Festive Decorations

I've got a fun off the page project today - you probably know by now that I'm on a mission to get convince card makers that our supplies can be use for so much more than just cards. With a little thought you can turn your simple card into gifts to treasure or if you sell your crafts, products than can command a fee to cover your stall fees!  So today, I have another example of a Christmas gift, or just a lovely decoration to hang in your own home made from nothing but paper and an inexpensive MFT shape as a base.

For mine, I went with a large heart shape (it's around 20 cm x 17 cm) from a wide selection at The Works bookshop - for the princely sum of £1! I painted it with some PaperArtsy acrylic paints in 3 shades of blue - starting with a pale shade all over and then whilst still wet I added a darker dusky shade and a bright teal and used a scrunched sheets of scrap paper to "dab and mix" the shades together to get a frosty ice kind of look - I'm not a painting expert - I just play, get myself covered in paint and mess it around til it does what I want (or let it dry then paint over it if it goes wrong!)

Whilst that was drying, I set to work on making lots of poinsettias.   I like to have "fake" poinsettias on my decorations as I love the plants so much but they pretty much always die on me within a couple of days of bringing them home!   So for this ornament I used two different poinsettia dies to get different shaped and coloured plants with different leaves.  Fresh Cut Florals by Concord and 9th provides the paler blooms and the pine leaves, whereas Stitched Poinsettia from Lawn Fawn provides the darker blooms and the poinsettia leaves.  I just assembled them into 5 flowers with the leaves glued behind and then kept the pine leaves to add around to complete the floral arrangement.

Once the base was dry I went to my go-to Christmas stamp - the Big & Bold Warm Winter Wishes Snowflake from Colorado Craft Company, stamped some snowflakes around the right edge using white ink.  Now there is a matching die which means I can do much more with it (I'm going to make lots of snowflake ornaments to hang in the window!) so I stamped and embossed one snowflake on vellum and used distress collage medium to apply it to the base.

To finish I arranged my flowers and leaves around the right hand side of the heart and added a sentiment using the Merry & Bright Die from Concord and 9th and hung with some candy-cane rope from a local habberdashery store.   Here's a close up so you can see it in more detail hopefully as the light is really poor here today.

So hopefully I've encouraged you to have a go yourself - if you have no mdf shapes - make your own with some thick card instead - draw around a plate for a big circle or make a star.  It would be a fun project to do with kids too.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• MFT have a new release on Tuesday which will be in store for release.

• Lawn Fawn have a release on Thursday which is currently in transit (new stock only.  Sorry no restocks this time)

• Avery Elle also have a new release on Thursday - that is also in transit.

• The latest Waffle Flower Crafts release is in transit and should be here this week.

• Mama Elephant don't have a release in December but I got a notification that little agenda gnomes were back in stock (stamps only sorry dies are still oos) so they're on their way back too.

There is also lots of other stuff coming but as none of it has shipped yet, details will follow next week heopfully.

Happy Crafting

Tara