Season's Greetings!
Not only has the hectic holiday season been in full swing, so has flu season. I've been battling with my sinuses for the past two weeks but the gifts are out, the cards arriving, and the treats made.
I wanted to share our Christmas card for this year (Sorry for the poor lighting.):
The base is
Crumb Cake card stock and the mat was a piece of
Chocolate Chip embossed using the
Northern Flurry Textured Embossing Folder Die (Mouthful, isn't it?). I misted on silver and gold that you don't often see right away until you tilt and move the card face around in the light. We loved the subtle Wow! factor.
The images and sentiment were from the
Snow Swirled stamp set and embossed in silver and gold using my beloved
Versamark watermark ink pad. Inside, I used
Chocolate Chip ink to stamp sentiments from the
Many Merry Messages stamp set. I like doing slight variations of a card design to explore and because many cards go to people in similar places.
They were definitely handmade and I loved being able to try different products and while I layered new techniques, the card was only two physical pieces. I learned my lesson last year and made sure I had found a nice stamped sentiment for the inside of the card. I hated thinking of fluff words to fill some awkward space inside last time. Oh! That reminds me of the biggest difference between last year's and this year's cards: Another half! I had done a postcard-like card last year but was able to ween down the number of recipients and make full cards this year.
I go a little extensive and nuts planning out the stamp set, color scheme, and layout of my cards each year. I really involved my significant other and bless his heart, he did come up with ideas (that I ran with) and had a good chuckle over watching me running around like a madwoman in the process. It seems that I trend towards using snowflakes and non-traditional colors. So far, it's been neutrals with metallic-sparkly accents. I love the embossing and mists, all of the shine without the mess of glitter. Did I mention that I cranked out more than 50 of these suckers in a day and a half? Not even working all that hard. That alone is enough to make me love the design.
Speaking of design and inspiration, I also browsed and saved tons of ideas from the Stampin' Connection. It's a forum that's exclusively for Stampin' Up! demonstrators and I love it. I'm in the galleries 98% of the time but it just has so many ideas to go through!
Another amazing perk of being a demonstrator? The fact that I've already had my complementary preview copy of the Occasions Mini and Sale-a-bration catalogs for next year. Not only do I get to see what's coming in the next month, but I'm able to earn and order goodies from there months ahead of time! It gives us all the chance to explore, learn, and make fun crafts to share with all of you!
While I'm still working on preparing samples ahead of time, I can say that with some early Christmas money from my folks (Thanks, Mom & Dad!), I was able to order some of those items a little and will get them in next week to play with as a gift to myself! I cannot wait to show you sneak peeks.
That's all from me for now,
