It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas...Tim Holtz Style

Well Christmas is 7 days always and all my Christmas cards are done...made 42 total and some gift card holders. Wanted to use some new techniques and also as many Tim stamps as possible.  Here is a sample of my cards:

The background here is painted enamel- love this technique!

I used brown flocking on the reindeer for texture.

Next up are the winter wonderland cards:

Backgound here is done with alcohol inks! I entered this one into the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Winter Stamping. See details here.

And now for the blueprints:

A few inspired by Tim's tutorial on the Ranger blog:

And of course the gift card holders-Katie made these!

She is so talented!

Hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ho Ho Ho.....

Made this super cute Santa card yesterday and wanted to share.  I have been wanting to do the chimney for a while now and I just love how it came out.  I inked up the Tim Holtz Brick Wall embossing folder with Pumice Stone distress ink and ran it through the vagabond to get the color of the cement in between the bricks.  Then I went over the raised bricks with Fired Brick distress ink and a blending tool.  I used the drippings from the Alterations Bigz die Candlelight for the snow.  I covered them with texture paste and distress tickles rock candy glitter for texture.  For the Santa- I painted all the pieces, inked the edges and applied snow batting to his beard for actual fuzzy texture.  I used distress rock candy glitter on his hat, pom pom and mustache!  I placed both pieces with pop-dots on Tim Holtz Merriment paper- "twas the night before Christmas"- how appropriate!

The Countdown begins.....

Cannot even believe it is already December and we have started the Christmas countdown.  This year to commemorate the days leading up to my favorite holiday I made some advent calendars.  Thanks to the inspiration of Tim Holtz and his media team member Anna-Karin. Instructions for the advent calendar are here on Anna-Karin's blog Layers of Ink.  I also made three others in less of the vintage style for my sister, a friend and of course us!

Here they are:

And of course the one for my sister HAD to have snowmen on it:

The other two: 

For the latter ones- I added my own flair and used wash tape around all the edges instead of painting. I love the candy cane look and feel that it gave to the project.  I also used Tim Holtz's Letterpress and some decorated trees (colored with distress stain sprays of course) to add some interest to the top!

Let the countdown begin! Oh, and most importantly all drawers were filled with yummy surprises!