitter card with a magazine freebie die. I was pleased to find eyelets of exactly the right shade of copper in my Cropadile box. Incidentally do those eyelets breed when we're not looking? I've had my Cropadile for years and seem to have used it thousands of times, and yet there seem to be even more eyelets than when I started! The final touch is a scrap of hairy yarn left over from my long ago knitting days.

I am sharing this with

Cuttlebugmania - Music 
Dies R Us - Tags
Pixie's Snippets Playground - week 255
CD Sundays - Sparkle and Shine
Just Us Girls - Metallics
 

Run, run, as fast as you can.....

... you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!

This week it's one layer week at Less is More and the theme is Books/Literature. Now I'm an avid reader, but as soon as anyone says to me "Think of a book title"  my mind goes totally blank. The only book that sprang to mind was "The Satanic Verses" and I absolutely promise you I have no suitable stash to represent that! A glance at my bookshelves didn't help, as we tend to pass fiction on to friends, family or charity shops after reading, so our shelves are full of titles like "Jamie's 30 Minute meals", "The Concise Oxford Dictionary" and "The RHS Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants". All titles I could probably do something with - but it wouldn't turn out to be CAS or one-layer.

Then I looked at the grandchildren's book shelf - yes! The Gingerbread Man (also One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish if you are still "fishing" around for an idea for this challenge. You can thank me later.)

My gingerbread man stamp is a Christmassy one, so he became a Christmas card. I stamped with memento ink and coloured him in with pencils, drawing in a face because there wasn't one on the stamp, then roughly masked him and stamped over and around using a Linda Luckin background stamp and Versamark ink. I gently brushed tiny amounts of  mica pearl powders in gold and green over the stamping to give an "out of focus Christmas tree" effect,  and added some dots of gold glitter glue.

Reindeer at Cardz 4 Guyz

Time for our new challenge at Cardz 4 Guyz, and this week we would like to see cards suitable for a man or boy and featuring Reindeer.

I've made my reindeer by dabbing my fingertip onto an ink pad and pressing it down on the card to make the heads, doodling in the antlers and sticking on googly eyes and  glitter gems for the features, then adding a simple stamped sentiment.   This would make a good wet-weekend project to do with the children or grandchildren.

I am sharing this with
Allsorts Challenge - Feature a Creature 
Craft Your Passion - anything goes
Crafty Creations - Animals 
Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - Coral (orange, RED or pink)
Christmas Card Challenges - Glitter (the noses!)

Silver Squiggle Cat

I've had this squiggle cat stamp just about forever, it's an unmounted stamp of unknown origin. It looks great stamped with an ombre pad, but today I've used it differently, stamped and heat embossed on silver onto turquoise card then mounted on a die cut panel of silver sparkle vinyl. This has a smooth finish so doesn't have the adhesion problems that glitter card has - it's made by Cricut.

I am sharing this with
Show us your pussies - Furrything Goes
CAS on Sunday - Pets  

Dreaming of a White-on-White Christmas

The current challenge at Craft Rocket is White on White. They  are actually allowing a coloured image, but I love the cool crispness of a completely WOW card so that's the route I chose to take.

The embossing folder is one that was a magazine freebie a couple of years ago and has become quite a sensation among crafters - I believe that Craft Stash currently have it in stock if you still haven't got it. The poinsettia, too, is cut with a magazine freebie die, the ivy with a Marianne die and the pine sprig and cones, an old die from my stash that I *think* is a Spellbinders one.

The sentiment is a Tattered Lace die. Incidentally am I the only one to have tried every special adhesive method or delicate dies, like various brands of adhesive sheet, glue pens, dabbing the die cut in a blob of glue on the back of your hand like some of the TV presenters do and so on, and gone back to the old tried and tested "tacky glue on the end of a toothpick" method? Or has everyone else already done it and I've come late to the party?

I am also sharing this with Glitter and Sparkle - Anything Goes
and Jingle Belles - Mele Kalikimaka 

Getting subatomic

I was quite excited when I saw that the latest challenge at The Male Room is Science, because I'm a former scientist myself and still have a love for all things scientific. Even so, I found it quite hard to come up with an idea for a card because I don't really have anything suitable in my stash, apart from steampunky stuff that I wasn't in the mood to play with.

Then I remembered a sheet of NBUS peel offs that have been gathering dust for about 20 years. They are similar to the Spirograph designs I used to love making as a kid, and one of them reminds me very much of the old planetary-model diagrams of atoms.

I added pearls for electrons, orbiting around a nucleus made of a gem that is composed of lots of tiny spheres - like a cluster of protons and neutrons. The sentiment is computer generated. Well, it may not be an accurate quantum mechanical portrayal of an atom but I think it pretty well sums up what we all think of as one!

Poinsettias for Christmas

I've been playing with the poinsettia die that was a freebie on one of the craft magazines last Christmas. I don't think I used it at all last year as by the time I got it, I'd made and posted all my Christmas card. It makes quite a big flower (yes, yes, I know that only the yellow centre is a flower and that the red 'petals' are actually bracts, but this one is made out of card so it can be whatever it wants to be. Got it?) so I kept the rest of the card very simple with a white background and the Memory Box "Happy Christmas" die cut in kraft.

I am sharing this with

Fab 'n' Funky - Get Krafty
Jingle Belles - Mele Kalikimaka (flowers)
Winter Wonderland - Ribbon or lace and/or Christmas Flowers
CRAFT - Winter