Vintage - Merry Christmas

Well I know it's insanely early to be thinking about Christmas cards and normally I wouldn't even be giving it more than a thought, but alas my bff gifted me 3 Tim Holtz classes on onlinecardclasses.com

I have taken the first two and the third starts this week which is a live class. The other two were self study. I have to say the first one really goes into depth about all the distress products and the difference between them and demonstrates which ones do what. Very informative and of course very enabling. I did go buy some more inks and a few stains.

Then I took the second class which IMO is just a more casual repeat of the first. You do get to see Tim create more tags with the products which gives you ideas on creating with them, more enabling and I went and bought some paint. Now I will confess to you that almost everything else he used which was a lot I already owned. Nice to see alcohol inks being used because years ago I bought that and then realized I didn't really care that much for them, until these classes. Now I am trying to debate do I really need more of them.

I finally got all my supplies and proceeded to start playing with them. As I started to get through some techniques it was apparent to me why I stopped buying and creating the whole distress/grunge look. It's just not my style. Now I feel like a sucker having bought more of the distress products and am committed that I will use them. So doing what I know I love I decided to go vintage with some of my Halloween and Christmas cards because I love love love the vintage look of these two seasons.

So my first attempt was to go and create tags but then I realized why am I making tags, I don't normally use them, so I quickly changed from tags to cardstock in the size of cards rather than the tags. But I started a tag so I didn't want to waste it.

This is just the basic distress ink type of technique. I did use the Picket Fence stain to white wash the tag then added in his distress inks, then stamped it. Then thinking hey I can mist some water on it, I realized what it did was pull that white picket fence stain to the forefront which gave me a washed look. I then used some metallic embossing ink for the sentiment and added all the other bits of pieces to create the card.