Some festive inspiration for Country View Challenges

Good morning I am back with some more inspiration. This month I am hosting the challenge over at Country View Challenges and chose the theme of "Anything BUT a card". So just as it says on the tin I would like to see you sharing any crafting projects at all, papercrafts, knitting, sewing etc etc but NO cards this time. 

As always there is a fab £20 voucher up for grabs for one lucky randomly selected winner to spend on the website. What a cool pre Christmas treat that would be. All the details for the November challenge can be found here.

If you missed my first post, a journal page, do check it out here

It's only 6 weeks now til Christmas so I thought I would share something more festive to hopefully tempt you to join us. I LOVE making artist trading cards and coins so I decided to make both. I usually swap these but you can also use them to make into focals for projects/cards too.

This is what I got up to using a set of my very vintage Tim Holtz set of Christmas stamps. His traditional stamps never go out of fashion in my humble opinion. There is nothing quite like a "real" Father Christmas. I think it is the child in me and my memories of Christmas past.

My old set is called Holiday Collections. The images are wonderful.

I stamped them in black and clear embossed them on white card.

Using Zig watercolour pens I added a tiny bit of colour just to highlight areas.

Using Vintage photo and Evergreen bough distress inks I then blended on some colour for the backgrounds. First the vintage photo ink

I rounded the edges

and I then added the Evergreen bough ink.

I also added a few die cut elements which you will see in the finished photos.

Finally I matted them onto black cards measuring 3 1/2 by 2 1/2 ".

For the coins I just die cut the stamped images with a 2 1/2" circle die and used the same process for colouring and adding distress ink as for the cards.

I then added some snow to Santa's beard using a Snowriter and glamour dust.

Here are my finished cards 

with some close ups.

The coins

and both together.

I hope I may have inspired you to join in with our November, "Anything but a card" challenge. You can use any stamps/products, the choice is yours. 

I would like to enter them into the following challenges;

Simon says stamp Wednesday anything goes 

Unicorn challenge 1/3 anything goes 

You can enter our challenge as many times as you like and combine with other challenges. There is also a £20 crafting voucher up for grabs to the lucky randomly selected winner to spend over on the Country View Crafts on line store. Remember that UK postage and packing from CVC is free on all orders over £7.50! Once again all the details for the November challenge can be found here.

Thanks so much for stopping by today.

Back soon

Bye for now

Jane x