Freshly Made Christmas in July with Cricut Artiste

I stayed up late making this card so that I could pray and hope we would really get rain tonight. It's been many weeks of extreme heat and no rain here. I was finally rewarded with the happy sounds of thunder. I'm hoping that the light shower will continue through the night. In my heart I'm singing "There shall be showers of blessings. . ."

Here's another Christmas card using a shape from the new Close To My Heart Cricut Artiste cartridge that will be available for purchase August 1st. This one uses the Freshly Made Sketch #45 and the challenge at Holly Jolly Christmas to use non-traditional colors. I was also inspired by the Christmas challenge #101 at 2 Sisters Challenge Blog to use an animal on the card. The sketch and Clean and Simple emphasis of the Freshly Made challenges made this card a quick and easy card!

The Cricut shape behind the bird is from Artiste, page 67 "M", Accent 3 shift, cut at 2.5" Real Dial size. If you don't use Real Dial size you get a tiny shape meant to be the embellishment on a 2.5" card. I love this new cartridge, so I intend to keep introducing some of its 700 shapes. If you're interested in getting your own cartridge, you'll be able to find it on August 1st using the Shop with Me button on the side.

Close To My Heart is introducing some new colors of cardstock in their paper packs that will be unique only to that paper pack. The ones I used come from the Flirty pack and are called Flirty Raspberry and Flirty Yellow, definitely not typical Christmas colors. I combined them with silver trim and lightly retraced the tops and left sides of the dove and the letters with a glitter gel pen.

Challenges for this card:
2 Sisters Challenge #101 - Christmas in July, optional twist - use an animal image
Freshly Made Sketch #45
Holly Jolly Christmas - Use non-traditional colors

4.25" x 5.5" Christmas Card Recipe:
Papers - Close To My Heart "Flirty" paper pack (coming Aug. 1st)
Stamps - CTMH "Blessings of Peace" (coming Aug. 1st)
Inks - black, Garden Green marker
Accents - CTMH Silver trim; glitter gel pen

Jingle All the Way Christmas Card

Life has been so busy the past week I missed my craft room and haven't made many Christmas cards lately. Here's a fun card I made by combining several challenges with this whimsical horse named Charlie dressed up as a reindeer from Clear Dollar Stamps. I was looking for an image using jingle bells for the ABC Christmas Challenge, J - Jingle Bells, when I found this delightful horse.  It's from a set called Charlie Reindeer Games.  I used this sketch #88 from Sketch N Stash. The item from my stash that has been long overlooked is the red shiny ribbon which had always seemed to stiff for making a bow, but was perfect for this design.

I modified the small circle at the bottom and put Santa's pack there instead. It also had jingle bells. I chose the soft blue snowflake paper for the Christmas Card Challenges Week 26 today--to use bling-- so I covered the jingle bell images and the center of the snowflakes with Sakura Gelly Roll glitter gel. It's subltle and shiny. I also chose a shiny red ribbon.  52 Christmas Card Throwdown Challenge #5 for this month was to use embossing, which I used on the white circle behind Charlie to look like snow.

Here's a close up of the glitter gell on the snowflakes and jingle bells.

The last challenge I used was one I recently found, Holly Jolly Christmas, Anything Goes with Ribbon.

4.25" x 5.5" Christmas Card Recipe:
Paper - My Mind's Eye "12 Days of Christmas;" Close To My Heart White Daisy and Cranberry cardstock
Image - Clear Dollar Stamps digital "Charlie Reindeer Games"
Copic Markers - Grays (N0, N2, N4, N6, N8) Crimson RV29, Pea Green YG63, Mint Green BG13, Yellowish Skin Pink YR61, E00
Accents - Cuttlebug embossing folder "Swiss Dots," red shiny ribbon unknown from my stash, Sakura Gelly Roll glitter gel pen, pop dots