When I first received The Greetery’s Notionables and Oval Hoopla die and insert, I cut lots of pieces out and assembled them. I put them in one of three wooden bowls I keep in my craft room and they have stayed right there until after Christmas when I needed two thank you notes for my college friends.

I absolutely love these dies! I grew up in Ohio in farm country. Most of my friends lived on farms, and everyone belonged to 4-H. Luckily for those of us who lived in the village, there was also a 4-H group for sewers. Amazingly enough, when we moved to New Paltz, NY when I was a junior in high school, I found another 4-H group of sewers and belonged to 4-H until I graduated from high school. I continued to sew for years, making clothes for myself, the guys in our family, and then for my kids. Hannah has worn a couple of the dresses I made for Sarah when she was a little girl. I gave up the habit when it cost more to buy the materials to make a dress than it did to buy a nice dress in the store. These Notionables are so realistic. I didn’t include any of the scissors in my cards since they are too big for my 4-bar notecards, but I included one in the photo above. If you assemble it with a tiny brad, they open and close. The thimble is adorable, and one of my most prized possessions is my mother’s sterling silver engraved thimble.

The Hoopla dies are also realistic. The frames die cut with a woodgrain pattern and the wooden fittings with the pin are also realistic. The insert die creates that tiny pattern around the edges that completes the look, and you can see that the thread die goes right through the eye of the needle.

These were a lot of fun to make and I still have plenty of assembled pieces to make more cards, including a pin cushion made from red felt–so cute! I’ll drop these in Darnell’s NBUS Challenge to honor the occasion of putting this set to good use.

It’s nice to be home and crafting again for challenges. One on my intentions this year is to work my way through the new-to-me products, of which there are far too many. I’m off to a decent start here. These snowflakes arrived as a freebie with a Scrapbook.com purchase, and seemed to be perfect for the Simon Says Instagram Challenge White On White.

The design idea for this card came from Cécile Ribon who often uses beautiful wide ribbons on her cards. This ribbon is Soft White fr0m Paper Source. The sentiment was silver embossed with Reverse Confetti’s Snowflakes. I thought it was generic enough to use for a winter birthday or anniversary. I added some pearls to the centers of the snowflakes.

So this is off to the Simon Says Instagram Challenge, and this is the first time I’ve ever played along there. It’s also off to Simon Says Wednesday Challenge: Something New and the Time Out Challenge with is also “New.” Greta, a blogging and Instagram friend had just joined the Time Out Design Team so I wanted to be sure to play along. The challenge is up for ten more days, so I’m likely play there again. I’m also add this to NBUS where I hope to add many cards this year!

In November I “spent” my rewards points (and a little extra) on some new goodies from #altenewstamps. When the Festive Greenery 3-D embossing folder and stencil arrived, I sat down and created a lot of panels, thinking I would make a set of identical cards. Instead I set a challenge for myself to make as many different cards as possible, and ended up with nine cards. I posted a few of them (here and here) as I made them for various challenges, but I thought I share the rest of them today. All of them started with the 3-D Stencil and coloring stencils. Since there are multiple cards, I’ll just add the additional products I used under each.

Ellen Hutson Essential Ovals, Pinkfresh Studio Perfect Sentiments: Holiday, Pinkfresh Studio Gold Pearls

Ellen Hutson Essential Rectangles, Star sticker The Paper Studio, Reverse Confetti Christmas Card Greetings

Simon Says Stitched Dress-up Tags, The Greetery Speed Tags: Christmas  Sentiments

Simon Says Stitched Rectangles and Stitched Circles, Pinkfresh Studio  Foiled Sentiments for Holiday

This one was embossed on Concord & 9th’s Evergreen cardstock, no stencil; Pinkfresh Studio Perfect Sentiments: Holiday, Paper Studio Gold Pearls

And, finally, a tag which ultimately I put on a card base when I needed one last Christmas card.

Ellen Hustson: Essential Ovals, The Greetery Speed Tags: Christmas Sentiments

There are still a few challenges looking for holiday cards so some of these are off to 52 Christmas Card Throwdown looking for Clean and Simple cards, The Four Seasons Challenge (looking for Winter cards), and The Card Concept: Christmas Cheer.

