It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas:

 Last Minute Inspiration from our Design Team!

Hello, Friends!

Can you believe we are just 15 days away from Christmas?  I bet your homes are all looking cozy and festive in preparation for the Big Day!  If you're still trying to get Christmas tags, cards, or presents ready at the last minute, our fabulous design team has some great inspiration to share with you here today!  

Michele has used the tiny dots paper from Retro Christmas Digital Paper Kit to make this elegant Pink Poinsettia Card.  She layered the dots paper with a panel from our Merry Christmas Vintage Scraps and I love the soft effect this created. 

 

When you're short on time, these Vintage Scraps are a fabulous resource for cards, gift tags or Christmas tree ornaments.  The double-sided Merry Christmas Creative Scraps can be best described as wonderful vintage to adorable retro. This is a colorful collection of Christmas themed images and sentiments. The sheet includes 22 great images printed on a medium weight cardstock. We still have some of these available in the online store, and best of all they are on sale!  

 

So many of us give and receive gift cards or cash gifts during the holiday season, and it's always nice to have a way to "dress up" the gift.  Ginny has a great idea for making a pocket card that is stuffed with adorable tags.  The images are from our Creating with Retro Christmas CD, and the pretty blue and white papers are from our Creating with Vintage Patterns CD.  I love the way the pops of red in the clothespins, flowers and burlap string pick up on the cutie pie image!  This little project really is "snow much fun!"

 

Sandy has reduced the price on the Retro Christmas CD, as well as on the Vintage Christmas CD.  She has also created a super bundle deal where you can get both the Retro and Vintage CD's at a special low price.   These are such great resources to add to your crafty stash as they contain dozens of beautiful digital papers, templates, card sentiments, printable images, ephemera and more!  You simply choose the paper or image you want to use and you can print it out on your home printer, sizing items just the way you like.  Or, you can use them to create digital layouts, Christmas letters, e-cards and more!  Even though the price in this photo says $26.75, the actual sale price for both CD's is only $22!  

 

 Both CD's have great Christmas tags and Post Cards that allow you to make an almost "instant" card.  Michele  used some of the tags from Creating with Vintage Christmas to make this super sweet vintage Christmas card.  I love the rusty jingle bells tied onto that gingham bow!

I think interactive cards are soooo much fun, and I just love this great Pop Up Box card that Shantaie made using beautiful papers from the Creating with Vintage Christmas CD.  This would be so pretty displayed on a Christmas mantel or side table.  The snowflake stamps are from our Vintage Christmas Digital Stamp set and Shantaie cut them out with her Silhouette machine.   This is such a stunning project, and I hope you'll pop over to Shantaie's BLOG to see how she put it all together. 

 

 

If you haven't seen our Vintage Christmas Digital Art Stamps yet, you will want to check those out in the store.  They are gorgeous!  This has been one of our most popular clear acrylic stamp sets for years, but now that we've introduced them in Digital format, we think you are going to love them even more!  The images are now considerably larger than in the original set, giving you lots of options for larger sized cards, layouts and mixed media projects.  And, you can have them in your hot little hands as soon as you order them, as they come via a digital download. No waiting!  You can order them now and get your craft on today!  How great is that?  There are 18 images and sentiments in this beautiful vintage set.

 

Shantaie also created this pretty Vintage Santa tag using a lovely Santa image found in our Seasonal Image and Journal Notes booklet.   I love the way she used a gold foil doily to frame our jolly Santa image, and that white poinsettia is the perfect accent piece!  This festive tag would look great hanging on your tree, and would make even the smallest gift really special!

 

You can find our Seasonal Image and Journal Notes Booklet ON SALE HERE along with the rest of our Heartwarming Vintage Booklets.  These are such gems, and contain beautiful vintage images, journal notes, and sentiments.  They would make fantastic stocking stuffers at their clearance price of just $2.95 each!  Or get a bundle pack containing 9 Booklets for just $19.99!  

 We get so busy making everything ready for the holidays that we often forget to take a moment just for ourselves.  Sheila reminds us of how important it is to refresh our own spirits by creating beautiful moments in this soft, feminine digital layout.  She used digital papers from our Creating with Vintage Christmas CD along with her own beautiful photography.  Wouldn't this stunning project make a great screen saver on your computer?

I love to hang handmade Christmas ornaments on the tree, and these cheery tags Ginny made with our Retro Christmas CD would be fabulous tree ornaments!  She used the tag images from the CD along with pretty papers and the result is very merry, indeed!  You can find all the details on her lovely BLOG. 

 

Sometimes, a card is so special it is a gift all on its own, and this shimmery, sparkly card Ginny made combines papers and images from both our Retro Christmas and Vintage Christmas CD's.  I love the fresh color palette and pops of glitter, don't you?  You can read all about how she made it HERE on Ginny's Blog. 

 

Wow!  What amazing projects from the team!  It makes me want to break out my Crafty Secrets supplies and get my craft on!  Since we have our house on the market, it's been challenging to create, but I have some goodies that I'll be sharing here soon.  

