Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Snowflake tag

This has been floating around in my holiday boxes for two or three years, and I finally sent it off to a new home this year, because I sent everybody else on my little list a handmade card, and I was one short. I'm not sure what year that was exactly, but I got to experimenting with different colors of blue and different snowflake stamps - including the one that says "happy holidays" - and this was the result. I really like it and I've always intended to make more like it.
It's not exactly perfect but I am not a perfectionist, anyway.

December SSS kit

This is a card I made with the paper and stickers from the December card kit (which is apparently not sold out yet as I write this on 12/23):
I keep thinking of ways I could have improved it, but it went to a child, and he's not likely to be picky about it, so I need to just let it go!

Under the cut are some cards I did not make - these are some cards from Simon Says Stamp's website, and I'm putting them here because I imagine they will disappear from the website at some point in the future and I want to be sure I can find them again when I'm ready to make cards for next year. (I only got around to making a couple of cards from the kit, so I've got lots of stuff left.)

(Another adorable idea done with a stamp set I have is this geometric thing, done by one of the ladies below. That one would work all year round, I think.)

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Simon Says Stamp December card kit

This is the only finished card I've made with the Simon Says Stamp card kit yet, but I think it's cute and really I like the pieces that are in this kit. This is going to my nephew along with his gift:
(I'm not entirely satisfied with the way I did the sequins, but eh.)

I saved the picture from the link, & here that is:

Here's most of the contents of my kit - stamps, stickers, sequins (in two colors), cardstock, and a little VersaMark pad. It appears to be exactly the same as above. The red patterned paper you can see is part of a 6x6" Pinkfresh packet that coordinates with the stickers.
There was also an idea sheet which you can see a bit of at the top left, and I think the only other thing was some embossing powder. (It's "rainbow fine embossing glitter," it says here, which is certainly not anything I already had, but I haven't tried it out yet. - Which, hmm, is this stuff, I guess, so it is embossing powder and not just glitter. I thought so, but I wasn't quite sure from that first description.)

Here's more of the paper:
You can see that the top one was what I used for the card above. There are a couple of different ones like the bottom one, with little drawings that go across the page.

I'm showing you the close-up of the stamp set for a particular reason:
...and the reason is that I adore that "happy holidays" script stamp, I've been using that stamp on everything. I like a lot of the other ones, too, and I think I'll eventually use a lot of these, but that one is the early favorite. (The all-caps "merry christmas" is also adorable, but I send cards to a number of people who don't explicitly celebrate Christmas, so it's good to have religion-neutral stamps.)

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Forest cards

So here are 11 cards with basically the same design, yet you can see that nothing is exactly alike.
I believe the first one above (top left) is the one I made originally as a test piece, and I showed a picture of it previously. I had some pre-cut cards from SU in Old Olive, so I just cut my "sample" out and mounted it on the Old Olive, which is one of the colors I used for the trees anyway so it matched great. The rest of them are true one-layer cards.

Honestly, the only one where I have any serious critique on the forest part is the top center one above, where the trees are a bit scattered and go much further up on the card. But even that one looks fine. The others all look great, I think (both above and below). You can tell the ones I did together - I just stamped all the way across the bottom of the cardstock and then cut it in two afterwards. You can kind of see my progress as I did more of the tree stamping - I'm not sure if the one at the bottom right below is actually the last one I did, but it seems the most "realistic"-looking in terms of the way the trees fade into the background.

I also experimented around with various borders on the "jingle" ones below. I do like the one with the white border all the way around but again, I think they all look fine, with and without.
The only thing that really bothered me about leaving off the santa-and-sleigh stamp from the original was that I didn't feel like "jingle all the way" made much sense without it. I could have gone and gotten the other Ellen Hutson stamp set that had that stamp, but instead I went looking for a "jingle bell" stamp - that is, one with a picture of a bell. I wanted one I could put it on the inside of the card, so at least there was a follow-through with the saying. (Some people that get the card may not even notice, but at least *I* am happy, that way.) I ended up getting this one from Paper Source, and I stamped it on the inside in Real Red and it looks cute.

(And then, naturally, I ended up buying two boxes of cards and a calendar from Paper Source while I was at it. That place is dangerous.)

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Card kits & stamp pads

Note first that I've started using the "large" type size, which looks pretty big on the editing screen, but not excessively big on the blog (different font). I don't know if everybody else is seeing what I'm seeing, though. If anybody thinks it's annoying feel free to chime in in the comments. I know at least a few people are reading my entries!

I ordered the Simon Says Stamps December card kit on a whim because it looks like it has really useful stuff in it. I generally don't do subscription card kits because I found that I just didn't use them enough. (I still have pie-shaped boxes from last year hanging around - those were in a Paper Pumpkin kit and they're adorable but I just didn't really have any particular use for them. If I remember next year maybe I'll put candy in them and give them out to co-workers or something. Last year there were candy bags the month before that and I did use every one of those.)

Here's the stamp set that's in the SSS kit:
It looked like it had things I'd actually want use in it. Plus there are stickers and papers and sequins and such.

I have more new stamp pads: I ordered from Inspiration Emporium on the last day before the class coupon codes expired - they had the spring Distress colors marked down to $10 & change for the set of three, which seemed like a good deal. And I also added "Seedless Preserves" to the order, because one thing I found out from swatching all my stamp pads was that I don't have many purples. I also did a small Stampin' Up order and replaced my contaminated Real Red pad (which was an old-style one anyway) and also got an Old Olive one, because all I had was a Spot (mini) and I seem to end up using it a lot. And I also threw in some washi tape because it was on sale and I'm (newly-again) obsessed with washi tape lately.

(That still leaves the old-and-glitter-contaminated Cherry Cobbler pad - darker red - but I haven't wanted to use it so far this year, so I'll save replacing that til later. I just wish I remembered what I was thinking when I got glitter all over both my holiday-red stamp pads!)