Fir and Card Trees

We went up to our local Garden Centre on Sunday to choose our main Christmas tree.The weather was perfect....so cold and frosty. There were also some real Reindeer there which certainly drew in the crowds.

Comet and Dancer had just finished eating and were snoozing in the sunshine ;0)
There were as always lots of lovely trees to choose from.

We selected one about 7' tall and it was will be delivered during the week. We will pot it up and decorate it next Saturday....I just love getting out all my ornaments from over the years and will be adding my little gingerbread man my Mum bought me at Harrods.











I have also been creating some Christmas tree cards. I was really lucky to win some stamps from the UK based company, Visible Image and I had time for some crafting at the weekend. I decided to go back to my crafting roots and have a play with messy stamping...and what fun I had. I first tried some embossing using their Santa and reindeer stamp, which I already own.  I then made a whole sheet of backing paper using green and red distress inks. I had forgotten what fun it is to get inky fingers

I also won a lovely poem stamp which I will use another time.


I made the backing sheet on the far right using Kraft paper, it gave a lovely richness with the distress inks. I love the way you can blend the inks together.

These 2 focals have been stamped with  blue pigment ink and then clear embossed.

So I will share with you for my card challenge today one of my finished tree cards.




For this card I stamped directly onto the red/green backing sheet I had made and then added white embossing powder which I melted with my heat gun. I love the way some pink/red/green highlights shine through.

I really love this effect. I matted the stamped focal onto red card and mounted it onto some fun robin backing paper. I added a Lili of the Valley sentiment, a ribbon and some hand punched holly leaves.I also used plenty of glitter glue on the snowflake.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;
Visible Image Christmas challenge
Stamping Sensations  Treemendous
The Ribbon Girl Christmas ho ho ho
Penny Black Allsorts It's your choice
Pretty Little Ribbons Shop It's Christmas
Totally Gorjuss Anything goes with glitter #160





There are only 22 sleeps to go now.

I have my last silversmithing class tomorrow and I hope to finish most of my present shopping afterwards. I wrote and posted most of my cards on Saturday so things are ticking along fairly well.

We brought in our little Christmas tree from the garden yesterday. We managed to keep it growing from last year. With the wet summer it really thrived. We call it our chocolate tree and I put on its lights and some of the chocolates last night. There is something quite magical when the fairy lights twinkle in the darkness. It is standing in the hall and I can see it from where I am typing this. Christmas really is here now.

All is well in Jane's World ;0)

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x