Backgrounds

 Christmas backgrounds - we made these at the Christmas club at the Craft Barn.  Use inks, I think we used distress ink and distress stains, and use a brayer to paint them on to card.  You are meant to put a little bit on and you need to get the look of it fading out.... (ie don't cover your brayer in ink and try to get a smooth line).  Just keep going with different inks.  Then you can print a script in gold or silver ink on it (I used red on the red one) - it's meant to be faint.  Spray with gold or silver to finish.  I used Treasure Gold in silver round the edge too.  Then I just used die cut shapes from mirror card to put in the middle - I love the background so no need to put too much on it.

Little Claire Stamps

I bought these little stamps at the Biggin Hill show back in May - really useful with this background paper.  I was trying out my Gelli plate, but used paper to print onto instead of card.  Once done, I used a stamp (the Jo Firth Young one of snowflakes) and also put glitter on.  I put it everywhere because much more came out of the bottle than I thought!  (I used Stickles glue.)  I then decided I needed something simple to put on top - and the snowman stamp doesn't need many colours on it, either.

Pop up card

These seem to be very popular at the moment - I made it with a free gift from one of the cardmaking magazines (sorry, cannot remember which one) - the aspire crafts "Sew Pretty" range.  Used the free papers and the bits provided, I only had to add a 12 x 12 inch sheet of claret coloured paper as a backing.

Penny Black Stamp

 I thought I might frame this rather than put it on a card - it's a Penny Black stamp, which I coloured with my Copics.  I'm now quite impressed with my colouring - I decided to go with Copics after my husband looked at a Christmas card I made a few year's ago using Copic pens, and wondered who had sent us a Christmas card so early.  If he couldn't work out I had coloured it, I decided they were the pens to go for!!