Just saying hello

Such an appropriate title for my first post of 2016. I had intended to create and post at least one Christmas card per week, but sometimes life gets in the way.

On the first Sunday of the year, my husband was hit by an infection and this hit him extra hard because of his chemotherapy. The last treatment was supposed to take place last week but was postponed because my husband was too weak and yesterday it was decided to call it off altogether. So now he can concentrate on getting his strength back and regaining some weight. What he wants most of all right now is to be able to start walking the dog again, something I've been doing for the past couple of weeks.

I treated myself to the Altenew watercolouring class and have been playing around to create a few background panels, and last night I actually managed to finish a card. Yay!

I started by creating a wash of colour using Altenew inks (the first red I used was a trifle too pink to my liking so I added some darker red at the top) onto a panel of watercolour cardstock (Crafter's Companion). I then masked and stamped the flower and leaf images from Altenew's Henna Elements in Versamark onto a piece of vellum and heat embossed using white embossing powder (Simon Says Stamp) and fussy cut the image. I also heat embossed the sentiment from Altenew's Painted Butterflies in white onto a piece of black cardstock. I popped up the sentiment strip using foam tape and used this and a few drops of multi medium matte to adhere my flowers to the trimmed watercolour panel. I adhered my panel to a top folding card made from black cardstock (Crafter's Companion). To finish things off, I added a little shimmer to the black strip using clear Wink of Stella and adhered a few clear sequins (Pretty Pink Posh and Simon Says Stamp).

My card also fits the new theme at CASology, where this week's cue card is 'CLEAR'

And I'm just in time to link up to the ombre challenge at Simon Says Stamp.

FTHS Gift Stack Teddy Bear

I'm squeezing in one more card this year. This one's for the December free stamp of the month challenge over at From the Heart Stamps. I received this image for free because I joined in the November challenge.

I printed the image and the sentiment from another FTHS stamp set onto Neenah solar white cardstock and coloured the image using Promarkers. Of course I could not resist adding some festive shimmer using clear Wink of Stella. After several attempts, I managed to take the following photograph that captured the sparkle.

I suppose I would be extremly early to go and wish you a Merry Christmas at this time of the year but I do wish you all a New Year filled with good Cheer. I would also like to thank all of my followers and visitors for dropping by my little blog this past year and leaving me comments. They really make my day.

I'm also entering my card into the following challenges:

CHNC - 261 Anything Christmas goes
Cupcake Inspirations - 340

ABC Christmas Challenge - Z is for Zoo animals

Passion for Promarkers - 326 Let's celebrate, Mega Christmas challenge

Creative Card Crew - 103 Anything goes

W&W Winter Woodland rerun

Today's card is a rerun in more than one way: Winnie & Walter's rerun challenge no. 7 is about giving some love to the (slightly) older Winter Woodland stamp set and I decided to have another go at a card panel I had abandoned back in January because it didn't turn out how I had hoped. The idea was that the birds, which I had stamped in white pigment ink, would show through the green of the tree, but nothing happened, so I started afresh, resulting in this card. When I was browsing my collection of abandoned card panels for a recent challenge at Shopping our Stash, I came across my original attempt and the W&W challenge was the final push I needed.

As it turned out, 'fixing' my card was relatively easy. I simply stamped over the birds in red ink while slightly offsetting the image and then did the same with elderberry ink and the stag image. I also reinked my tree stamp with a darker green and dabbed off patches of ink before stamping over my original tree image. All I needed to do then, was add a sentiment (I cut the sentiment so that I could stamp it in two lines instead of one), trim the sides of my panel, swipe the elderberry ink over my card base and adhere my panel.

I'm also entering my card into the following challenges:

CHNC - 261 Anything Christmas goes
A snowflakes promise - 13 Winter/Christmas
Creative Card Crew - 103 Anything goes
ABC Christmas challenge - Z for Zoo animals