The Cats Pajama's Tuesday Challenge #352

Yippee, its finally Friday!! Max arrived home from camp this afternoon after being away the past four days. He had a fantastic time but I had to wash ALL of the clothes he took with him (whether he wore them or not) as they were all soaking wet and smelled like shoes!! I also have no gardening to do this weekend (apart from my own....) and have just posted the last of my Christmas cards, so things are looking good!!

The theme for the current TCP Tuesday Challenge is 'Winter Holiday'. I recently made 100 cards to give to Sending Love NZ who distribute cards to rest homes for people who have no family etc. I made three different types. These ones that took the longest but I loved making them with all the vibrant colour:

The die is from The Cats Pajama's 'Round Tree Die' and I had to have it for my Christmas cards as soon as it was released a few months ago. It was fantastic for Halloween and even better for these colourful creations.

I started off by die-cutting 50 of the round circle die (it comes with the tree die) from white CS. I then die-cut the tree part from 25 of them, so I had 25 left over to make the backgrounds.

Using Distress Inks, I grouped them in similar colours and blended the darker colour on the outside of the background circle die-cut and blended with the lighter shade in the middle. As you can imagine my fingers were covered in ink but they looked so amazing, I couldn't stop blending!!

Once I was happy with them I flicked them all with water and dabbed gently with a tissue. Once they were dry I used Gina K Connect Glue to adhere the tree die-cuts over top. These were then adhered to the card fronts with glue tape.

I don't have any TCP Christmas stamps unfortunately, so I used this pretty one from the Simon Says Stamp 'Stamptember' set with Gina K Designs 'Joy of the Season'. I tried to match up the ink colours with the darkest Distress Ink and stamped them on each card. I didn't add any sequins as I didn't want elderly people having the sequins fall off and become annoying, so left them nice and clean.

I also stamped inside the cards with this sentiment stamp from Ellen Hutson 'Mistletoe and July'. I've used this one a lot, its great to use when people may not be celebrating Christmas itself.

I finished off writing in all 100 cards this week. I've set up a box at our local library so hopefully other people will drop in some cards too!

Bella has been hanging around me for ages to go for a walk, so I better do that before I lose the energy. I also need to hang out all the washing I just did, hopefully it doesn't pour with rain like it has a few times this week out of the blue. Our weather is so bizarre at the moment but this weekend is supposed to be super hot, so hopefully we can go for our first swim of the season. Better get out my clippers to 'tidy up my hedge' if you get my drift.......lol...

Take care
Shona