Crafting for the christmas market

Hi Crafters,

Christmas is approaching fast now. Our school will have a booth at the local Christmas market next week-end. And as if I hadn't enough to do, I volunteered to create some cards. So I've been trying to squeeze this in for a few weeks now. Including two very crafty week-ends. You really wouldn't want to see, how the house looks right now!

But now I have finally completed something and I might make some more of the simpler cards over the week - depending on time and energy available.

So, here it comes...

 The first set was inspired by the new die and stamp and stencil set from Simon Says Stamp, which I don't own, so I simply cut out the pieces. It's not too difficult, because these are all simple shapes - except for the bow, which I didn't want to use anyway.

 Finding that both my star punches are too small, I used a star stamp from a Christmas set, stamped it in a light color and cut it out before I coated it in 2 layers of gold embossing powder. Would you believe it, there was NO fitting punch available around here.

The green paper strips and the lining of the envelop I created myself with distress inks, lots of water, some stencils and an airbrush. I also colored some white cardstock with my distress inkpad for the trunks.

For the red baubles I wanted a paper pen, but couldn't get one in red, so I used white window color to create the dots, colored them with an alcohol marker and stuck them on the branches with some liquid glue.

The snowbank is just a torn piece of paper, with the sentiment in golden embossing powder.

I created 24 of these cards and am hoping to sell them in sets of 5. The 4 extra cards are just to test, if they sell better solo. If the do, the ladies at the booth can just rip apart the sets and sell the cards individually.

 Looking back: Why the hell didn't I go for something more simple? Creating these sets cost me so much time, with all the cutting and the makeshift baubles.

As the Paper Players have an evergreen challange this week, and I thought that this card fits, not only for the obvious reason (featuring a christmas tree), but also because my fingers are probably going to stay forever green, after all the inking I did...
I also added it to the Simon Says Stamp "anything goes" challenge, because their stamp and die set inspired me.



My second idea was much more simple, a single layer card with a little masking, stamping and embossing. I could even recruit  my daughters to help me stamping the envelop liners. They loved it, and so did I.  So far I have only created one set of 5 from these, but as I said before, if I find the time, I might make a few more.

Credits fore this  go to Annika from Annikarten who inspired me on this.

So enjoy the rest of your week and, and have a great Christmas time

Ela