Along with her Favorite Five Christmas Cards contest, Debby runs a Favorite Five Cards of 2012 contest. All you have to do is pick your favorite five cards that you made in 2012 and link back to her post.

Here are my favorite five in no particular order:

Original post HERE.

Original post HERE.

Original post HERE.

Original post HERE.

Original post HERE.

Come join in the fun HERE!

Favorite Christmas Cards

Debby, from one of my favorite card blogs, is holding a drawing for some yummy prizes and all you have to do is list five of your favorite Christmas cards that were made in 2012.

I didn't make too many Christmas cards this year, but was still able to pick out my favorites. Here they are in no particular order:

The original post for all these cards can be found HERE. Except for the Mucha-inspired "Hiver" card which can be found HERE.

Thanks for the chance to win, Debby! And merry Christmas to all!

Horses

My friend gave me some lovely gifts for Christmas and for my birthday so I wanted to make you a "thank you" card. She likes horses and reading books so I made her a card with horses and a bookmark.

I made my first gate fold card and this is the front. The horse is stamped in brown even though it looks like black or gray in the picture.

Here's the inside of the card. Again, the image is stamped in brown.

This is the bookmark I made for her. It's difficult to see, but there is a horse's head in the circle of kraft paper. I used the die from My Favorite Things for the bookmark.

Thanks for stopping by!

Last of the Christmas Cards

These are the last two Christmas cards I made this year. They are both for my mom; one from me and one from my friend.

This is the card I sent to my mother. She loves the artist Mucha so I put "Mucha stamp" in a search engine not expecting to get any good results but, amazingly, I found this one at The Paper Shelter! I wish the person in it was a more realistic woman, but since this is the only one I found, this is what she got. I was intimidated by coloring it but I used their example to work off of and it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. Those aren't really Christmas colors so I call this more of a winter card than a Christmas card.

This is the card I made for my friend to send to my mom. I didn't put any embellishments on it because I wanted the khaki snowflake to be a focal point. The scalloped border behind the image looks black in the photo but it's actually dark blue. I'm still working on being able to color hair and this image was a particular challenge.

So that's it for me for Christmas cards. I've reorganized my stamps recently and found plenty that have never seen ink so now I'm inspired to make some non-Christmas cards!

I hope you have a lovely holiday season. Healing thoughts go out to all the victims of the Connecticut tragedy and to humankind in general. Things like this affect all of us and I hope we can find a way to trust again.

Christmas Cards Galore

Hello! Boy, it's been a while since I posted. Today I have some Christmas cards that my friend asked me to make for her to send out to friends and family.

I wasn't real pleased with how this one turned out. It's kind of plain and it needs something in the lower right corner. But it is what it is, I guess.

I usually shy away from animal stamps because I don't have experience coloring fur but she wanted this one so I gave it a go. It didn't turn out too terrible but I definitely need practice on fur!

Ok, so the image looks crooked in this photo, but it's actually on straight. Silly camera! I love this digital stamp and was glad she chose it for one of her cards. Looks cozy, doesn't it?

This is another simple card using a stamp from Stampin' Up! I just stamped the image in brown onto craft card stock then put some white glitter on it so the ground looked like it was covered in snow. Easy peasy.

I love this stamp. It's from Lili of the Valley and I love using it. You can't really tell from the photo but I used white flocking on the trim of her coat and her hat and silver glitter on the blades of her skates. I toyed with putting some Crystal Accents on the ice part of the image but figured it would be too difficult to get it all around their feet.

I love the paper on this card. It's from a Lili of the Valley paper pad. I'm so glad they started offering paper pads because they're all lovely.

This is another image that I love except for the trees in the background - they look a little wonky! But for some reason I love coloring snowmen. Probably because they're easy!

I did something I'm not happy with on this one. I used Crystal Accents on the Christmas balls but then sprinkled glitter on top before it dried. I was hoping for a little sparkle but it ended up making them looked frosted. Oh well.

Here's another card with some hedgehogs on it from Penny Black. I had a hard time with the grommets and I'm not happy with how I did the sentiment, but the image is cute so it's ok.

