The Holidays Are Here!

That's right...and we hope you will help us celebrate over at Our Creative Corner by making a holiday card - Christmas or Hanukah - and entering it into our challenge! The design team has some fabulous holiday cards to get you started. Stop on over and check them out and get your holiday mojo revved up! Here's my DT card for this week...another one that I didn't get the inside done yet.

It will happen, of course, but maybe not in time to use this one for this holiday season! This has been a super busy week and unexpected issues kept cropping up to monopolize my crafting time (don't you just HATE that?). And I wish I could look forward to taking some time off, but while the rest of the parish staff works half days and the parish school is out entirely, I will be working even harder to keep the food pantry running throughout the holiday season - probably with a reduced volunteer staff because people will be away or wanting to take time off even their volunteer gigs. So if you don't hear from me and I don't visit your blogs, please don't take it personally. I am hoping to cut my hours back to the 20 hour work week that I am being paid for after the first of the year - I want my life back and I need my sanity back! And my New Year's resolution will be to do it!

Okay, so now that I am done venting, I'll tell you a bit about this card. First of all, I'll tell you that I love it. I think I am becoming a brown person. I didn't really have a plan for it. It just evolved. I knew I wanted to use the Cardinal Christmas set. I was a little lazy and didn't want to pull out my Copics and spend time coloring so I decided that brown tones would work just fine. From there, the cracked glass technique seemed to be the right move. Have you seen the Mojo Monday sketch this week with the three circle elements? I've seen a bunch of cards made using tha sketch and I loved it so I set out to use it. It got me started, but I couldn't work it out with the circle size I used for the cardinal so I went to one circle element with Spellbinders dies behind it. First I stamped a piece of Close to Cocoa with the Weathered stamped inked up with Chocolate Chip ink. Then I used the Spellbinders Fleur De Lis pendant die to cut one out of the Close to Cocoa and one out of Chocolate chip cardstock. I offset them, glued them together and layered the main element over them. The main element is stamped onto Very Vanilla with Chocolate Chip, sponged with Tim Holtz Old Paper Distress Ink and with Chocolate Chip around the very edge and then embossed 3 times with SU's Glassy Glaze EP. I stuck it into the freezer for 20 minutes and then cracked it immediately upon removing it. The ribbon is from Jo-Ann's holiday selection, the buttons from Foofala Bag-o-Buttons and the silver half pearls from Michael's.

My daughter is home for a few days so we are planning to decorate the tree tomorrow and bake Christmas cookies...mmuumm...I can almost smell them now. Looking forward to some quality family time this weekend. Hope you find some too!

Update: This card was featured on Card of the Week.