Magical Christmas

Austin: I thought Sally was totally crazy by ripping the mountains up but made the card even awesome. I made the card to sent children in need and I think they are going to like it. What I felt when I was making it was fun and exiting. I enjoyed doing the watercoloured smooshing makes the mountain. I like the way the card is still looking awesome.

Sally:  Hi, so we always end up making way more Christmas cards than we need to hand out, what can I say? Austin loves making Christmas cards 😊 Instead of throwing them out of anything like that we like to give cards to various card drives or charities that collect cards to give to people in hospital. This year in addition to the Caring Hearts card drive we do every year we also made cards for Cards for Hospitalized Kids & Post Pals which are two different charities that give cards to kids who are seriously sick. Austin is a really compassionate kiddo & loves to be able to help people & if he can do it with his cards all the better.

Happy Owlidays

Austin: I enjoyed the sewing I find it rests me and I like the owl on it and the branch makes it sophisticated card. Love this card.
I took time but the card looked really awesome at the end.

Sally: I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving (those of you who celebrate it) & are enjoying the Black Friday Sales. Among the emails for Black Friday I saw the one from Winnie & Walter saying that they are shutting down.. Austin & I were gutted, Winnie & Walter are one of our favourite brands. We especially love the stamps, we don't have many sets but we have used the two we've got over & over again in so so many different ways. This Happy Owlidays set has to be our favourite though (they are sold out & I doubt they're restocking, for obvious reasons).

Bright Starry Night

Austin: The best part is the sentiment and the trees and the background and the stars.

Sally: We do so many winter night cards we weren’t sure how to make something a bit new. So we didn’t. We took the key elements of our winter night cards & just simplified it, polished it & ended up with an elegant, sophisticated, clean & simple card (or as CAS as we get lol).

Joy to the world

'

Austin: I have made this card over and over for a long time over and over again. It's been hard but I really like this card. I did the right colour on the mountains make it worth it. When I was making this card I really enjoyed and had a good time making this card blending the background prepping everything was magnificent.

Sally: As Austin said we have made this card a few times (athough it really isn't very hard, Austin just doesn't like anything where he has to do delicate or fiddly elements on a card. He likes the result though which is why this card has been made over and over again.
What makes this card so good is the Hero Arts Snowy Drifts die set which has these great layering scene dies. We have done all kinds of things with this set, we have made it into a stencil which we used to make this card.
My personal favourite though is when we use the dies like this.

Winter wonderland

Austin: I love this card because it has lots of glitter and sparkle which I love and has lots of character on this card.
My favourite part of the card is the glitter card background and the snowflakes is really pretty and the glitter houses is so perfect.

Sally: This card idea totally came from the embossing powder we heat embossed the snowflakes with. Kristina Werner recently did a card where she heat embossed one huge snowflake with some Brutus Monroe Rainbow Sparkle embossing powder & she mentioned that it looked amazing on black cardstock. We happened to have the Rainbow Sparkle embossing powder so I really wanted to try it out & from there this card idea just kind of manifested.

Christmas down under

Austin: I love the way the sand is the banner and the background is to die for and the waves are blended.
The tree with the decorations are amazing makes the card especially the penguin.

The stamped background is awesome because its a grey and words on it makes it stand out.

Sally: This card is kind of a merging of two favourite card ideas, three if you include the banner scene element.

Years ago I was watching a Jennifer McGuire video where she reviewed a stamp release by My Favorite Things. As she was going through the stamps I kind of zoned out until she got to this Penguin in Paradise set. I knew Austin would love making Christmas cards with it & he has, he's made loads (although not as many these days because I struggle with fine motor control which makes fussy cutting difficult and painful, I never could get the hang of solid dies so we never got them for this set). 

Austin's favourite way to use this penguin set is on a 'beach Santa' card, like with this awesome die from Paper Rose.

Rudolph the Dragon

Austin: I do lots of Santa cards with the dragon. I normally put them on a New York Card because I think it looks cool but I like this one too. I like how Santa is dropping presents, makes it a really good Christmas card.
I love the background watercolouring. I love watercolouring because it's so fun and I enjoy doing it.
Everything about the card is such a good design and I love the painted mountains because they make the background look good.

Sally: This is actually a deceptively simple card, That background is actually a simple watercolour background with black, watercolour painted mountains, a lot of flicking with white watercolours and a simple 4 pointed star.

