Post-Christmas greetings!

I hope everyone had a truly wonderful Christmas! We had a very quiet one, at home for the day, which is rare. Despite our son being in Sicily, Stephen was very much with us, thanks to Skype & a web cam! A tradition at Christmas is that our children sing "We wish you a merry Christmas" outside our bedroom door at the appointed "wake up time" (which mercifully is much later now that they're grown up!). Stephen called on his cell phone, and with our daughters (using an extension to keep together (more or less!) we still were sung to! Then we went downstairs, and connected with him on skype, and opened gifts together. It was fun, zooming in on things so that he could see, getting his reaction to his stuff, etc.

Back to stamping on Monday!

Christmas Penguins!

Christmas is such a wonderful time of celebrating Christ's birth, that I make few cards that don't have a specifically Christian meaning or symbol. But this little guy was so cute, and in the dollar pile at a craft store that I impulsively snatched him up. I made them into Spanish and Croatian Christmas cards for the Houghton College store. Why Croatian? Simply because my oldest daughter is familiar enough with the language for me to be confident I had the right translation, lol!

Spanish Christmas

I just realized I did actually make a couple of other Christmas cards this year: foreign language cards. This is a design I created a couple of years ago. I sponged pinks and oranges (latino Christmas cards do not stick to our American/European traditiona reds & greens) on glossy cardstock, then stamped the three kings in black stazon, then computer-printed the scripture on vellum. I had rejected the background panel because I did not want any "lines," but when I looked at it with the vellum overlay, it looked, as you see, very soft, and like light from a star.

More Joy!

And the last of my Christmas cards, I think, the other Dovely Joy image I mounted ... just in time for it to be delivered before Christmas! I used foil flakes on this one ... this image just begged for it!

Joy!

As I worked on "recreating" or fixing cards yesterday, I came across two of these "Dovely Joy" panels, and easily made them into cards. This was my favorite Christmas stamp of last year; I must have made seven or eight panels with it, and each one was a little different. A couple might become cards next year...

This one was made with Antiquities embossing powder; I don't believe they are made any more, but they are very similar to Tim Holtz' distress powders. The background was a silent night stamp applied with distress inks.

Wise Men Still Seek Him

Friends of ours have me make a set of ten Christmas cards each year, and last Christmas they chose this design for this year. A good thing: today was the only day I had to make cards for friends and family, and there's no way I could possibly do that. So, every single card was from my "Christmas box" of cards or parts of cards that were begun and not finished, left over from finished cards, goofed cards (smudged, glued crookedly, etc), etc.

I changed this card slightly from the one I had made last year. I used distress inks, and getting a perfect image with that ink with the wise men image was very challenging, and so for the ten cards I completed, I had nearly twice that many of that particular image that had to be pitched.

The "parchment" map was created by using two or three shades of brown distress inks on old white parchment-like typewriter paper, then rolling Ranger Butterscotch across it for a mellower look.

I had hoped to participate in the smARTworks "word challenge" this month; if I weren't already making a card with smARTworks' stamps, I wouldn't have been able to participate, so that's happy!

Link for inspiration

This is a site I have not yet taken advantage of, but I may today if I can't get a serious dent into my personal Christmas card making. I finished my last cards for selling Monday night, and delivered them on our way out of town for Christmas shopping, and will post a picture later today ... it was one of those designs that was fairly simple, but required using ink that did not consistently give a decent image, so, making them last minute as I did, I didn't make more than the ten I needed for my friend, and there was no time to take a picture before I left town yesterday! So, I'll make a couple more today...

Anyway, this site has some free printable Christmas tags, though I hope if you really like and use them, you'll consider making an actual purchase. Fun stuff! Just click HERE.