Christmas is Coming!!!!!!!!

 Hello!!

 

Okay, Christmas is coming. It's going to be strange, it's going to be different. Christmas is still happening - it has not been cancelled.

Thats been the main thought running through my head for the past two months, hopefully tomorrow we'll find out what the UK plan is for Christmas and we can all chill out a bit!

It's been bust at work and with the second lockdown (I haven't been furloughed this time!) I've had plenty to do to keep me busy - so much so that I cancelled a week off out of paranoia that I'd get furloughed after it 😂 I have however just had a long weekend as I was really starting to feel burnt out from all of the stress and pressure that I apparently never show. So my plan for this long weekend was to get those Christmas cards made.

 I sat down on Friday morning, looked at my craft materials and literally had no idea where I was going to start. I wanted to make use of some of the dies that I had bought and picked up of the Christmas magazines I've picked up over the years so I got out two of them which are very similar snow globe shapes. I just kept running them through the machine until I realised I probably cut too many out. Here are a couple of the snow globes:

 

 

There was so much glue everywhere with these... So while I had the glue out I got out some festive paper and covered the front of several smaller cards and let them dry before attaching 3D stickers to them - simple yet effective. I have a thing for stickers, especially Christmas ones. They might seem a bit like cheating to make cards but combining them in the right way, on the right background then they can look great (I think they do at least...).

So that summed up Friday, I think I came out with around 25 cards. Saturday morning brought another batch. During my Slimming World Zoom meeting I was sat in the craft room so I used that time efficiently and made up some of the decoupage packs that I still have and later attached them to cards. I made a few more before I started to wane a bit with my inspiration when I had to go do a bit of tidying for my parents coming over for dinner (they are still my support bubble so this is allowed). The last three I was quite pleased with. I had taken inspiration from an activity we're planning to do with the Brownies and Guides - make a Christmas tree shape card out of paper. I made the tree: half a large circle of green paper, fold it into 3 and fold back the outer edges so it opens like a door in the middle before cutting out snippets of paper from the side to give it a more tree like effect. I took the tree and on the middle section I stamped "Merry Christmas" and used glittery embossing powder, and on the outside I added different features for baubles to each card - pom-poms, coloured gem stickers, and red/green pearls. To make it more obvious that they were trees and not random bits of green paper stuck to a card I dug out some textured brown card to create tree trunks. 

 

I am posting photos of most of these creations to my Instagram. Really I should post a blog before I post the pictures but it takes seconds to post to Instagram whereas it takes a few minutes more to create a post... I'm so lazy! In theory I'll be making more cards and posting more pics as it draws closer to Christmas when I'll start posting or handing them out to family and friends. 

Christmas is the time for giving, caring and sharing with everyone. It isn't about the presents, it isn't about what you got off people or the physical value. It is about coming together, it's about family, and most importantly sharing love and kindness to all. It's been a hard year, I've been lucky in that I haven't lost anyone but at the same time so many have lost loved ones and can't spend time with the ones they love. Loneliness is hard, its worse at Christmas time and it has affected so many more people this year. So I decided that I was going to send Christmas cards to any of my contacts who wanted to receive one. Some of them are going to get one just because I have their address. I don't expect to get anything back but this is my way of saying to people - I see you, I'm thinking about you, I care about you.

 

C x