Christmas Countdown meets You Always Deliver

This was one of those projects that looked better in my head. I was aiming for clean and classy but fear it may just be a little boring.

I set myself up with a bit of a task by deciding to colour in the berries individually. Turns out there are 50+ on each image... and I was making cards for all the customers who ordered at a party this month! Still, it turned out the thought was worse than the actual colouring and I finished them in a few minutes.

I’d been a bit reluctant to buy and use this stamp set because we don’t have cardinals in the UK... and then I realised, it makes the perfect crested tit!

My Pool Party ink pad was freshly re-inked, so I stamped off the background image to avoid it swamping the bird, which was stamped on top in Grey Granite. A few dots of silver give it a wintry feel. 

#Simplestamping for Christmas with Peaceful Boughs

Peaceful Boughs has definitely become my go-to stamp set for Christmas projects.

We used it at my Crafty Friday session last week to make this beautiful shaker dome pizza box but it's just as good for simpler projects such as this one. This would be a great design for mass producing Christmas cards as it's just one layer, stamped, with some ribbon around it, stuck onto a pre-cut foil-edged card. Quick and easy, but pretty effective.

If you want to create the one-layer look, use a fairly pale green ink for the boughs; I've used Pear Pizzazz here with Soft Suede pine cones stamped on top. I've tried all of the darker greens and the pine cones don't stand out enough.