The Card Concept wants you to define your style. I’m sending over the first of the tag cards, so it’s a Clean and Simple style,

The card I shared yesterday was the first card I made with Pinkfresh Studio’s Folk Snowflake. I went on to make several more variations. The first one was made for a blogging friend who has a love of the color pink.

I white embossed it on pink paper and used some new Pinkfresh Studio inks (cherry blossom, peony, begonia) to color it with the stencil. The sentiment is from Gina K’s Blizzard.

This snowflake was gold embossed and colored with Pinkfresh Studio’s Turquoise, Paradise and Atlantis inks. I layered the PFS Snowflake Cover Plate and then the Art Deco Frame onto an aqua blue card base before adding the snowflake with some dimensional tape. The sentiment and die are from the Folk Snowflake set. I layered three of them together before adding it to the snowflake.

This card proved to be almost impossible to photograph. The card base is a beautiful silver shimmer, but shows up almost like a beige. Definitely not, and much prettier in real life. After coloring this snowflake with Waterfall, Paradise and Atlantis I added it to an already foiled panel I found in my stash. The foiling plate is Waffle Flower’s Tiny Dots.

 I didn’t know what I’d think of a snowflake on a green background, but it might be my favorite in the end. The background panel was dry embossed with Honey Bee’s Winter Gems Cover Plate. It’s not an easy cover plate to use, but came out well this time, and I love it on Concord & 9th’s Evergreen cardstock. It was added to a gold shimmer card base.

After embossing, this snowflake was colored with Ocean Breeze, Mermaid Cove, and Emerald City inks. I added some PFS Gold Glitter dots for a final embellishment.

The sentiments included in this set are great because they could (and were) used for holiday cards, but with the right sentiment on the inside, would work equally well for a winter birthday or other winter celebration. Case in point is the card I posted here that I gave to my hairdresser as a birthday, holiday, and retirement card.

I can be guilty of buying new products and taking months (even a year or more) before I put them to use. Not so with these snowflakes. I think I’m done with them for now, but I’m sure they’ll reappear next winter.

I’m adding two of these to the Pinkfresh December Challenge: Holiday Vibes which is still open.

Needless to say, this card was completed before I left home. We arrived in Wisconsin yesterday, and with the excitement of a “second” Christmas with Caleb and Hannah, I totally forgot to get this post written. I find it interesting which woodblock stamps I chose to keep when I sold or donated a large portion of them years ago. This little stamp from The Stamp Clinic dated 1966 was one of them. I graduated from high school in 1966, and I’d never heard of rubber stamps! When I did a Google search I found several Stamp Clinic stamps featuring these tiny girls listed on eBay, but not this one. They are all marked with a date in the 1990’s. 

I think this might be the first time I’ve ever fussy cut images from a woodblock stamp, but I love how they came out. Before I cut them I had colored them all with Polychromos pencils. They’re so tiny that I thought trying to color them with any kind of marker would be a recipe for disaster. After deciding on the design of the card, I die cut the rectangular opening and added a frame from My Favorite Things A2 Rectangular Frames. On the inside I added a piece of Soft Stone cardstock from Papertrey Ink and placed the girls within the frame, adding dimensional tape to each of them, and a shadow with a gray pencil to mark their path as they carry the letters.

Knowing I’d need some thank you notes, I added a simple script thanks from AMuse Artstamps–a long time favorite. Although I didn’t take a photo of the whole inside, there is room above the frame on the inside for a handwritten message. 

So now I’m off to see what other cards have been added to the Woodblock Wednesday post for December–with thanks to Amy Tsuruta as always for hosting this event.

I set out last night to make two more Christmas cards and knew they could both be more religious in nature than most of my cards. I purchased the Stampin’ Up Peace to You set last year, but this is the first time I’ve used it. It was perfect for the recipients and I used the colors of the AAA Cards Challenge to use black, white and gold. That challenge ends in a few hours, so here is the second post of the day.

In keeping with the AAA Cards Clean & Simple design requirement (and always my preference) this is an easy card to mail. I did use some dimension behind the main panel, but decided to keep the card very simple and without embellishment.

Here you can see the gold frame easily, but the gold on the sentiment didn’t photograph well. The sentiment is one of many I’ve used this season from Memory Box: Black Tabs: Merry Christmas.

In addition to AAA Cards, I’m sending this off to CAS on Friday which is also a color challenge: Black, White and One Other Color. And, of course to NBUS because this stamp had never been used before!