Holiday Projects

I was really excited to come up with some projects this week at Frosted Designs.  Our challenge this week is to come up with a Holiday project for the December Holidays.  Since we have been in dire need of holiday decorations at our house this year I decided to make a Happy Holidays banner  for my first project.  I decided on Happy Holidays because we are a blended family and we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas along with the New Years holiday.  Keeping with that I kept the colors more wintery than holiday specific. 

My Bosskut Gazelle was integral to this project.  I used it to cut out the snowflake, alphas, bows, smaller snowflakes, and ornaments.  Once I got everything cut out I set to work assembling each letter block.  Each letter is mounted on a 4x4 piece of cardstock.  Then the large snowflake sits on top of that and finally comes the letter.   On the large snowflakes I used a decorative flourish stamp to create swirls all over the snowflake.  After I used this technique on the altered box I made for the Hanukkah swap I was in I just can't stop.  It looks so good! Each snowflake I tried to stamp in a little different pattern so that each one was individual like real snowflakes. Then I inked the edges of the letters lightly with black soot Distress ink and on the tops of the letters I used icicle Stickles to create an icicle effect on the letters (I got the idea from Tim Holtz's 12 tags of Christmas).Finally I added some little die cuts that I cut using my Bosskut, some more Stickles, and some bling.  I attached the letters using two different white ribbon I had and some brads.  I am really happy with how it turned out and it looks great in our living room.  Here is a close up of some of the letters.

My second project this week is an altered canvas that I made.  Homemade is a theme for our Christmas gifts this year.  With the tough times and a recent budget that my husband and I put ourselves on we wanted to make every dollar we spent really count this year for the holidays.  SO we went to Hobbly Lobby and bought a few canvases with 40% off coupons and voila!  You have $5 gifts that are awesome!  This canvas is for my step grandmother-in law.  She loves vintage and handmade crafts. 

Fist I took the canvas and used Tim Holtz red pepper and gold alcohol inks for the backgrounds.  I used the December Swirlydoos kit for the papers, shaped template and the poinsettia design.  I distressed and inked the paper using vintage photo Distress ink.  Then I stamped and embossed the flourishes using a Tim Holtz stamp and a Zing embossing powders with a glitter and metallic finish.  Then I used the bracket doodling template that was included in the kit to make the half bracket and the little sun ray design.  I stenciled the words.  For the poinsettia chipboard I used the red pepper alcohol ink for the flower portion and the covered the leaves in green Stickles.  Finally I added some dimensional gift stickers and I mixed perfect pearls silver and gold powders with water and flicked them onto the canvas for a bit of a sparkly snow effect.  Here is another view of the project.