Traditional Christmas Stampin’ Up!® projects using Christmas Season stamps

 

When it comes to Christmas cards, you cannot beat the traditional Stampin’ Up!® colours of Garden Green and Real Red.

Today I have two Christmas projects which use these fabulously festive colours and the gorgeous Christmas Season stamp set, while showing a couple of fun tips to take your projects to the next level. 

Last-minute Christmas gift projects – with free tutorial

It’s around about this time of year that I begin to lose interest in Christmas projects and get anxious to start crafting with my new Stampin’ Up!® supplies. But there are still Christmas gifts, decorations and more to be made so for my penultimate craft class of the year we made a gift card holder and a couple of packages for tiny gifts. 

 

All of these projects can be made from one sheet of Stampin’ Up!® Painted Christmas Designer Series Paper (or any other designs of your choice). 

 

 

We began by making the bauble/gift holder which can be made from any size square but I went with 7" (17.8cm) to allow enough leftovers to fit the gift card holder.

This is far simpler than it looks and requires no cutting, measuring or special tools. I used this tutorial by Aussie demonstrator Fiona Bradley. 

 

 

The only thing I changed from Fiona’s tutorial was to punch my corner holes after the first two folds – it’s way easier to do this when the paper is still flat. Punch through both layers when the paper is folded corner to corner, then repeat on the other two corners. 

 

We held our baubles together using Simply Elegant Trim and decorated with a gift tag made with the Seasonal Labels Dies and coordinating Christmas Season stamp set. 

 

The card is a square one made to fit some 13cm (5") envelopes from my stash. All the pieces of Designer Series Paper you need can be cut out of the remaining sheet you used for the bauble.

 

Download a free tutorial here

 

 

 Make sure any decorations you add to the front of the small square don’t overhang on the left or this will make the card difficult to open.  

 

Inside the right flap you can stick a piece of Designer Series Paper and there is just enough room for a credit card-sized gift card... if you don’t apply adhesive on the right hand side. 

 

With our leftover pieces we decorated these little Simply Classic Treat Boxes, which are ideal for table gifts or for packaging something small such as jewellery. You could even hang them on the Christmas tree filled with chocolates.

 

There wasn't a long enough strip of Designer Series Paper left to go around the whole box so I cut two 3.5cm wide strips and joined them. Once the gold trim and decorations are added you can’t see the joins.

I hope these projects have inspired you to make some last-minute festive packaging. They are a great way to use up any leftovers – and don’t feel you have to hoard this pack of paper as it is only going into hibernation. The Painted Christmas Designer Series Paper will not be available from 4th January but will return in July 2022. 

The Christmas Season stamp set and Seasonal Labels Dies are both carrying over into the new year, although will not be available as a bundle from 4th January. So if you want to make your 10% saving, I suggest you order before then. They have proved to be my most-used Christmas stamps this year and the dies will prove useful all year round.

Want to craft with beautiful projects like these? If you’re in the UK, please head on over to my store to shop. If you use the host code TFBG2JJB before the end of December, I will send you a thank you gift next month.

To make it easy for you, please shop using this link

Does your wish list come to more than £99? Please get in touch and I will help you get more for your money and unlock discounts all year round.  

 

Please message me via my website 

 

Painted Season gift projects – with FREE tutorials

Some of you are way more organised than me and already have your Christmas cards made – and perhaps even written them. Therefore, your thoughts will be turning to gift packaging. 

I made these gift wrap ideas using the beautiful Painted Christmas Designer Series Paper from Stampin’ Up!®. 

 

As you may guess from the fact that pine cones feature in all of my project photos, this Suite is absolutely right up my street – the designs, the colours, everything. Finally, those pine cones make sense!

 

The large bag is a great design which I borrowed from UK Stampin’ Up!® demonstrator Julie Kettlewell at The Paper Haven. 

 

 

 

It requires two full sheets of 12x12 Designer Series Paper but produces a bag which is big enough for a book or box of chocolates. Hopefully the recipient will like the bag enough to use it again next year, too.

Download a free tutorial here

 

I decorated the bag with a gift tag made using the Christmas Season bundle. 

The tag can be as simple or as detailed as you like. I love the pine cones (obviously) so stamped these onto Crumb Cake cardstock to really make them stand out.

 

The half-cracker gift box is a brilliant little design which can be used as novelty gift packaging or as table crackers which can be used year after year. 

 

 

Regular readers with good memories will recall I made this half cracker gift box last year, too but it’s such a good little box that I wanted to repeat it at an event this year using this gorgeous Painted Christmas Designer Series Paper... after first checking that none of this year’s ladies had attended last year, of course!

 

Download the cracker tutorial here

 

Again, I made a gift tag using the Christmas Season stamp set and Seasonal Labels dies, which are available as a bundle. This time I used a smaller label die and the smaller of the two pine cones from the set.

I had two packs of this beautiful Painted Christmas Designer Series Paper which enabled me to create a matching cracker box to go with each bag. But if you mix and match they look beautiful, too. 

 

If you are in the UK and would like to order, please visit my store and, if you use the November 2021 host code P6VRQPMJ, I’ll send you a thank you gift in the following month.

To make it easy for you, please shop using this link

Does your wish list come to more than £99? Please get in touch and I will help you get more for your money and unlock discounts all year round.  

 

Please message me via my website 

 

Four cards in one using Christmas Season

 

Today I have some cards to show you which use the Christmas Season stamp set from the Stampin’ Up!® Jul-Dec Mini Catalogue. I love this stamp set and made these projects at my all-day Christmas workshop last month, when we also made these projects. In fact I will be making the ornament and these cards again tonight in a Zoom version of the event for those  who couldn’t make it. 

