Christmas Card Club Challenge - Animals at Christmas

Hand stamped Christmas Card by UK Stampin' Up! Demonstrator Zoe Tant with We Must Celebrate

I'm a little late for our fortnightly Christmas card club challenge set by Kate up in Scotland, but a) I didn't have it made yesterday to post and b) it just felt not quite right being Easter Sunday. So I've enjoyed tinkering today and have made this card for the theme Animals at Christmas.  Mine are cute, fluffy and not what you'd usually expect for Christmas, but I think this fun combo of stamp sets from Stampin' Up! and animals has worked out quite well.  If you like cute and humorous Christmas cards you may also like one I made last year with Stampin' Up! This Little Piggy.

Ready for Christmas provides the tree, gifts, ornament, main sentiment and cute little dog.  The other critters are from the Stampin' Up! spring catalogue set We Must Celebrate which I adore as it is so sweet and full of great sentiments like 'We're behind you all the way" and 'We think you're the best' which are great for teachers and children to give to teachers.  I used the tree lights from a set called Confetti Celebration stamped them in black ink and add white gel pen to make it simple white lights.

As the critters are adding baubles to the tree I just added some gold metallic enamel stars to help them along the way and the tree was first stamped with old olive ink and then just partially with garden green to give some shading although my photo doesn't show it ever so well.  The parcels coloured up nicely with my stampin' blends alcohol markers and I gave them some depth by raising some with stampin dimensionals.  To break up the old olive matting layer I embossed it first with the Scattered Sequins Dynamic Textured Impressions folder.  My card base is 5.75" square and so I was able to make it from a sheet of thick whisper white card.

I hope you've managed to have a relaxing Bank Holiday weekend and that the weather has dampened your spirits as much as your garden.  We've played games and chilled and it's been great to have Olivia home from Uni.

I'm now spending the week doing a little more of the above and some final preparations for going to the Stampin' Up! Onstage event in Telford next weekend.  I've made my swaps ie cards to trade with others for ideas and now just have my team presents to wrap.  Hope you have a good week.

Zoe xx