A few Christmas cards and tags

Hello from a very rainy Lancashire. I'm just taking a coffee break chance to do a quick catch up and share one or two more images of things I've been up to this week. On Saturday I'll be at Card-io in Wigan from 10am - 4pm where I'll be showcasing my Christmas range of stamps and various messy techniques - as well as some cleaner ones!

Here are some of the things I've been creating for Saturday's demonstration....

The first card was made using my "Little Festive Houses" set and I also added the tiny snowman from the "Cold Hands Warm Heart" set. The background was spritzed with Shimmer Goosebumpz before I blended various blue and purple Distress inks over it. 

Next up is a card featuring a Dylusions ink sprays background - with the white ink sprayed through a stencil over the other colours. I've used images from my "Moon Gazer" stamp set...I really like the whole moon gazing hares imagery and have a small hare in the garden that gazes upwards...not a real one of course! Though we do get hares in the fields behind the houses on my lane.

Now for a couple of tags....

.....both have snowmen from the "Cold Hands...." set. The trees in the left hand tag are from the "Little Festive Houses" set and the ones on the right hand tag are from "Peaceful Christmas" which I inked and then stamped onto scrap card before stamping onto the tag itself. Both backgrounds are made using Distress inks swept across the craft sheet, spritzed with water and then picked up on the tags. 

I added TH Christmas remnant rubs in white to the right hand tag before inking as the rub ons resist the inks to give a nice, soft finish.

Thank you for the great feedback I've had about the new stamps and especially these little chaps.....

 ....they are from the "Merry Christmas to Whoo" set. It's a shame that the camera doesn't pick up the amazing sparkle on this card - I used Tsukineko Shimmer Spritz, in Sparkle, over the whole front and it gives a very delicate sparkle to the picture that really does look like fairy dust! 

Here's one of the two Christmas Zendoodle word stamps used on a very simple card - great when you need to make plenty in a short space of time though!

This stamp is called, unsurprisingly, "Zendoodle Peace"! I took the photo using flash in the evening, hence the slightly creamy tinge. All I did was stamp, colour and add Crystal Stickles to the letters with some added dots of Stickles around the word - really easy and pretty quick!

A last tag to share using the "Doo Lally Pip Tree Fairy" stamp set.

This was a tag from my bag of unfinished bits and pieces - we all have those I think! I didn't really like the colours or how they had come together but I decided to go with it. I stamped the string of stars a few times across the surface and used a white gel pen to pick them out to brighten up the muddiness of the background a bit. More TH remnant rubs added very randomly to add more white highlights. Then I stamped, coloured and cut out little madam and added her before glittering her wings. Doesn't look quite so dreary now!

Talking of cards, I have added some Christmas cards for sale on my Etsy site and will be adding more items as and when I can....I have neglected my shop for quite a while so am determined to get cracking with it once more!

I've not been able to get into the garden this week what with work and the temperamental weather, but I've collected some more rocks for my latest project. Well, to be fair, I thought they were rocks but they turned out to be lumps of concrete! However, once they're half buried and have plants growing around them they will be fine and will do the job of keeping the soil in place.

I thought I'd end with a piece of music that I've been listening to a lot this week. It's sung by Enya and is from the Lord of the Rings trilogy which David and I absolutely loved....can't count how many times we watched the films. We always said we'd have a trilogy day where we'd watch the three films back to back in one go but we never quite found the time to do it!

Things are a bit rough here at the moment and, at times like this, I miss David more than ever, so this song pretty much sums up how I feel....