The final Christmas countdown

I have enjoyed making Christmas cards this year, but to be honest I don't mind not having to make any for a few months...

And a few gift tags:

And here's another birthday card:

Polaroid style birthday cards and some more for Christmas

I love Polaroid dies and have recently used them a lot on cards. IrRESISTible inks are another recent discovery I cannot get enough of, so here we go:

It also means I can make more room in my box of DIY embellishments (see earlier post), and they can be used without a frame as well:

 

De-stashing is also more than necessary for my Christmas stuff, so more Christmas cards:

Off to the craft room now - I would like to finish something else for Christmas. Please stay tuned...

Christmas cards again

This time for personal use and made at home rather than in the office:

I love this forest die. Actually I just wanted to buy glue last Saturday, but the die somehow ended up in the shopping basked as well. If I remember well a snowflake punch was also involved.

Corsica

The other day I found a photo CD, which included some photos from a cycling tour in Corsica ending at the Pointe de la Parata with its Genoese tower. (For further info see Wikipedia.) Allegedly the Genoese towers inspired Tolkien to create the beacons of Gondor, but this may be a myth... and I digress.

Two of the found photos made there way onto this layout:

Some more cards for a good cause

We did it - a total of 168 Christmas cards! These are the ones we made with a bunch of colleagues over a few lunch breaks:

There was a bit of paper left over, and one evening and ten cards later we have used it all up, except for some tiny stripes:

More than half of the cards are sold already, the remaining ones will hopefully all be gone by Saturday.

Christmas cards for a good cause

There are quite a few philanthropic activities over the year at the company I work for. My favourite good cause to support is a children's home. They host a Christmas market each year for which I have normally made cards to sell. This year there are some more colleagues who want to help, so we currently spend 1-2 lunch breaks per week making cards for the market and for sale to our colleagues in favour of the children's home.

The ones for the market will all have a French greeting, and for the preordered cards we consider our colleagues' language preferences.

Here's our first lot:

Some more layouts

I have completed the 24 layouts before Christmas challenge :-) In an attempt to decrease my stash of supplies I added a little extra challenge to include at least one supply that is over a year old. Admittedly I am not going to run out of supplies any time soon, so there was no considerable decrease, but at least I have completed this mini-challenge as well. Some girls included a "no shopping" mini challenge, but since I have subscribed to a kit this was out of the question for me, plus I needed a new album, as I was running out of space to file the layouts.

Here are some of the layouts. The first one is about pistachio cream, which tastes a bit like an even better version of Nutella (chocolate cream) but looks a bit like its extraterrestrial version:

I have no idea why I always prefer limited edition perfumes and shower gels. In most cases I don't even notice that there are limited until I want to buy more but can't because the product is no longer available. In this case my clever friend included a bottle of my current favourite shower gel in my birthday present, so I can continue my iced strawberry dream for another 500 ml. This layout is actually the result of coincidence - I only thought about it when I wanted to throw the empty bottle away:

And here's my confession of being a Downton Abbey addict:

Most other layouts for the challenge include photos of friends and family, which I do not want to share on the blog - sorry about that.

Autumn beauties

At the moment there is challenge on my favourite forum to complete 24 layouts before 24 December. This my 11th layout for this challenge and includes supplies from two lines I like a lot these days - "Shimelle" and "Notes & Things".

Luckily I managed to take these photos on 1 November - the mushrooms were broken off a day later:

Time to use the DIY embellishments

The DIY embellishment box was overflowing - time to actually use them. I also used some older scraps as well as some of my current favourites - the "Shimelle" collection by American Crafts and "Dreamy" by Heidi Swapp.

I have also recently added a few new mists to my collection, which so far only had flat and non sparkly sprays. I still love Dylusions and will continue to use them a lot, but the dimension of the Tsukineko IrRESISTible sprays looks great, and so does the Heidi Swapp Color  Shine.

The IrRESISTible spots look black on paper, but they are actually grey. I think I prefer this and will not buy the black spray for the time being - might be too much of a contrast.