Deck the halls

Another Christmascard in the works. This time I have used a very sweet image from Penny Black. I haven't used them in a very long time so I thought they deserved some ink :)

I have coloured the most with promarkers and used oilpencils and alcohol for the "fur". The papers are a great mix of all sorts of papers I had in my stash. I have used my nesties, qk holly leaves and distress ink.

Challenges for this card are:


ABC Chistmas - any of the old challenges ( I chose H holly + sketch from 7:th april)
Fun with shapes and more - scalloped
Penny Black - the holly and the ivy
Stampin' for the weekend - Christmas

Winter wishes for a happy birthday

The other day I got an e-mail invitation to be a guest designer at the papertake weekly challenge blog. I was very honored and will participate in four challenges. This is my first one and the theme this week is Christmas birthdays. I hope you will join us too.

I've been having my Greeting farm Anya stamp for months now and never gotton around to using it. When I found out the theme of the challenge this stamp was directly what I thought of. I wanted to give the card a frosty feel (any excuse to use glitter which was perfect for this week's theme at the alphabetchallenge) and started looking through my Christmas papers stash. I couldn't believe it when I came across this set I've gotten together with an english magazine. It had a winter birthday theme. So perfect! It was a joy to colout as I love bold colours. I was actually almost out of both the fushia and blue paper so I had to improvise. I used whichever scraps I had and tried different solutions. So the layout is purely accidental. I scrambled with what I had :)

The image is coloured with promarkers and I stamped some snowflakes on the right side with distress inks. The glitter is stickles glitterglue. Pretty basic, but a great result for a birthday card.

Reindeer greetings

Wow, I'm really on a roll here. I don't think I've made this many cards for at least a year if not more. One or two a day? Whoa, lol. Maybe I'll get it all done on time without getting totally sick. Keep your fingers crossed...

I have used one of the reindeers from stämpelgården again. I really like this stamp. Because he is mostly covered you can match the colours on him to any patterned paper you might have. I sometimes find it hard to colourmatch when there are animals because they often need to be brown and that ruins the whole impression.

Most of the papers I have used are from imaginisce although I used some small pieces from other companies too. I used a sketch, but removed one of the panels as it got way too cluttered for my taste. I think many of the papers are too covered, so I'm not sure how I feel about this card. I must say I was much happier with it when I finished it. Right now it seems a little bit iffy to me. Maybe it's just because I want to send a superwonderful card to my cousin and knock his socks off, lol.

The challenges I've used are:

Cooking it up with katie - red, layers and Christmas
My time to craft - reindeer greetings
Peartree designs - Christmas
Pink elephant - winter wonderland
Promarker  - anything goes
Sketch saturday - sketch (I turned it upside down)
Stamptacular - winter scene
Stamp with fun - X-mas

French horn Christmas wishes

I'm stuggling on to get all my Christmascads ready on time and make my first card as guest designer for papertake weekly and getting the secret bloghop ready for tomorrow....I'm sure you have more things to do, but this is quite enough for me especially since I'm also fighting a cold on top of everything else.

Today's card is one I'm especially proud of. I made it for a friend that plays the french horn in a symphony orchestra. We just recently started talking again after finding eachother on facebook after 10 years. I've had this little charm for years and when I decided to send my friend a Christmascard I knew I had to include the charm.

Finding the right stamp wasn't that hard as I remembered some of the house-mouse stamps had instruments in them. I thought this one was perfect!

The image is coloured using my promarkers and because I'm not used to using dark colours I nearly gave up colouring it. I actually started on a new one using a different colouring medium, but got so BORED having to colour the same image twice, lol. So I got back and worked some more on the original one. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Not my best work, but still something I can be proud of. Except the image that took ages to colour I had huuuge issues with the bow (or the other way around ;) I think it took me an hour to get it right, because I also wanted to include the charm in some nice way. I started with a wider bow, but it got too big and tieing it around the green one was too bulky - it was a nightmare as I was so close to finishing the card. In the end this is how I made it and I think it looks so good. Just don't ask me how much glue I used or how many pieces the bow is made of, lol.

The papers I have used are all from Basic Grey's Wisteria line. The gold music panel is a stamp that I embossed with gold powder. The edges are inked with a gold pen. And that's it :)


I used a couple of challenges while making this card:

All sorts - last minute Christmas
Creative card crew - anything goes
Creative inspirations - anything Christmas
Friday sketchers - sketch
I love promarkers - Christmas carol/song
Simon says stamp and show - A holiday greeting