Christmas cards galore!

WARNING... PHOTO HEAVY

My Mojo is still waning.... and I need to make some Christmas cards - getting asked at work when am I bringing them in to sell!   So while I was in Spotlight yesterday morning getting some knitting needles to make some little Ugg boots for the upcoming arrival... I spotted a pack of pre-cut dies cuts

So I thought that with some patterned papers  I might get some cards done with out too much effort,

These first two use die cut poinsettias.  I enhanced them with some grey pencils.  The first one was added to some purple patterned paper and used a Kaisercraft  sentiment embossed onto black card and the second one used an embossed panel with the same sentiment.

Loved these three gnomes so added them all together on the one card.  I grounded them with a strip of bronze glitter washi tape.  The panel was embossed in the upper corners and finished with a gnome sentiment.

The next two cards used patterned paper.  One had a little touch of stamping of some pine branches in the corner.

the deer and the Merry Christmas banner are actually silver but it was very hard to get the photo to show this.  Both papers came from a Recollections paper pack

 

And my final card for the day was a commissioned card.... Request was for something for a NZ'er and his Italian partner who live in Spain..... so came up with NZ Pohutakawa branches covered with some snow.... and with a Spanish sentiment. 

Think I got the brief covered.
I am adding this to the Watercooler Wednesday Challenge... it's Tristan's All About Holidays...

Well if you've made it here... thank you for visiting.  Please leave me a comment and let me know if you liked my cards. 

Christmas Tag a la Oz.

Christmas Tag a la Oz.

This weeks challenge at Hero Arts is Holiday Tags. At quite a number of the blogs I like to visit, talented ladies make amazing tags... Jacqueline and Suzanne but to name a couple. I have been amazed by what they do, so thought I'd give tags a go. I went to the office supply store near where I work thinking I might be able to pick up some tags.... but sadly unless I wanted to buy a box of 1,000 for $60 I was out of luck... ( just trying to imagine how many years they would last was mind boggling!!) So stopped into the stamp store on the way home... yes I could get 8 tags for $1.50 - now that made more sense.....
For this tag I decided to try out Linda aka Oz's 4 stamp background technique. Visit her blog here to see the video she did... it's like being in the room with her doing it....I used my new pine bough stamp from HA's together with the sentiment from a Sparkle clear set from last Christmas. As I was trying for a bit of a vintage look ( don't think I quite got it) I dyed some white lace dark brown by putting Rich Cocoa Memento ink over it. I added a fawn flower with a dark green snowflake and a brown pearl to finish it. I am reasonably happy with the result.

Last week I bought the Spellbinders Tags die so over the weekend made a tag or two to put on my presents this year.  I ended up getting an order to do 10 of the little white and blue tags.  I used a snowflake stamp from the HA set Joyful Greetings I got last year.  For the red tags ( made 1/2 a dozen of these) I simply used the HA's digi kit - Snowman stamp resized and printed out.  I cut them out and placed on the tag.
Tonight I made another tag - This one is called my Kiwi Christmas as I used the Pohutukawa as my inspiration for it.  The Potutukawa tree is known as the New Zealand Christmas tree and has the most amazing red flowers that come out around this time of the year. The pine bough stamp reminded me of the flower. 

Well this has been a bit of a long post...thanks for taking the time to read it.