The rest of the cards I'm actually sending out to friends and family with the exception of my mother's card because she visits my blog and I don't want her to see hers before I send it!

This card is for my nephew who just started college this year. It's super plain but since it's for a guy, I didn't want to add a lot of embellishments because they seem too feminine. Looking at it now I think I could add some pearls or rhinestones to jazz it up a bit. I'll do that before I send it.

This card will go to my niece and, yes, it's ANOTHER snowman! Told you I like them! I love that big snowflake die and, although you can't tell, I covered it in glitter so it would sparkle like snow.

I'm sending this one to my brother and his wife. This time I used the negative from the snowflake die and put some patterned paper behind it. The blue layer is popped up so it gives it some dimension.

Phew! Well, that's all the cards I can show you at this point. Later I'll post the card I'm sending to my mother and the card my friend is sending to my mother. In the mean time, I hope you're having a great holiday season!

Enter With a Thankful Heart

A friend of mine wanted me to make some Thanksgiving cards for her to give out on the holiday. When I saw this stamp set from My Favorite Things, I knew it was going to be perfect. I created four cards for her, each using the same main image and sentiment stamps but with slightly different layouts. I only photographed one of the cards and here it is ...

The scroll is also a die from MFT. Thanks for stopping by today!

Workout Woman

I created this card for my sister-in-law's birthday. She works out daily so I really wanted an image of a woman working out. It proved to be, however, impossible to find! I found a stamp that had four chickens working out and I actually made up a card using that stamp, but I really wanted a real person for the card.

I've been an avid follower of Saturated Canary and I happened to mention to her what I was looking for and, believe it or not, she whipped up an image that would work for me! Now, she didn't draw it just for me. It went into her online shop and I bought it to use on Deb's card.

I must admit that I have a few images from Saturated Canary but I've been a little intimidated to color them up. They all have beautiful, long flowing hair and I was a little scared of it! A lot of times their clothes are also elaborate so that was intimidating too. This one is a more simple image to color and I had fun working with it. Maybe now I won't be afraid to try coloring the other images I have.

Anywho, here's the card.

I colored her with Copics and used a brown Copic to color some white pearls to match. The paper is from Kaiser Craft. The sentiment is a Hero Arts stamp.

Thanks for visiting!

The Sky's the Limit

Hello! I'm back with another card today. For this one I used 1/8" grosgrain ribbon in rainbow colors that I bought at Really Reasonable Ribbons. And you know what? They *were* really reasonable! I used an MFT cloud die and white felt for the clouds. The sentiment is from another MFT set.

In retrospect, I think I wish I hadn't used the cloud DP but it's ok. 

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a great day!

And Still More Butterflies!

Happy Saturday! So I'm still on my butterfly kick, obviously, LOL. This is another easy peasy card. I covered the card base with the butterfly DP then added a strip of brown and cream cardstock. The butterflies were punched out of coordinating cardstock as well as white vellum. I folded up the wings on the vellum butterflies and glued the centers of the butterflies onto the colored butterflies. Simple!

Thanks for stopping by!

MFT Birdhouse

Happy Friday, everyone!

My card today features the MFT birdhouse die set. There was very little stamping involved - just some wood grain pattern onto kraft paper and a little sentiment. Everything else was made with dies from the birdhouse set and tree branch and leaves dies.

I die cut the bird out of red wool felt. For the branch and birdhouse I stamped a wood grain stamp in brown onto kraft paper. The leaves were die cut out of DP and the roof and bottom of the birdhouse were cut out of brown paper. After cutting the circle opening for the birdhouse, I covered the back of the birdhouse with brown paper. It's supposed to look like the darkened interior of the birdhouse, but I'm not sure that's how it actually came out. To hang the birdhouse from the branch I used twine. The sentiment is from an old Stampin' Up! set.

Thanks for stopping by!

Cards for Michael

Michael is my nephew and his mother (my sister-in-law) asked for some cards she could send to him while he's away at his first year of college. Here are a few of what I came up with:

Hopefully they'll like them!