Before I begin I must tell you that from today until Thursday (16th-18th November) we have a special Seasonal Sale when you can make savings on lots of crafting staples. 

During the Seasonal Sale you can save:

• 10% on cardstock
• 15% on Classic Stampin’ Pads
• 20% on dies featured in the Annual Catalogue

Plus, if you join Stampin’ Up! before the end of November, you can get up to £130 of craft supplies for just £75. And guess what? There’s absolutely nothing to stop you stocking your bespoke Starter Kit with discounted products! 

 

Please get in touch via my website if you would like to find out more about this bargain of the year.

 

Now onto the cards. These can be as simple or as complicated as you like – keep them simple to churn out the Christmas cards on a very speedy production line!

 

You begin with a piece of standard white cardstock and draw pencil lines along the centre axes, so if you use A4 that will be at 10.5cm and 14.8cm. It doesn’t even have to be pencil; a pen will do as you won’t need to rub it out.

Using various leaves, berries etc and different shades of green, red and brown (for berry stalks), stamp along the two lines. It’s a bit like a one-sheet wonder, you just don’t fill in the whole sheet.

 

 When stamping along your lines, keep it simple as you can always add to it later. This will give you more options when it comes to making your finished cards. 

 

You’ll end up with something like this (this was an earlier experimental piece not the one I used in the end) which you cut into quarters, along the lines. The resulting four pieces will form the basis of your four cards as you can trim them down to suit. 

 

 

This is a really simple card, with the quarter trimmed down and laid onto some Designer Series Paper. This paper was from Sale-a-Bration, which I’d hoarded for my class, but you could use anything in red or green, or even just a layer of cardstock. 

If you prefer, you can step it up with some die-cut (or fussy-cut) pine cones and sprigs, and a piece of gold ribbon. 

 

 

This version adds a cardstock layer and a label as well as the cut-out pine cones. A strip of Evening Evergreen Chevron Weave Ribbon adds texture.

The final variation on the theme uses a trimmed-down piece to show more of the Designer Series Paper and is finished off with die-cut pine cones and a bow tied in the beautiful Evening Evergreen Open Weave Ribbon. The thicker Chevron Weave ribbon would be too bulky here. 

I hope you like these four festive cards using Christmas Season, one of my favourite sets from the Jul-Dec Mini Catalogue. If you want to save on cardstock and inks to make these cards, you can see which colours I used here. 

If you are in the UK and would like to order, please visit my store and, if you use the current host code P6VRQPMJ, I’ll send you a thank you gift in the following month.

To make it easy for you, please shop using this link

Does your wish list come to more than £99? Please get in touch and I will help you get more for your money and unlock discounts all year round.  

 

Please message me via my website 

 

Christmas season gift box, ornament and tags

 

It was so good to be back with a group of crafty ladies again at the weekend, for my first major craft event in 19 months.

It was a Christmas-themed event and everyone received the Christmas Season stamp set from Stampin’ Up!® as part of their kit. 

We made several cards, which I’ll show you in a future post, plus this lovely Mini Paper Pumpkin box to hold an ornament and some tags.

You may have noticed that I have a bit of a thing for pine cones and woodland themes. The Christmas Season stamp set feeds into this obsession quite nicely so it was my first choice for this all-day event.

I have always loved the Mini Paper Pumpkin boxes; they’re such a great size for lots of gifts, although not so great for posting as the depth of them bumps up the postage to small parcel rate here in the UK.

I’d saved a load of Designer Series Paper from Sale-a-Bration for the projects, so the guests could have half a pack each to work with. This silver birch design makes an ideal backdrop for the pine cones and berries on the Mini Paper Pumpkin box.

The stamped images are enhanced with a piece of ribbon made to look like a fir branch. We did this using the Evening Evergreen Chevron Weave ribbon. I sliced off one side seam, then frayed it to create the fringe you can just see below the greeting label. The strands I removed to create the fringe where then folded in half to create this fan of threads to resemble a branch of a fir tree. I can’t believe I thought of that all by myself!

 

Inside the box we made a little tray to separate the tags from the ornament, although guests had the option to leave this off if they wanted to use the box for something else.

They could also choose how they made their tags. I knew some would be fed up of die-cutting by this point so they had the option to punch these using a Tag Topper punch. We used Shimmery White cardstock for a touch of subtle glimmer. 

But those who were still up for some die-cutting could use the coordinating Seasonal Label dies to make pretty gift tags. 

All were stamped using the Christmas Season stamp set with added greetings. I used the lovely little word stamps from the Christmas Whimsy Card Kit which everyone is loving so much at the moment. (Hint: don't delay if you want this! While it’s still available in the Europe market, the French version has sold out and the English version is selling fast!)

The ornament – oh how I love a log slice ornament – is another fun way to show off these lovely pine cones and berries from the Christmas Season bundle. Again we used some threads from the Evening Evergreen Chevron Weave ribbon to create a fir sprig effect. Some ladies chose to stamp a greeting on the reverse, while others repeated the stamped and die-cut design so it looked the same from both sides.

A lovely day was had by all, and it felt so wonderful to be crafting together again. 

 

 

Want to craft with beautiful projects like these? If you’re in the UK, please head on over to my store to shop. If you use the host code ZKTV7U4Z before the end of October, I will send you a thank you gift next month. 

 

To make it easy for you, please shop using this link 

 

Does your wish list come to more than £99? Please get in touch and I will help you get more for your money and unlock discounts all year round.  

 

Please message me via my website