Yesterday I finished off my (new) batch of Christmas cards made to send to the Caring Hearts Drive. What a chore I made of it for myself this year!
I had realised last week that most of the cards I had ready to send were not the required size, but fortunately I found a forgotten stash of PTI card bases, (A2 sized). So yesterday I started...
I pulled out suitable weight card stock, inks, stamps, dies...you name it, as my mind wafted off on a flurry of indecision as I tried to think out what I wanted to produce...something smart enough to send to strangers, simple enough to be able to make a few of them, but interesting enough not to bore my socks off while I got them made.
Now it was very fortunate that I had already viewed Therese from Lost in paper's recent video where she produces six cards, all different but utilising the same items in their construction...(The first in a series so keep an eye out for the remainder). So I was able to stop the mindless avalanche, put everything I had just hauled out back away, grab a coffee and think it through more carefully.
I asked myself these questions...What materials did I have that were Christmassy and in sufficient quantity? What technique did I want to utilise? What colours did I want to include?
I haven't used my embossing folders much at all in the past few months, and I have a nice one from Craft Concepts called Secret Garden that I always think of as suitable for a Southern hemisphere Christmas, i.e. vaguely mistletoey but not wintery. I had a partial sheet of SU gold card stock and some nice weight Bazzill marshmallow card, plus the PTI card bases...I was good to go.





The scraps tend get a bit dog eared, as they include odd shapes left over from the eClips or Brother projects, well, I'm sure I don't really need to describe the result. There must be others out there who know what I mean.
So, over the weekend I spend a long time sorting through one bin...the browny/orangy/yellowy one...slicing up the paper pieces into usable standard sizes for matting. I now have a box of lovely paper pieces ready for the use of. It was such a boring and lengthy job that I was able to discard any "rubbish" with a very blythe spirit indeed. I found a surprising amount of good black card pieces in there as well (black, white and grey have a separate bin supposedly), and I popped all of those into another small box to use as sentiment banners.
I will be doing the same to the other bins over the next couple of days, but I won't be saving the smaller pieces that Leslie recommended. Easier just to have larger pieces and cut down if necessary. The original idea she recommend came from an oldish video by Sandy Allnock. Again, the sizes are imperial, but I just sized my scraps to suit myself and my metric Cutterpillar that did all the hard work.
Di