December Deluge 7: 6×4″ Nutcracker Sweet Christmas Cards

This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous posts I showed you several December projects, the first of which was a quick Christmas Mini Album, so you can start there if you’d like to see them allToday: Part 7 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

This year’s Christmas collection for me has been Nutcracker Sweet by Graphic 45. A couple of blog posts ago I already showed you a number of 4×4″ Christmas cards I created with this collection. ANd there’s more purple projects to follow, so stay tuned! 🙂

I always like to do double layout cards, by which I mean cards that have layouts both on the front and on the inside, which gives them a particularly finished look and adds a luxurious feel.

Today I continue my Purple Plethora of Christmas cards, with seven 4×6″ versions of Nutcracker Sweet!

Enjoy the video & pics!

 

Next up: December Deluge 8 – Nutcracker Sweet Treasure Chest!

BewarenBewaren

Gift idea: Christmas Paper Bag Album

Before you read any further: this album is for sale for a special opening price, so please check it out on my Showroom page! (International customers: please pay attention to the fact that international shipping fees will have to be added).

Tis the Season, yea! 🙂 I haven’t got my Christmas tree yet, but nevertheless it’s that time of the year again, which means holiday-themed projects for crafters all over the world! Soooo many gorgeous new Christmas collections and I haven’t even bought a single one this year. Not because I don’t want to create anything for Christmas, on the contrary. But since I bought like a gazillion Christmas collections last year, I’m afraid I’ll be not-buying any new Christmas collections the coming years until I’ve used up the ones I already own…. (Right. Like that’s going to happen! But: at least this year it is! 🙂 )

Anyway, here’s a so-called paper bag mini album, the pages of which are basically created from paper bags – and some cardstock. I really love this type of album, for it requires less basic construction than the usual cardstock albums, so you can relatively quickly move on to decorating and embellishing – which, you know, is grrrrreat! 🙂

The paper collection I used is North Countryby Prima Marketing, plus some separate sheets from other collections. I also used this paper line for my Christmas cards this year.

My first Christmas mini album

This past year has been my first “full” year of paper crafting: it all started with the calendar I created for my mother back in November 2012, which seriously infected me with the “paper crafting virus” 🙂 . It has been a year of wonderful creativity and I’m very grateful for the many new techniques (new to me, at least…) I’ve been able to learn. Looking forward to 2014, I’m hoping to plan my craft projects more around the different seasons: not just taking into account the uniquely different feel of winter-spring-summer-autumn, but also bringing some of the holiday seasons into the mix. Not with every single project of course, I mean, sometimes you just want to use a certain design paper because it’s simply too gorgeous not to 🙂 – but generally speaking I feel it should be doable.

So, starting right now, at the end of 2013, I’m very happy to present you all with my very first Christmas mini album!

I used the Tis the Season paper collection by Kaisercraft and inked around all the edges with Vintage Photo distress ink by Tim Holtz. I’ve also incorporated some so-called scrap mats again, a technique I actually came up with (and named) myself. If you want to know how to make them, feel free to check out my tutorial!

If you’d like to know how such an album would look with pictures in it, check out the pictures underneath the video PLUS the 2017 update here! 🙂

Right, ’nuff said, on to the video!

 

Inside front cover – decorated this time, plus a picture (of little me 🙂 ) added to the photo mat:

Die-cutting the picture and finishing its edges with glitter glue adds interest to your photo mat! I also stamped the year in the lower right corner, in copper-colored ink:

Liked this mini? Then check out its little baby sister, my Christmas Micro album! 🙂

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL, AND THE HAPPIEST OF NEW YEARS!

A stack of tri-shutter Christmas cards!

A couple of blogposts ago I published my tutorial for a tri-shutter card. Since I’ve now sent out all my Christmas cards, it’s time to show you this holiday season’s version of a tri-shutter card – plus, how I made good use of the leftover scraps, as usual :-). Hopefully to inspire!

The paper I used was Holly Jolly by My Mind’s Eye. Enjoy!