Last Christmas Card Class

Amidst all the craziness of my upcoming craft fair, I managed to squeeze in the Last Christmas Card Club class of the year. I was inspired by the Chirstmas Stampin All Year Round concept and came up with the idea for a series of Christmas Card Classes that started in the summer. The focus was on simple Christmas cards and projects and we'd make between 3-5 projects per class. Keeping the class projects simple was great for beginners and it also brought a lot of us back to basics in card making. In the first class, I polled the students to find out what kind of projects they wanted to do and feedback was they didn't want to stick to just cards. So one class focused on tags, one on gift card holders and the rest were cards. For our last class, I was inspired by all the cute Hero Arts stamps in the store. Earlier I shared with you a gold version of this embossed wreath stamp, but I couldn't do gold this time, so I went with silver and it came out just as nice. This next card is actually not the finished sample we made. I forgot to take the picture of the revision I did- just added the sentiment to the bottom of the card. Oh well, you'll have to use your imagination. Found these tiny jingle bells and thought it would be a cute accent. I also found this cute paper by Jillybean in the store that reminded me of Christmas candy and thought it would be perfect for this card. This Christmas tree punch art card was inspired by all you bloggers out there. I've seen several versions of this card before so I CASE'd them for the class. We built the tree using 6 heart punches. The white was used to simulate snow to coordinate with the white polka dots on the Doodlebug paper. Since we were using hearts for the tree, I thought it would be cute to use hearts for the ornaments too. This last card is my favorite of the bunch. It took the most time to complete because we had to emboss 3 of each tree for a total of 9 trees. The time saving part was that we embossed it on green cardstock, so no coloring was needed. My students always request no coloring, so I have to find ways to reduce the amount of coloring in the class. I also stamped the background using the musical note background cling stamp by Hero Arts. I was so happy Hero Arts came out with a cling of this as I was trying to find a large musical note background stamp. Yay! Stamped it using my Antique Linen Distress Ink- love how it came out- very subtle but enough to make it interesting. Plus one of the trees has musical notes on it, so I thought it coordinated well. Finally, I decided to thank the students by doing a bonus project. They were all so nice to sign up for my class with no class sample to look at beforehand, so I thought I'd reward them by showing them how to make this simple A2 box. Found the instructions on Splitcoast Stampers here.. We added a bellyband using the MS Snowflake punch since it coordinated well with the snowflake paper. This class was so much fun to host each month! I'm thinking of doing this class series again next year starting in the summer.