Stampin' Up cards

Holiday cards past, from Stampin' Up class in maybe 2011 or so! I think maybe these were all from the same year - I know we did a thing where you made like 20 cards with four or five different designs.

This one was made with one very large stamp, and an improvised giant stamp pad made from baby wipes

Glittered trees - this was supposed to have green ribbon, but I kept forgetting to put it on and I finally decided I liked it fine without it - I believe the stamp is from the "Lovely As A Tree" set. (I am just a CAS girl at heart. Why do you need the ribbon here, that's my thought!)

Embossed vellum (this one does need the ribbon, I admit). We made these in several colors and they were all really pretty.

Twinkle lights with some kind of shard glitter (I remember these being a big pain to make, because putting all the little pieces together was frustrating.)

tiny tree!

Card not sent!

Here's my super-simple card idea from last year that I didn't actually send:

The idea was that it was deliberately wonky rather than perfectly round, but I didn't have it put together right here, I think. (Added: what I mean is that the circle-within a circle is offset - two perfectly-round circles made with dies, but deliberately not perfectly centered within one another - and then I think I also offset the embossing to match.) I do think this is cute, but by the time I decided that, it was too close to Christmas to bother, and instead I just sent (non-handmade) New Year's cards. So I may resurrect this idea again later. (This was all stuff I had. I think the green paper was something from Paper Source. The stamp is from a Simon Says Stamp kit - originally I said "a year or two ago" but actually it was 2015, if you follow the link! The cute dotted paper was from a pad I had bought at some point, not from that same kit.)

(I'm taking the onlinecardclasses.com class - again - so hopefully I'll have something to show later on! I am late getting started, though.)

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.)

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.)

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.)

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!)