Concord & 9th Winter Wear

Oh boy has it ever been busy here since I last blogged, we seem to have gone straight from one thing in to another since September, always something happening or somewhere to be.

We added to the workload with the bedroom decorating which now looks lovely I may add 😀 Although the door still needs painting so does the radiator, and those are jobs for the Xmas hols lol! How are you getting on with your festive jobs? I'm down to the general cleaning and tidy up and the food shop left to do, the decorations are all up, all the wrapping, card writing and faffing has been done.

I confess that this year despite wanting to make a lot of gifts to send to people, I just didn't get the time, I had lots of ideas and made a start on several projects which just didn't get finished sadly 😞 So much happened in the last quarter of the year that I found it difficult to keep up sometimes and from mid October to today, there hasn't been a lot of time for crafting. Tomorrow we do our last teaching session of the year, Simon finishes work for the holidays, and aside from a trip to visit my family in Manchester sometime over the weekend we are all done and we can now chill and relax. Time to regroup and plan for 2019, we already have the first Young Roboteers sessions booked early in the year and have had enquiries to run some other events.

I started my chilling session earlier today, I'd done all my chores for the day, so I got out a new stamp and die set I'd recently been treated to, its by Concord & 9th and is called Winter Wear, I fell in love with the set back in November when I saw Kristina Werner use it to make a card as part of her 2018 Holiday Card Series, that's 2 stamp sets I bought as a result of her demos lol! I used Nuvo Alcohol Markers for the first example, they blend very well but there aren't very many colours, I'm hoping they will release more soon as the choice is pretty limited at the minute. Kristina used Copic Markers on her card but they are way out of my price range at the moment, but I would like a set of basic colours, something to collect in 2019 maybe?

I confess that I had a minor fluff up, originally I stamped direct on to the card blank with the intention of making a single layer card, but I stamped the elements to low down and it didn't look right, so I die cut the stamped image using one of my favourite wonky stitched circle dies and stuck it on to a card blank that was sitting on my desk left over from the 2018 cards. I decided not to add a sentiment on the outside, keeping the focus on the images and stamped a nice sentiment inside the card. I didn't get the scarf and face bits lined up and small amounts of white space were left. So after I'd coloured the image I used a black fine liner pen to finish off the lines.

I've got lots of ideas for using this stamp set and I'll be making batches for sending, the two cards in this post are now officially my first cards for posting out for Christmas 2019! I know it may seem early, but I'm taking the stance that early in the year and in parts of the summer nothing is happening. So if I use that time to make my Christmas cards and other items, then I won't be as stressed as I was this year because I still needed to make cards to send instead of having them all ready.

The second card was coloured with Prismacolor pencils and Gamsol, I need more practice with coloured pencils but the finished card didn't turn out so bad. I used an embossing folder that was free with issue 185 of Simply Cards & Papercraft. I bought the magazine for the folder as I'd been trying to find a knitting effect embossing folder for a while. The sentiment is from the Winter Wear set and was originally going to go on the first card, but I decided that it didn't look right so put it to one side.

In 2019 I want to improve my colouring skills, I may even try to take a class either near me or online! I also want to try harder to only buy things that I will actually use, and not buy things just because I think they look cute. Something else I need to do is stop buying all the colours of a new ink pad, embossing powder etc until I've actually tried the product out. I've been caught out on more than one occasion, allowing my "full set" syndrome to dictate how I spend. I started dabbling with Mixed Media this year and bought lots of jolly things to pursue that area of crafting, so over the Xmas hols I think I'll have a play and see what I can create.

I'm hoping I'll have time to make another post before the years out, but in the event that I don't here's wishing everyone that reads my blog and takes the time to comment, a very Merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years. May 2019 be filled with crafting time a plenty, mojo abounding, health and happiness in no particular order. Your lovely words have cheered me when I've been down this year and I appreciate each and every one of you. 💖💖💖