FranmadeInOregon: December 2024

DECEMBER TOB HALLOWEEN CHALLENGE

It's December and we have a new Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge up! While everyone is rushing to finish up their Holiday cards, here we are at TOB continuing with our Halloween images.

Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge: December 2024 Anything Goes Halloween

The ladies have posted some creepy images for your inspiration! My theme this month is to use sentiments that are parodies of old Christmas sayings, like the lower right quadrant. For the past couple of years I've been using card stock from this really creepy Park Lane "Haunted Hollow" 12x12 stack. It's filled with bats and spiders and snakes and skulls and the colors are very somber. But I love it! One of the pages has a bunch of sentiments, two of which have ones that mimic Christmas and I started there (you'll see the second one on our mid-month reminder).

These paper selections have a vaguely mauve undertone so I dug through all of my scraps and came up with a mucky mauve stock to mat the sentiment with, after punching drips along the bottom of it. Then to set it out against the skull paper, I matted it a second time with a drippy black panel. I attached the square skull panel to a side-folded square black card base and added the sentiment over the top and off-center. Then I fussy cut one of the bats from a coordinating paper, folded his right wing for dimension, and attached him to the front for balance. EEK!! The skull cardstock is backed by a mostly black background with skulls and leaves, so I made an envelope to match.

I look forward to seeing what kinds of clever ideas you come up with to mix the holidays with Halloween! Remember - if we get 25 entries in our challenge, these great Whimsy dies are available for a drawing!

BE A DEER

My old friends over at The Paper Players are playing with a theme challenge from LeAnne - "Be a Deer" and I thought I would like to join them in the fun. I have only one item in my stash with a deer and I dragged him out for the first time this season, although he has been a mainstay of my collection of winter/holiday creatures for several years. I love deer and it's actually quite an amazement that I don't have any others in my stash anywhere.

I'm really partial to square format cards, so square it is! Since my little deer is whimsical I wanted to use papers and shapes that were less realistic than LeAnne's lovely blue and white image. I opted for a very old light blue polka dot paper from my stash, die cut it, and attached it to a white 5-1/2" square card base. I selected a darkish blue and turquoise polka dot card stocks to die cut with Tim Holtz's "Forest Shadows". I layered these on the lighter blue and then added a couple of layers of white edge-stitched snow drifts and an Impression Obsession sentiment and attached my little deer.

The Paper Players: PP718 - A Theme Challenge from LeAnne

WARM HUGS

BTW, how the heck did we get to December so soon? Last week I commented on a stamp set that I have that has several small holiday images - this is the second one from the set from Hero Arts (#CM386 "From the Vault - Winter Joy"). I'm joining Inkspirational's Mood Board, where at the bottom right part of the board is a little village of houses with a black sky and stars. There are so many appealing images in this mood board that I may have to enter this challenge more than once!

This card is a bit more complex than it appears at first glance. I started it by stamping the image twice - once on black with white heat embossing and once on white with black ink. I colored the white image with Copics, fussy cut it, and glued it over the black sky and tree. Then I die cut a small scrap of white cardstock with a stitched "cloud" outline and stamped the sentiment with PTI "Fresh Linen", glued it to the black stock, and die cut all of the layers with a small stitched rectangular die. I die cut a white cardstock panel with a larger stitched rectangle and then die cut a stitched opening in it. I used an embossing folder to emboss the snow and assembled all of the layers onto a black card base. I wanted a bit of sparkle, so added three rhinestones to the stars in the sky.