Around here, November seems to mark the beginning of the holiday season. When I think of the holidays, I think of all of the traditions that are associated with them from the special holiday decorations to the special foods. I want to see layouts (and cards if you are feeling up to that challenge) that celebrate your family’s special traditions. What better way to capture the history and meaning of those traditions and to pass them down to future generations?

Family Traditions

Entries will be accepted all month long. Simply post a link to your layout/card in the comments below. If you don’t have a blog or online gallery, you can simply email a photo of your creation to me using the email link to the right. Another option is that you can join the Scrappy Hours group on Facebook (if you aren’t already a member) and post your layout/card there. I will pull from all of these to post at least a sampling of the entries on November 30th.

Looking forward to learning about your family traditions. I have a couple of traditions that I am thinking about how to best capture on a layout myself and hope to be posting some soon.

Last weekend, I bought two new cartridges for my Cricut and I am totally in love with one of them: Lyrical Letters. Not only does it have a bunch of fabulous fonts, it has some fabulous sentiments and images. As soon as I saw the Cherry Good Wishes sentiment, I thought it would be cute to use with the latest Sketch Saturday sketch. Take a look and see for yourself:

With just white, red and green cardstock and a piece of ribbon, I was able to pull this card together. I just love how bright and cheery it is. What do you think?

I am really getting into the Christmas spirit when it comes to my cards. Maybe it is because my friend Laura is supposed to be coming over next weekend for us to have a cardmaking session. I can hardly wait.

When I saw the latest challenge over at Secret Crafter Saturday Challenge and they invited us to create a card inspired by at least one of the four seasons, I knew I was in. I decided to use the sketch from Stamp Something for my layout. Here is what I came up with:

The printed papers are from American Crafts. The large snowflake is from a Sizzix diecut and the small ones and the reindeer are from the Going Places Cricut cartridge. I colored the snowman image was colored using colored pencils. I think it pretty much says winter, at least to me it does. What do you think?

 

I had every intention of getting up off of the couch at 3:00 to make another card. I had the idea all worked out and put together in my head. Two hours later, I finally got up and got to work. In my defense, I have a horrible head cold and am feeling pretty miserable. I will admit, working on the card did help me to feel a bit better. I used the latest sketch from Inspirational Card Sketches and for the card’s theme, I was inspired by the Stampin’ for the Weekend challenge: Let’s Celebrate.

Here is what I came up with:

I just love these darling little mice, gluttons that they are. I don’t know about you, but I know I was pretty gluttonous on my 21st birthday. Of course, it wasn’t cupcakes that I splurged on. Regardless, I wound up looking pretty much like these two.

I am home sick again. The one upside is that between blowing my nose and drinking plenty of fluids, I do have a bit of time left to make a card or two. This morning, I decided to make a card using the latest sketch from Friday Sketchers and using a new angel stamp that I recently got. Here is what I came up with:

I decided to stick with a basically black and white design for this one. There is a touch of red on the printed papers and I used red thread to attach the buttons to the flowers. Other than that the only colors are the angels face and hair and the gold of her halo. I used Stickles on the halo and on her wings to give her just a bit of sparkle. What do you think of my little snow angel card?

 

So many times when I make cards, I am making them for this challenge or based on that sketch. Well, today I had an idea for a super simple Christmas card that I wanted to make.

For this card, I simply covered a card blank with patterned paper cut to match the size of the card exactly. I cut two 3/4-inch strips from a coordinating solid and trimmed them to size. I adhered the strips so that they crossed near the top right-hand corner. Added a poinsettia flower where the strips intersected. I finished by stamping a sentiment onto the horizontal strip.

It is always fun to make the detailed cards with fancy images and all of that, but if you find yourself in a rush at the holidays, it might be nice to have a super simple, but pretty, card that you can fall back on.

I feel kind of like that Itsy Bitsy Spider right about now. I just wish the sun would come out and dry up all the rain. In the meantime, I guess I will just stay indoors where it is nice and dry and make cards.

When I first saw the challenge over at ABC Challenge, H is for Hidden, I didn’t know what I might do. As I looked at all the DT cards I was truly impressed, but the one that provided me with the most inspiration was Jan’s. Just last month, I had gotten the Creative Memories Scallop Circle Maker and thought that it could provide a good hiding place for something. I also happened to get a Trick or Treat Additions set at that same crop. Once I pulled out those papers and stickers, the idea came together very quickly and easily.

Lo and behold, the itsy bitsy spider is hiding a much bigger spider. Eek! I figured I had passed the test when I showed the card to my 10-year-old son and it took him a minute to find the hidden element. His first instinct was to try to tug on the brad at the end of the shorter strip. He discovered the bigger spider quite by accident with the purple circle shifted under his thumb.

I will admit that I reused the fabulous Mojo Monday sketch even though I had already used it for the House Mouse Challenge this week. I think that it is fun to see how the two cards based on the same exact sketch and made by the same person, can be so totally different.

I decided to participate in this week’s challenge over at Just Christmas and Birthday Cards, since I loved the sketch. I decided to do a white-on-white card and to use wintery rather than Christmasy colors for my image.

I embossed the top 2 squares using the Cuttlebug snowflake embossing folder and stamped a snowflake design on the long rectangular section using silver ink. To keep the colors soft on the snowman I used my chalk pencils for the cape and hat. I debated whether or not to add the gems at the bottom and I am still not quite sure how I feel about them. What do you think?

I was so excited yesterday when I took a look at the House Mouse Monday Challenge. They had given their DT members a “kit” to work from. I was so excited when I realized that I had the elements from the kit (for the most part) and would be able to join the fun. The kit contained:

Colour theme – Brown and Cream
1 x spotty/patterned paper
Brown Ribbon
Silver thread
Charm
Stamped image
Sentiment
Swirl die-cut (or something similar)
embossed card (brown or cream or both)
Pearls (or diamontes)

They clearly said that you could use as much or as little from the kit as you wanted.

I combined this challenge with the Mojo Monday sketch challenge and this is what I came up with:

I am pretty happy with how it turned out even if it wasn’t the image that I originally wanted to use.

Yesterday, Our Creative Corner posted a photo for their challenge. They wanted us to some how pull inspiration from the image. Well, here is the photo:

I loved how the photo included snowmen like pumpkins – something traditional yet unexpected. For my card, I decided to arrange flowers like snowmen:

I embossed a sweet little bee among the flowers on the front. He is kind of difficult to see in the picture. I wanted to include a sentiment on this card, so I had to go and do something inside as well:

I carried the flowers inside and arranged them around my sentiment of Friends are the flowers in the garden of life. It is a pretty simple card really and while I think that there are still ways I could make it better, I am pretty happy with it.

When I saw the latest challenge over at Stamp Something – Recipe for Love – I knew that I wanted to play along. I just needed a bit more inspiration. When I saw the sketch over at Sketch Saturday (#76) this morning, I knew that I had my inspiration. But, of course, I didn’t stop there. I had to see what they were up to over at Penny Black Saturday Challenge. For their 74th challenge, they want us to draw inspiration from a song title or lyrics. I was stumped at first. Then I remembered that I had the Minding Shelty image. With as much country music as I listen to, I figured I could definitely come up with a song title about horses. Then it hit me, Big and Rich’s Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.

Probably not the song that popped into most people’s heads as they considered song inspiration for a Penny Black card. What can I say? However, I did use the sketch and my card includes 1 ribbon, 2 Bo-Bunny papers and 3 buttons.