Er.....HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hello lovely visitors and a belated Happy New Year to you all.   I know we are almost 2 weeks into 2013 but I'd still like to wish you all a year filled with happiness, good health and love with a bit of wealth thrown in there too.  Like many of us I'm sure, I'm still not quite back to normal after the Christmas and New Year break.  The grand daughters went back to school this week and Hubby's had a couple more days off for appointments so tomorrow will be the first 'normal routine' day of this year.  Yesterday we had to go see a man about sorting out OH's pension funds as he is due to retire in April.  Scary stuff as we've watched them reduce in value over the past few years but hopefully not as bad as we feared :0).  Now I just have to find him a hobby or he's going to drive me nuts, lol!

I haven't had chance to do much crafting since before Christmas so I apologise for staying in Christmas mode for this post by showing the very few Christmas cards I managed to make.  I am determined to do better this year!!!!!!  Anyway, this set of cards I made for my Snazzy's DT buddies.

 By necessity ('cos I left it soooooo late) I kept these simple with just a strip from one of the various border designs from the gorgeous papers in our December DT pack, a lovely Chocolate Baroque 'Merry Christmas' sentiment stamped in Versamark and embossed with Ranger Queen's Gold EP and a wooden embellishment from a freebie pack on a magazine.  I coloured each one with Treasure Gold (from PaperArtsy) and then triple embossed with clear EP.  I really loved these little embellishments.

My only other handmade Christmas card was made for the Chocolate Baroque forum swap.  If you click on the logo in my sidebar it will take you to the forum which has lots of interesting groups and information.

This was created on a 21 x 21 cm base card.  I blended Distress Inks over the base starting with the light shade which I think was Tumbled Glass then building up with Faded Jeans, a smidge of Chipped Sapphire and finally round the very edges, some Pumice Stone.  I then stamped the snowflake tree with Flitter Glu and applied silver gilding flakes.  I followed this with stamping the corners using Cobalt Archival Ink and after making sure this was thoroughly dry I stamped the free Crafter Stamper magazine Chocolate Baroque snowflake stamp using Flitter Glu randomly all over the card but avoiding the tree.  I then applied Ranger Clear Rock Candy Dry Glitter to all the snowflakes.  This is just my sort of sparkle ................ very subtle!

Next I stamped the 'Winter Wonderland' and cut it out with a Spellbinders label die.  I had to cut one half then rewind, move the die along and cut the other half because I didn't have a die long enough but it worked perfectly.  The final touches were a few gems in some of the tree snowflakes and the addition of some snowflake charms over the rest.  All of the stamps used are from Chocolate Baroque.

Well, that's it for today.   I do have another card design to share soon but this was for my three special friends who I sadly had to neglect at Christmas.  I had a severe loss of mojo (probably because I left everything to the last minute) and just couldn't make a card I felt was good enough for them so I gave up until last week.  I'm happy to say, mojo restored, I came up with a design I am happy with but as they haven't received their cards yet I'll have to wait a little while longer to see what you think.

Next week will be my first turn on the Snazzy's DT Blog for 2013 and boy do we have something different to play with this month, lol!  I'll admit to being a bit stumped to start with but once I got stuck into it this week I'm having great fun.  I'm just keeping my fingers crossed I don't go and muck it up halfway through ;D!

See you again in a few days but in the meantime thanks for visiting and if you have time for a comment, thank you because I really appreciate every one.

Hugs
Lesley  Xx