Christmas Presents - Doll Bags

Oh dear. I might have splurged on some fabric paints and jute bags. Look what happened:

Christmas Presents - Personalised Shadow Box Frame

This one was commissioned by a friend of mine, and I know she hasn't passed it on to the person it is for yet, so I won't put all the pictures of hers up! I stole the idea for my sister in law, as a present from our wee fella, and she had a tear in her eye when she opened it. The nicest thing about personalised handmade presents is that they are so specific to the person and the situation. Here is my "Everything is nicer with..." frame:

Christmas Presents - Personalised Subway Art

Now that Christmas is over I can post some of the delicious Christmas presents I was commissioned to make this year!

The first thing I was asked to make was a personalised subway art frame. I love these things, and I especially love coming up with the things to write on them with the person giving the gift. They're such a personal present. This one is for a lady called Angie.

I usually make these in Inkscape but I ventured into Serif this year and I'm delighted with it. I hear from the person who ordered it that the recipient absolutely loved it!

Christmas Card 6

Last one! This was made off the back of the popularity of my "wine fairy" range. For some reason she always seems to go down well and I love the idea, so I made myself a cheeky card from my wee boy! A crafter's got to do what a crafter's got to do, right?

Here she is:

This is fairly heavily based around the sentiment. I just used my stickles on the "mummy" to make it stand out. The fairy is a cutout from a Serif embellishment. I can't wait to get my Christmas present as I have some exciting things I can do...wait til I tell you about it...

An Art Deco Christmas Tag!

Hello! This is an exciting post as I've applied for a design team! I don't know if you know about these - there are lots of brilliant challenge blogs and they recruit a team of crafters to come up with inspiration for each challenge. I've applied once before years ago for a design team but I didn't have any luck and I've always thought my stuff was too basic so I've shied away from applying again. Anyway, I found this one through a Facebook group, and it's a blog I didn't even know about, which is actually perfect for my style!

The blog is based heavily on sentiments, and lots of my cards depend on sentiments, so I'm going to go for it. Wish me luck!

The challenge is to make a tag. This stamp is called 'Vintage Tree Party' from A Day for Daisies and I fell in love with it. It's so Gatsby and the dresses just cry out for some lovely shaded colouring.

This is in the middle of the making - I positioned the stamp and used a font called Bergamot Ornaments for the art deco style line, and a font called Benthem for the sentiment. I tried to use art deco style fonts to match the stamp. The sentiment is a lyric from Etta James' Santa Baby, which is such a sultry wee Christmas song! I thought these girls would be looking for a classy gift like the ones requested in the song!

I tried to go for a silver and gold theme so the dresses are my caramel and sandstone Promarkers and the greys (mainly Ice Grey 3 and 1). I put the presents in the same colourways, and used Brilliant Silver and White Gold glitter to embellish the tree with my quickie glue pen (I love that wee pen).

Then the whole thing was cut out in a nice art deco shape (using a hi tech sellotape roll to draw the curves, hah...I'm such a cheapskate), mounted on silver mirriboard, then black, and wrapped with a huge black organza ribbon bow. I'm quite pleased!

Christmas Card 5

I'm getting close to Christmas now! Baby has had a cold so these were thrown together. I like them, though!

Have a guess where the background came from? Serif! The Happy Christmas is also a Craft Artist embellishment but I'm really proud of the font-matching job I did for the name underneath. I found this chalk-board style font on dafont.com and managed to use the outline, outer glow and noise features in Serif to make it match the embellishment as much as possible. I'm quite proud of how it worked out!

The penguin is from Create a Critter, and the igloo is his wee featured embellishment from the same cartridge! It's so cute looking.

Christmas Cards 3 and 4

Another couple of cards! Again, mega quick as the boy wonder is having a wee growth spurt and I barely have time to craft!

The background was built up in Serif - I love the snowy, sunny background and the trees with the christmas lights! The reindeer is from my Cricut Create-a-Critter cartridge which I bought with my full loyalty card from Craftworld! I love this cartridge, it's too cute. I made up the sentiment which is why it's so cheesy haha.

This one is a Serif background and a typed sentiment. The nativity was found on Google and I used Inkscape to make it an SVG, which I cut using Make the Cut. I love it, but I thought my Cricut was going to keel over with the stress!

Christmas Card 2

Here's another of this year's Christmas cards. I'm so grateful for Serif Craft Artist this year, it's making all of my backgrounds etc!

This one is for hubby! I really did depend on Serif for most of this - the Santa, background and Merry Christmas were all made in it. The name was cut using Make the Cut and a free font. Super quick but quite nice.

Christmas Card 1

Here is one of my special Christmas cards for this year! I wanted them to be handmade but not too full of effort as the wee fella is taking up all of my time this December.

These were just a Serif Craft Artists background, some ribbon edges and crepe bow images. I dropped a shadow behind it all and added a sentiment.

The cut files are my new favourite cut files ever! They are called Comet's Christmas Candy Land from SVGCuts.com and they are all solid holiday shapes with filigree cuts to correspond. I used gold and silver metallic card from Create & Craft to cut these out which look quite elegant!