Sunday 6 December 2015

Christmas Trees, Elves and Vikings!

So today I have another eclectic mix of projects for you.  A couple of last minute gift ideas plus a card using my new favourite stamp!

Firstly I wanted to share a Christmas decoration idea which is very giftable - I am gifting this one to myself!   It does use the reindeer which are out of stock and won't be back before Christmas - sorry I did try to get them but they are not avaiable on the wholesale site at Mama Elephant.  I have been wanting to share it though and as the tree die is now back in stock I thought I'd go with it as you could use other Christmas stamps in place of the reindeer.


I started with a white box frame (I get mine from The Range for a fiver so they make very inexpensive gifts) and used a sheet of bokeh paper for the background along with some snowy hills using the ever popular Lawn Fawn hillside die.   I made two tiny trees using the snowflakes and smallest bough from the Take A Bough die and stuck them into a couple of blobs of plasticine on the edge of the frame, hiding those with another snowy hill ;-)  I added the reindeer and then the sentiment that was my inspiration for the whole frame - "Its Time to Jingle" from Mama Elephant's Jingle Greetings and then filled the frame with lots of jingle bells (we have some in stock in basic supplies).    You can see I really love the bough dies - my house will be covered in miniature trees this year!

For my second gift idea, I've returned to one of my former craft making skills - I used to do lots of craft fairs selling handmade jewellery and when I saw the Elves by Lia stamp they just screamed earrings to me!


I turned to my friend shrink plastic for these and you can see on the image on the right just how much they shrink!   If you want to play with shrink plastic then you need alcohol inks or markers to colour them.  For these I stamped the image onto the FRONT shiny side and then coloured with copics on the BACK rough side.  You can't do too much shading as you start to lift off ink if you go over it more than once.  I cut these by hand and added a border so there was enough room to punch the hole at the top of the hat before shrinking.  Make sure your hole is big enough as that shrinks too!   Then just add jump rings and earring posts and you're good to go!

Finally this week, I could not wait to play with the new Viking stamp from Avery Elle's new release.  I am a bit obsessed with Vikings at the minute as we are watching the new BBC drama The Last Kingdom.  For my card I wanted to use it for a birthday so didn't want to use the punny sentiment in his beard (although I love that too!) so I carefully trimmed it out using a craft knife - I can put it back in anytime I do want it, but this way I get more use out of a stamp designed for Valentine's ;-)  What's more, I went even further and turned him into a spinner......


I stamped him as normal for the front and coloured him in with copics.  For the back view, I inked up the stamp again but only on the outline (using a momento pen instead of the ink pad) and then I just drew some rough lines to create his trousers, shirt and hair.  Trust me - I am no artist but this was just a few straight and wiggly lines so is very easy!  Colour in the back to match, add some string in the middle and sandwich together and he presto - a spinning Viking!    The sentiment was stamped in white and was spelt out using Milo's ABCs but any alphabet set you have would do.  This link shows you all the alphabets we stock.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

  • We will be getting the new release from My Favorite Things early this week.  We have got all the restocks we could too but a lot of the Christmas items you've been waiting for are STILL out of stock at their end so there will be no more Jingle or Elves before Christmas.  Sorry - I tried but I can only get what they have!
  • Both Mama Elephant and Wplus9 have decided not to release in December.  I tried to restock both but Mama Elephant didn't have anything we needed in stock so there will be deliveries from them now until January.  I have some items coming from Wplus9 early this week but again they were out of stock on lots of the things we needed.
  • Lil' Inker Designs have a new release on 9th December which will be live here with us that day too.
  • Lawn Fawn's mini release is on the 10th and again we have that ready to go.   We have all the restocks we could get from them live in store now.
  • After that, there will be NO MORE NEW STOCK UNTIL WE RE-OPEN IN JANUARY.


1 comment:

Dotty Jo said...

Ok, now I know I want that Viking! Jo x