Christmas Card Making Workshop

On Sunday 19th October, 10 lovely ladies came along to my Christmas card making workshop and made 20 cards and a gift box! They all received a goodie bag containing a set of 20 Stampin Up! notecards and envelopes, a reel of Lost Lagoon 3/8" Silky Taffeta Ribbon, a pack of Frosted Sequins, glue dots and 1/8th of a pack of All Is Calm DSP all for £30! I know the amount of  DSP doesn't sound a lot but I wanted to show my ladies just how far these paper packs go so are a very economical buy!
The cards used a variety of techniques:- heat embossing, dry embossing, Big Shot, free-hand cutting, punching, tying of bows (not everyone enjoyed this exercise) and the Envelope Punch Board.  The stamp sets that were used were Festival of Trees, Bright & Beautiful, Endless Wishes, Holiday Home and White Christmas. A variety of colours were used; Pear Pizzazz, Soft Sky, Real Red, Old Olive, Lost Lagoon, Pool Party, Smoky Slate and Basic Grey to name a few!  they were all proud to go home with all their projects completed in the 4 hours we had for ourselves.  Here are some photos from the day:-

Watch this space for future day workshops in the spring.

Start of the Christmas Season!

Well, with only something like 10 weeks to Christmas, I thought I would start to show off the lovely Christmas products form the Autumn/Winter catalogue. It is full of wonderful stamp sets, embellishments, accessories and ideas it was a struggle to decide what to buy. So this week I chose to demostrate the Festival of Trees and Bright & Beautiful sets to create a 3-in-1 project!

As you can see form the picture, we made a card with a circular cut-out using the Circles Framelits and then 'hung' a star from the Bright & Beautiful stamp set, embossed in silver and cut out using the Stars framelits.  The circle that was taken from the card was then stamped and again embossed in silver using a masking-off technique witht he greeting in the centre to make a gift tag.  A 'ring' of champagne glimer paper was used on the card to hide the bakers twine and the centre of this was decorated with a stamped tree from the Festival of Trees set to make a second gift tag!

Our second Christmas project this week was a mini treatbox in the shape of a birdhouse with a little robin.

This is an ideal 'thank you' gift for a teacher/neighbour/friend or a table favor etc and can be filled with a few Elizabeth Shaw mints. The stamp set that was used for the snowflakes (stamped in Whisper White Craft ink) and greeting tag (Real Red and Early Espresso markers) was Endless Wishes, another lovely stamp set with lots of  seasonal greetings and different sized snow flakes.  The box was made from Crumb Cake card stock and the roof from Always Artichoke.  The robin was made using the Bird Builder punch in soft suede.

Earlier in the year, Stampin Up! introduced Blendabilities. These are marker pens in 3 shades of several of the main Stampin Up! clolours and are used to create a subtle shading effect when colouring stamped images. So far I hadn't found time to introduce these new items into my classes so thought it was about time.
Plus it gave everyone the chance to indulge in a bit of colouring. 

This card uses two punches, the Pansy and the Dotted Scallop Ribbon Border.  The DSP was taken from the Moonlight DSP stack and the stamp set used was Flower Shop, stamped using Memento Ink to ensure that the ink did not 'run' into the Blendabilities colours. The two colours used were Daffodil Delight and Rich Razzleberry.  The Blendability pens can also be used to colour in Stampin Up! Pearl Basic Jewels (and Rhinestones) so that you can have matching emblishments to compliment your design.  The greeting was stamped in Rich Razzleberry ink using the Itty Bitty Banners stamp set.