Christmas Card Club - Cards 3 & 4/2019 - Fairy & Robin

Hello Everyone,

It's been quite a while since I've been able to blog anything - another lung infection bad enough to prevent me from doing much more than cough. Happily, I can report that I'm now almost completely recovered and normal service can be resumed!

And I have a twofer for you today because, unfortunately, I wasn't able to post a card for the last Christmas Card Club challenge. Firstly, here's the card for this week, CCC no.4, which is based on Gwen's challenge - 'birds'.

Actually, I've only managed one bird so I hope that passes muster. I found this bird stamp in a set and thought that coloured appropriately it would look like the perfect Christmas robin.One of my all-time favourite Penny Black stamp creates a very nice wintry scene.

Supplies used:

• a white A6 card base (Docrafts) portrait orientation
• stamps - Berry Red, Snow White (Penny Black); Winter Woodland stamp set (Craftstore) - leaf and bird; Forest Magic - greeting
• inks - Memories Black; Memento Rich Cocoa; Versafine Olympia Green
• card - white for stamped topper; red for layering; scraps of smooth white for bird and greeting
• paints - black, brown and red Spectrum Noir Aquatints Nos. 63, 40 & 11 for bird 
• embellishments: black 'pearl' for birds eye; Xmas Red Stickles for 'berries'

The second card, CCC no.3, should have been posted two weeks ago for GranMargaret's choice - 'angels or fairies'. I'm not a fan of either angels or fairies so I very nearly ended up going for the fallback of 'anything goes'. However, after a lot of digging around in my stash I discovered this fairy topper.

I also dug out of a box of 'experiments' the piece of embossed vellum used as a layer on the card. It started out as a sheet of plain white vellum but a long time ago, in fact two printers ago, I used desktop publishing software to change the colour to pale blue. This was in the days before it was possible to source coloured vellum - now it's easy to find online.

Supplies used:

• a white A6 card base (Docrafts) landscape orientation
• card - blue and red for matting and layering; scrap of white for greeting
• papers - red/white check from Those Characters from Cleveland (2012); pale blue vellum
• embossing folder - Snowflakes Cuttlebug) 
• topper - this cute fairy image is one from a set bought from an online store several years ago (source forgotten)
• embellishments - red peel-off greeting; red/white gingham ribbon; turquoise enamel dots

Right, that's me caught up with the Christmas Card Club challenges. It's so nice to be back and fit enough to participate again. The ladies in our Christmas Card Club will be publishing their cards too. To save the stress of the last minute dash in December we make a Christmas card every two weeks and posting it on our own blogs - see the list of links on the sidebar to the right.

There's quite a whiff of Spring in the air today so hopefully that's an end to the winter blues. The EM certainly thinks so - he's planning ahead by putting the picnic chairs in the boot of the car ready for the better weather.

Thanks for visiting - I really appreciate it.