An (almost) white Christmas!

Hi there, how was your Christmas? Hope you all had a wonderful day spent with your loved ones! We hosted our Christmas celebrations at our home this year, it was lovely seeing how excited Annika, our 3 year old grand-daughter, was opening all her presents. She even got to open her baby brother's presents too....I think it's more about the unwrapping than what's actually inside that excites her!

We had the strangest weather on Christmas Day! It started off as your typical Aussie summer's day, I think the temperature reached somewhere around 30C, then the weather turned very nasty! We had a bit of rain, followed by a hail storm......the hail was the size of golf balls! It sounded like someone was throwing big rocks on the roof. Both sons-in-law made a mad dash for the cars to put them undercover, one of them looked up at the wrong time and copped a few hail stones on his face...ouch! There's a photo below of the hail still sitting on our lawn and nature strip taken well after the hail storms finished......we ended up having at least 4 of them, along with some torrential rain! Luckily we are on top of a hill and the only damage was where some hail stones came through the laserlite sheets on our back veranda. Others fared much worse with flooding, car windscreens broken and broken roof tiles. I was really worried as my 82yr old Dad had only left 5 minutes before the storm hit, but thankfully he was OK and only had a few dents in his car from the hail.

Here's my last Christmas card for the year! I made this one for my grandson Ben's first Christmas! The little bear stamp is by Stamp-It, the greeting is from a Kaisercraft clear set. I coloured the bear with Copic Markers, put some Kindyglitz around the hat fur and cut him out and popped up with dimensional dots. The DP is also by Kaisercraft.

I'm linking this card up with the Forever Friends December Challenge - It's all Christmas!

I had a last minute crafting frenzy on Christmas Eve as I still had more gift-card holders to finish and I made my own Christmas Crackers (Bon Bons). Thankfully my daughter Hayley helped me finish off the Crackers......and wrapped my gifts for me as well, or I would never have finished everything! I didn't get around to taking photos of those last projects though!

I can't believe New Year's Eve is tomorrow! Hope you all have a Happy New Year, I'll be back next year!

Nearly there!

I've almost finished making my Christmas cards, only one more to go! These cards are for my two daughters and the fun rudolph card is for my 3 year old grand-daughter. She was singing Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer a few nights ago............so cute!  Luckily I don't need to mail these ones!

I'm linking these cards up to Annabelle Stamps for the 'Say It With......Christmas Cards' challenge.

I still have a few cards that I haven't shown here yet, I'll put them up when I have time.

Gingerbread house and a gift card holder.

Hi there! Christmas is getting closer and closer and I still have heaps to do! Here are 2 more Christmas projects that I recently completed.

The first one is a gingerbread house that I gave as a hostess gift at the Aussie Fiskateers Christmas party that I was lucky enough to be invited to last week. Fiskars Aussie lead ambassador, Lyn D, sure knows how to throw a party, we all had a fun day!

This is not my original idea, I saw something similar on a blog, I think it was a Norwegian lady, I'm afraid I didn't save the blog address though. It's made using a milk carton, the roof is only adhered on one side so you can flip it open and put some goodies inside. Papers are from Kaisercraft's 'December 25' range.

I used a Fiskars border punch for the roof edges. The Christmas tree is drawn free-hand and cut out with scissors. The roof requires a bit of weighting on the open side, so I used a jumbo sized square brad - it looks a little like it's a skylight.

The second project is a gift card holder. I made a few of these last year, but forgot to take a photo of the inside, so I've remembered to do it this time! I used a jumbo sized brad  as the closure and just wrapped the bakers twine around it to secure. Papers and die-cuts are all from the Kaisercraft 'Be Merry' range.

I'm linking these projects up to Papertake Weekly's challenge - Last Christmas projects/cards for the year.

Holly Jolly!

The December challenge at Inkurable Stampers is "Holly" - use some holly somewhere on your project.

I had heaps of holly to choose from for this challenge, but I ended up using a holly stamp by Kaisercraft, some punched holly leaves and if you look closely you'll see some holly at the top of the metal brad just above the bells.

For my background I misted some tissue paper with some home-made glimmer spray (made using re-inkers and Pearl-Ex powder). I stamped the image after the tissue had dried, then scrunched it up to make it all wrinkly and adhered it to a piece of spotty Kaisercraft DP using Mod Podge, then painted the leaves with Twinkling H20's and the berries with a marker.

My main image isn't a Christmas stamp at all, but I thought it would be fun to use the Laurel and Hardy photo stamp (by The Stampsmith), I added some extra distressing with TH Distress inks to make it look really aged and  adhered it to the background piece using dimensional dots on only 2 adjacent corners, so it was slightly curled up on the non-adhered corners. It was a no-brainer to also use the 'Holly Jolly' greeting (Penny Black) in keeping with the holly theme! I distressed it with TH inks as well.

Other bits added :red ribbon, red machine stitching. The red berries on the punched leaves had some extra Mod Podge over them.

I could never seem to get decent photos of cards using photo stamps with my old camera, they usually turned out too grainy, but I'm quite pleased with the photo taken using my DSLR camera!

I have a few more cards and projects to show you that I've finished over the last week or so, hopefully I'll add them here soon! Still have so much to do before Christmas!

Clean & Simple #169

Clean and simple is the way to go when you're in a rush to get your Christmas cards out on time! I used this week's sketch from the Clean & Simple blog to make not one, but two cards using the same stamp!

Stamps by Kaisercraft and Hero Arts (Joy). Patterned papers from Kaisercraft and Little Yellow Bicycle. Cheery Lynn doily die and Kaisercraft star brads also used.

That's all for now folks!

Christmas Trees.

Hi again, I'm back onto my Christmas cards today.....time's running out!

I used a trees stamp from Annabelle Stamps Hooo Loves Christmas set and a greeting by Stampin' Up, both stamped in Versafine Vintage Sepia ink. The trees are stamped onto a scrap of Basic Grey patterned paper.

I'm entering this card for two challenges -
Annabelle Stamps ABSC044 bling sketch challenge using the sketch below and,
CC351 Colour Challenge on Splitcoast Stampers - Kraft, White and Pizazz (green)

Other stuff used:
Annabelle Stamps - Lime Sprinkles (bling)
Cuttlebug - Swiss Dots Embossing folder
Nestabilities - Circle dies.
Stampin' Up - Kraft cardstock and word window punch
Bazzil - green cardstock
Kaisercraft - 'Be Merry' 6 x 6 paper pad.
EK Success - corner punch
Other - white organza ribbon, brown velvet braid.

It's officially the first day of summer here today, but you certainly wouldn't think so! It's been quite cold all day, I might even have to use my electric blanket again tonight! It was only a few days ago we were sweltering, I wish the weather wasn't quite so changeable! Hope you're having a great day in your part of the world, thanks for your visit!

ps. I think I'm going to colour those baubles on the trees red, it really needs a splash of something bright don't you think?