Christmas anyone?

Well here I am at Graphicus yesterday, with Lynn’s lovely mannequins in the  background.  We had a great couple of days and I have to say a big thank you to Team Graphicus who, as always, rallied round the week before to get everything ready.  Thanks too to Jean from Crafty Individuals – it’s always inspiring to see you at work Jean and I must have one of those new seashore paper pads – they will go with our underwater stamps beautifully.

The Elusive Images Design Team artwork was on display and was very well received.  Don’t worry, you will see it coming up on the DT blog soon.

Meanwhile, here are some pieces that I managed to make during the day.

Two versions of the same technique.  The card above was stamped with Adirondack Denim dye ink, then a waterbrush was used to pick up the colour from the stamped lines.  A little stickles finishes it off.  The trees were stamped with Versamark then I drew in the hills with a Versamark pen and embossed it with Kaleidascope embossing powder.

The same watercolour technique was used on the card below, but this time using Stream Adirondack dye ink.

The paper is from our Spirit of Christmas paper pack (there’s a great offer on Artylicious Papers this week – buy the A4 pack and you can get the 6×6 pack for just £1.00.  You need to quote the promotional code ARTYPPACK when you check out to get the discount applied.)

The reindeer trim isn’t on the website yet, but will be soon.  We made up some ribbon tags for the open days which sold really well, each one had four meters of ribbon and one meter of a fancy trim such as reindeer, holly, snowflakes, etc.

I absolutely love this pinecone stamp and had to stop myself reaching for it ALL the time while I was demonstrating.  It’s a fantastic stamp for backgrounds and looks fab embossed in white or stamped in versamark on glossy for a resist.  The card above is stamped very simply in Memento dye inks on glossy card – New Sprout first, then Bamboo Leaves on top.  The base card has the same design stamped with Pear Tart down the side.  The greeting is stamped onto one of the flourish blocks which has been stamped onto glossy card with Pear Tart ink.

This one has been stamped with Adirondack pigment ink – the pinecones in Lettuce and the sentiment in Bottle.  It’s then been embossed with clear powder.  The baubles are from a brand new card kit which we just got in. It’s one of three new cardmaking kits which are aimed at complete beginners, but are just crying out to be used more creatively than intended by mixing them up with stamps.  Two of the kits are Christmas and one is a fun girly one that goes really well with our boudoir stamps and would probably keep a fashionista youngster occupied for a while during the summer holidays.  They will be featuring in next week’s ‘What’s new’ email, so more on those later.

And it wasn’t just Christmas stamps that we were showing off this weekend.  We also got into a spooky frame of mind on Friday 13th.  You can have a lot of fun exploring the Dark Side, mwah ha  hah ….

The card is a work in progress, it needs a sentiment or bats or spiders or something else!  The card panel is actually just stuck on with blu-tak for the photo!  The background is distress inks and the house has been coloured with Memento markers, then clear embossed by colouring over with a Versamark pen.  We are a little early with Halloween – not many of our suppliers have stock in yet of spooky embellishments, so we’ll definitely re-visit this nearer the time.

The thing is, Halloween is a bit of fun, but it’s unlikely you will need a huge number of Halloween cards (unless you’re having a fancy dress or kids party of course).  However most crafters are going to need to make a batch of Christmas cards, so now is a good time to get started.

I’m curious – how many of you are way ahead of the game and have your Christmas cards made already?

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