Started my holiday card class........

As I mentioned in my previous post I signed up for the Online Holiday Card Workshop with  Jennifer McGuire and Kristina Werner which you will see the result starting  towards the bottom of my post. I thought, "no worries", a card a day, I can handle that...... LOL! Well we get a few more than a card a day of ideas and I'm already not keeping up. It's a good thing it will be accessible for a long time to come as I could still be working on them post Christmas for next year and beyond.

 

Last weekend I went to a Friday night crop and spent the weekend doing a Cybercrop over at Home and Scrapped. It was the last for the year and I really enjoyed taking some time out for myself.

 

 Suzanne challenged us to make a background that had to emphasize the theme of our photos so I have some great stamps from Stephanie Barnard that looked similar in design to the paper flowers that were at King's Park so I played along with those and coloured them with Whispers markers to make my background. I kept the rest of the layout simple as I found adding embellishments to it made it look too busy.

 Suzannes other challenge was to Use our stash:

1. Use 5 or more patterned papers; dig into those scraps.
2. Choose 2 categories of embellishments (ribbons, flowers, buttons, die cuts, brads, stickers, whatever) and use 3 or more from each of your chosen categories; for example, 3 flowers, 3 pieces of chipboard.
3. Use readymade or pre-made journal boxes, letters and embellishments wherever you can.
4. And finally, tell us what you’ve used!

I think I covered the criteria okay with buttons, stickers, 5 pp's and the pre-made journal box.

 Heather kicked off the CC with a Step-By-Step layout which I got around to on Sunday and really enjoyed as a way to use up little scraps of paper. It seems to be a common theme with Heather at the moment, making us use all our little scraps ..... so it actually comes in handy.

 Kerri challenged us to make a layout with a food theme and to use our photos and pp's at an angle. The angle part of it was definitely my challenge as I am such a straight lined person and symmetrical.... that it is not funny..... LOL!

 Our October challenge from Josie was to take inspiration from a couple of layouts she found on Pinterest. One used lots of hearts so I pulled out all my die-cut and punched hearts and played.

 Kerri's October challenge was to keep up with the scrapbook trends and use chevrons.  I'm not a big trend follower so it got me out of my comfort zone and I had the girls at the crop night very intrigued by what I was doing with my stripey paper. I'm really pleased how it turned out and found a good way to use up some of those really old stripey and gingham papers I have lying in my stash. Might use this idea again sometime.

 Heather's Mid-week sketch number 30-12 was another scraps using venture and I had some of the Granola Basic Grey range left in the packet that worked well with my photos. That koala is a die-cut freebie from here. I cut it with my ecraft along with the eucalypt leaves and the tree branch that I altered too. The leaves and branch were created from photos I had taken a few years ago that I converted to cut files.

 Here are some cards from the 2011 Holiday Card Bootcamp. The top one is a design that was planned for a photo card but as I don't do photo cards, I found some vintage Christmas images that I used instead which I bought a couple of years ago.

 This one was from Day one last year and uses a die-cut that I received in a swap just recently.

 This was day two last year and a newsletter card that I just made without the newsletter pocket.

 I have to say that I am a little challenged at times altering my cards to look similar but using totally different items to what they use in the class as I am working purely from my stash. I have lots of Christmas stamps but not many long greetings or picture stamps and I only own one Christmas embossing folder so have been using the Tim Holtz Sizzix, Damask and regal flourish folders instead.

 This is an acetate card created with Rhonna Farrer flourish stamps and the Kaisercraft tree from the "Merry Christmas" set from a few years ago now. It's the first time I have stamped and embossed it with white powder and I have used it many, many times. Looks very cute.

 This was another photo card that I converted to the vintage image card and had to hunt down the snowflakes from the Christmas Cheer Cartridge. I don't usually use snow flakes a lot on my cards as the whole white christmas concept is so foreign to us here in Australia.

 This card was a challenge from the CC where we had to use scraps from our food layout to make a card. Of course I chose to do a Christmas card again with a card topper and peel offs.

 Day 1 of the holiday card workshop - a set of 3" x 3" cards. I didn't make the envelopes to go with them as I don't have the scoring board they used to get the easy sizing so have to remember to ask the question of how far the scoring lines are from each point so I can make some little envelopes to go with them. They are all the same design so you can use them a a gift card set or use them on your own gifts.

Still on Day 1 - Jennifer showed us a technique for using the Fiskars stamp press and a cheat sheet to do a series of mass produced cards. I played along although mass producing cards is never something I do if you look through my blog for the last few years. I glimmermisted my stamping as I didn't have any distress inks that would go with the colours I was working with so the old Patina came out of hiding yet again.

If I can keep up with the class and pack to go away in a couple of weeks at the same time then you might see some more Chrissy card shares before I'm off......

Enjoy and happy craftin'