Family Christmas project

Every year my family gets together for our annual "Fish Night" a traditional meal using only fish as the main protein dish. In my extended family that can mean 60-70 relatives and wanna be relatives showing up at my cousin Barb's house for dinner. Every year I take pictures and the following year put the pictures into a special Christmas card that is sent to the family. This year I decided to use Karen Burnisten's Accordian Flip die cut to create a double sided photo show. Here's how it came out:

 The edition was 25 cards, but that meant creating 300 pictures that were hand glued onto each and every frame of 25 accordion folded sections spread across several weeks of construction.

One of the great things about this project was using up most of the horde of Christmas paper stashed in boxes from years past....whew... glad to make use of all that great paper.

 The image below shows one of the cards before it's all taped together.....

More Autumn themed cards

In addition to Halloween, our Saturday class made some clever Autumn themed cards using Impression Obsession dies and hand colored papers using alcohol inks and glossy photo stock.

 Also some very cool wood paper and metallic embossing over a Tim Holtz die cut.

Below is a quick and easy folded pocket card that can hold pictures, bookmarks, or gift cards and can be made up in a variety of papers to suite the holiday or celebrated event.

 Below are IO tree and leaves that were cut from hand colored paper using a variety of alcohol inks and patterned papers

 The leaves in both of the next two cards plus the wreath were die cut using IO thin steel dies and again a variety of printed and hand colored papers.....

Holiday Village class

Last year the fabulous and resourceful Paula of One Lucky Day created a holiday village using Tim Holtz dies and embellishments. So I spent most of August trying to teach myself the tricks of putting those darling houses together in order to teach a class in October.....and here is the result:

 Four women took the class and spent most of the day creating their "villages"....

 ...with each house a little different from the next but darn cute all the same.

 Below are the three sample houses I used as the basis for the class....really a fun, fun project.

Halloween Night

The frost is on the pumpkin or would be if we still had pumpkins in our fields, which made me realize I haven't posted in quite a while. So let's catch up with cards and holiday projects: first let me share some Halloween cards that were designed with Graphic 45 papers from their Halloween collection in 2012....okay I liked the designs for 2013 but the little store I teach at still had their paper from last year. Love Graphic 45 designs.

I used black silk ribbon on this one, popped several layers to give it lots of dimension and coated the "bat" with a ton of Glossy Accents.

 This card got a shot of Tim Holtz pumpkin treated with crackle glaze and Distress inks, again lots of layers and texture with the combination of two different kinds of border treatment.

More Tim Holtz pumpkins and a circle cut out - hard to see in this picture but trust me there is a circle window cut out to view the clock that is part of the inner message. Simple fun card that is flat enough to earn a first class stamp.