It's that wonderful time of the year

No I'm not talking about Christmas day but that one of my favourite Christmas challenges is back for 2016.  I was so delighted to see that Linda of The Funkie Junkie blog has started off her wonderful annual 12 tags of Christmas Funkie Junkie style.  I have played along with this Christmas challenge for the last 3 years and it really is such a fun.  You can make anything crafty as long as it is Christmas themed and I use it to create 12 very unique Christmas cards. This year I though I  may even be making variations of my originals to sell in Dotty's Tearooms as I need an awful lot of my handmade cards.

If you would like to play along please check out her post here which gives all the details of the challenge requirements. You can also see her first tag. The challenge is sponsored by The Funkie Junkie Boutique and you could even win one of the prize vouchers if you enter every week and complete all 12 tasks.

It certainly doesn't feel much like Christmas yet as we are still enjoying all the colours of Autumn at my beloved local ponds.

There is certainly a golden hue everywhere.

Linda's debut tag is gorgeous. I chose for my inspiration from it, the golden background stars, the music and the pine trees.

I know that in past years you have enjoyed seeing my process of how I make these cards so here goes. I chose to play with my Visible Image Winter wonderland set of stamps. This is such a great set for creating Winter scenes.
I decided to use Wendy Vecchi gold embossing paste and my Tim Holtz star stencil for creating my starry sky.

 I masked off a moon and started blending distress inks for my night sky.

 To add the music element I added Chipped Sapphire distress ink through my new Tim Holtz music stencil. I then stamped and embossed Santa and put him flying across the moon..........ready to delivery his presents.

I forgot to photograph the next part but I used green DIs to create a forest floor at the bottom of the card. I then stamped 2 of the largest Visible Image trees in the background.

I stamped a third tree using 2 colours of green archival ink and vaguely fussy cut it out.

 So then it was time to put everything together.

Below here is my finished card.  You can see that I added the Visible Image Go to Christmas words "from our home to yours" which I also embossed. I added a couple of Cheery Lynn snowflakes to finish everything off. I mounted my piece on a gold card blank, all ready for Dotty's. I am making these in 2s and I will share my other version at some point.

Ho Ho Ho!!

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

12 tags of Christmas Funkie Junkie style  week 1
Cheery Lynn 1/2 anything goes I have used CL snowflakes
Pixie's Snippets playground #249 I used snippets of card for my snowflakes and for my fussy cut tree.
The Ribbon Girl 1/3 October any card
Simon Says stamp Wednesday anything goes
Christmas at Sweet stampin Christmas die cuts my snowflakes are die cuts.
Christmas card challenges #43

Thanks for visiting today and for the kind comments you take the time to leave. Sending you some of this lovely sunshine in case you are not getting any!

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x