One more time

I'm not going to make any more predictions about whether this blog is going to become active, because I've been-there-done-that and it just doesn't seem to be happening. I did enjoy looking at Stretch Your Stamps 2, back over a year ago, but did I actually make anything? no. But I'm trying again, with another class - which is the holiday class for this year. Holiday cards are the thing that I am most reliable about doing. (Which is to say, I usually do some every year. I don't reliably produce a lot of them.) This year I've ordered some supplies and paid for this class and I'd better manage to produce something, darnit.

(I've basically learned not to say I MUST do something because that's usually the most reliable way to ensure that I don't. So I fudge.)

If you're interested in this class, it starts today, as it happens, and ends right before Thanksgiving. (But you can always come in late, or even come in after the "live" part of the class is over. Really the only live part is the interaction on the forums, anyway, and even that gets archived.)

So in any case, in honor of all that, here are a couple of holiday cards that I've done in past years

This card uses a background I did with the MDS2 software, but I have no clear idea now how I did this exactly, except that it involved digitally "punching" the hex shape out of an existing pattern and tiling it to make the repeats. I think I did that part by hand, more or less - that is, I cut-and-pasted the hexagon shape and dragged it around where I wanted it one hex at a time. That's as best I recall, anyway. And the big snowflake is an actual felt snowflake sitting on top of the printed piece, which I had embellished with glitter-glue. I bought a bunch of these snowflakes... oh, a number of years ago, four or five years ago, from a clearance sale from Stampin' Up, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them, but I have used them and used them and I'm still not out of them. There must have been 2 dozen or more in the package, I don't remember any more.

Putting glitter glue onto something fiddly like these snowflakes is the kind of thing where I almost always say "oh, that's too time-consuming" - but it doesn't actually take all that long to add the glitter-glue to these and the results are stunning. (The snowflakes came in two colors, or maybe three - red and blue-gray and maybe white, too. I did used clear glitter-glue on the light-colored ones and then red on the red, as you can see above.)

Aha, yeah, here's a white one and I know there were blue-gray ones so it was three colors. I like the crazy quilt-patterned card above but I really love the simplicity of this one, too. I think I'm a clean-and-simple fan at heart.