Carol Hartery's Creations: 'Tis the Season

Hi Everyone!

I still have lots of Christmas cards and other goodies to share with you before Christmas arrives. Hopefully, you'll find the time to create just a few more cards for your friends and family.

I am dedicating today's first card to my friend Susan DeMuth from Shapes, ETC. When she traveled from Dansville, New York to visit me in Massachusetts over Columbus Day weekend she brought me lots of surprises and more importantly taught me how to use watercolor pencils. I now LOVE to watercolor my stamped images and am getting better and better at shading my images. Today I gave another friend, MaryBeth, a set of watercolor pencils as one of her Christmas gifts so that she too can see how much fun they are to use.

For this first card I used my ScorBuddy to help me score the grid that you see on the card. I cut a piece of white tag so that it measured 4" wide by 5.25" tall. I scored a 1/8" border along all 4 sides which left me a space that measured 3.75" wide and 5" tall. Starting from the 1/8" border I scored another line every 1.25" going across. Starting from the 1/8" border I also scored another line every 1.25" going down. As you can see in the photograph I ended up with 3 squares going across and 4 squares going down. I used a black Memento (dye ink) pad to stamp a pair of mittens in every other square. Then I used my watercolor pencils to color the mittens. I used one of my Marvy Twinklette markers to color in the mitten strings. I used a red Memento (dye ink) pad to stamp the 'Tis the Season message in every other square.

I created the same grid on this card before I stamped the snowmen and the text. After I used my Marvy Twinklette markers to color the tiny snowmen I ran my paper through a Cuttlebug snowflake embossing folder. It made the grid lines disappear, but that was okay with me because I had just needed them to help me set up the card.

MaryBeth and I were talking about how much we both like to look at photographs of other people's cards so I will share pictures of some of the other cards I am sending out this year.