Winter Skating Party

Austin: I enjoyed making this card it was quite hard but I enjoyed making it. I love the watercolour background and the mountains this is an awesome card.
I really like the skating people, looks so cute and I love the sentiment in silver, it really stands out.
The glitter paper is so neat and cute and makes the card shine. Looks so gorgeous

Sally: Our mum came up with the concept for this card. She comes up with these conceptual ideas & then it's really fun trying to turn them into cards.
I especially love the colours on this. I gave our mum Pinterest & got her to pick a colour swatch of how she wanted the animals coloured & I think she did a pretty good job, they look perfect on this background, so well done mum 😊 

Simon Says Stamp November Card Kit

Austin: I like all these cards. I like how different cards there are I really like the cards I like how we can do so many different things. This kit stamp set is really good for beginners and it would have helped me at the beginning, that's why it's an amazing stamp set.
I like the watercolour card with the trees it looks lovely and a great design. The twine is what makes the card really sparkle because twine is so lovely and amazing. It's a really different card.

Sally: I used to get card kits all the time when I was first making cards & at least half the time I would have no idea what to make. I think I was so worried about doing something new that I would never make anything. So yeah, it's way more fun with Austin who totally doesn't care about that. Plus I did Kristina Werner's card sketch trick & it helped Austin & I choose which cards we wanted to make with the kit. We ended up making these 5 cards.

Cozy Companion

Austin: I really enjoyed this card and it was a disaster all the way through, it was hard making the card work but how it turned out looks amazing and wonderful.

I really love the fox sat next to the fire and I really love the card, so many good ideas and I really love the card. Sally did so good colouring and glitter is so pretty and the watercolour is so cool, I love it Sally so clever she has so good ideas I love it, it so awesome. It have so many good ideas.

Sally: Oh this card was so hard to sort! I can't believe how stressful it was to make an indoor card, why do we struggle so much? We started out by trying to make a window card with clever die cutting in the window & blending & glitter paste stencilling inside. In retrospect, that was way too much. First off the blending looked okay....the second time but the glitter paste totally ruined it. Yeah, and then we did the watercolouring & made the window.....which totally didn't work (clever die cutting is harder than it looks on youtube lol) then FINALLY we settled on this design. We totally love how it worked out though so I guess all's well that ends well.

Out of This World Christmas

Austin: I really love the card I really tried my best, I love the card. I made it for a Lawn Fawnatics competition for cards for boys, the idea for different cards for boys and girls is a bit silly everyone likes nice cards. But it was fun to make something different. I found this specific card very hard to focus and make the card I loose concentration on the card but I made a video and liked being in the video, it made me feel very professional and grown up.
I love the shaker card but I prefer the one with the planets more, I like watercolour the planets are so pretty.

Sally: We often do cards in twos, it's just as easy to do everything twice & when you have to make more than 100 Christmas cards a year it's best to make as many as possible. Anyway, we like to make multiples but not identical cards if that makes sense.

Joy and Happiness

Austin: I really like this card because I used the background that has been sitting on the shelf for a while because I didn't know what to do with it.
I like doing glitter paste but I wish it dries faster because I forget what card I wanted to make with the background.
I like the dragon because it's good colours and I like it because dragons are awesome. I like the bit where the dragon and squirrel are having coffee together.

Sally: This card is actually relatively straight forward to put together once the background is done.

First off blend dark blue & rich purple water reactive inks in a semi circle on the upper half of a piece of card laying horizontally. I can't remember exactly which ones we used but I think they were regular Ranger Distress inks.

Christmas in April

Don't worry, it's not Christmas card time yet. I make Christmas Cards all year long, I need to make a lot of cards and I am a slow card maker so I start early....like boxing day early.

I used a mask to create the mountains and I blended the sky with shaded lilac distress ink and the mountains in a grey distress oxide ink weathered wood on a piece of neenah solar white cardstock. That sorted the background. Then I dye cut the border out of another piece of neenah solar white cardstock using the lawn fawn fancy scalloped rectangles and a simon says stamp stitched rectangle die, it cut out a lovely border.

I also dye cut the memory box alpine tree on white card it cut out perfectly.  Then I cut a piece of acetate to the perfect size for the card using the lawn fawn die I used for the fram. Next I used foam tape on the card to stick the card, before I stick everything together I stamped the sentiment (from the Hero Arts Warm Hogs stamp set using Hero Arts Dusty Blue) on the background. Finally I put sequins in the card to make it a 'shaker' card. I picked lots out and then put them on the card.

My sister coloured the bunny (from the Mama Elephant Pix Happy Holidays) in copic markers and then I die cut it and stuck it on the card.

What do you think? I like the shaker and the background showing round the frame. Shakers are lots of fun I think I will do lots this year. My sister has ordered me some My Favourite Things shaker pockets to make it easier to do them. She says shakers are annoying to make.
Do you like making shakers? Do you have any advice?