In the meantime, I'd love to invite you to play along in our December Linky Challenge and Blog Hop. We have a beautiful digital paper and image for you to use in your creation, or just use any Crafty Secrets goodies that you have in your stash.  Create a card and link it up on the Crafty Secrets BLOG by midnight PT this Sunday, December 20th, and you could be the lucky random winner of a $25 Digital Shopping Spree in the Crafty Secrets online store.  You can find all the information HERE.  

I'll be back next week to announce the winner...and to share more inspiration from the team!

Thanks for stopping by today!  I hope you were inspired, found some great last minute Christmas ideas and some great gift giving ideas, too.  If so, I'd love to hear from you in the comment section below.

On behalf of Sandy Redburn, this is Kathy Clement/DT Leader wishing you JOY and CREATIVITY!

Cheerio,

kathy

November Linky Party, DT Challenge and Please Welcome Cherry Nelson!

Hi Everyone,  it's our monthly Linky Party and DT Challenge plus please join me in welcoming our NEW DT Member Cherry Nelson!  Cherry was a past Guest Designer here on the blog back in June 2010 and we are excited to have her join our team because she has great style and loves Crafty Secrets! 

Please check out what our Design Team ladies have created for this challenge and scroll below to see a bunch of samples by Cherry as well as some cool Christmas layouts


Vicki Chrisman Design Team Leader

Michele Kovack 

Darlene Pavlick

Rebekah Fairies

Sheila Rumney

Kathy Clement

Elizabeth Lincoln

Cherry Nelson  - New DT Member!

Cherry Nelson (aka Cherry's Jubliee Blog)  says she's had a fascination with paper and scissors from an early age and use to cut out little paper villages and still adores paper dolls.  She's been creating beautiful cards and altering items for about 5 years now and says paper is her passion and therapeutic to her soul. Quote: “I enjoy the whole process of creating...from found items, finding that perfect paper, to the embellishments. It makes me happy!"

 She created these great 'Bee' birthday cards using our Queen Bee set, now a Digital Stamp Set for $3.95

These are cards she created using our Girlfriend Creative Scraps

Here's a great rooster card Cherry made with an image from our Farm Fresh Scraps

I love the pink and blue combo in this pretty card she made using our  Sew Nice Scraps  

These are some older cards she made with our Autumn Blessing Cuts. That's the great thing about Vintage - it doesn't go out of style!

Cherry's made so many cards using our Childhood Booklet I put them together on 1 sheet

Okay, here are a couple of Christmas layouts.  DT Leader Vicki made the cute Santa LO one using images and paper from our Retro Christmas CD and I made the one below.

This paper was so pretty I didn't do too much besides add a green frame also from CD6 Vintage Christmas and gave Jack a candy cane to hold and added names and a date. The candy cane is a PNG file so it's all cut out. You can read several tutorials on adding PNG files in our Pintrest Tutorial Folder but I'm going to really try and make a video. Who are Jack and Robbie? I wish I had a family tale to tell you but they're just two cute kids I had a photo of and I made up their names.

 

Okay, now it's your turn to post any sample you have created in our Nov Linky Party and every person will recieve a $6.00 coupon and 1 lucky random.org winner will get a $50.00 Crafty Secrets Gift Card!  You have until midnight Nov 11/13 to enter.

 Next weekend if you live in the Seattle area, come see us at the CK Scrapbook Show in Bellevue WA Nov 8 - 9/13. Free gift with $15.00 purchase (1 per person), our big SALE and Show Specials!  Here's a $3.00 off coupon.

Thanks for your support

Sandy Redburn

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Blaine,WA 98230

Free Christmas Printable, 2 New Digital Art Stamp Sets and Alice Card Book

Hi Everyone,

I decided to make the Christmas bird I showed on my last post our Free Printable Christmas Gift to thank you for your support. I posted it here earlier this morning and said I would come back with the updated image and I love the way it turned out!  We did it as a 'Print & Fold Card' but you can cut it apart.  I also added the original sentiment below in case you like it better.

Just left click on the image a couple of times to get as big as possible and then right click on the image with your mouse to save it to a pictures folder. Print it on paper or card stock and trim any excess white border off the right and bottom side after you fold card. A bit of stardust glitter on the swirls will add some festive sparkle.

  Here's a photo of the card made up. The image above looks smaller than the poem below but it's a high resolution 300 ppi/dpi jpg and ready to print on 8.5 x 11" paper, card stock, label paper, etc.

Here is the first poem we had that I didn't like as much

We did the Pen & Ink Birthday Birds Digital Stamps $4.95 separately (see below) and a super cute last minute Christmas Kewpie Set  $6.95.  Also be sure to check out the fabulous Alice in Wonderland card booklet Anne made for her daughter with our Clear Art Stamps below.

Pen & Ink Birthday Birds DAS_100 $4.95 

Pen & Ink Birthday Birds is a Digital Art Stamp Set that includes 2 beautiful pen and ink drawings of birds in a gift tag and jumbo size, a mini crown and 2 Ready to Print Cards with a warm brown, or a blue and green combination.  You can resize these high quality 300 ppi/dpi PNG files depending on your project. The large bird is 11”W x 7”H W at full size and hand drawn with stunning penmanship over 125 years old! 

Here's a small image of one of the 2 printable cards included with the stamps.  Please tell me what you think about pre-colored stamp images? Do you use digital stamps and if so, what image editing software do you use? In the new year we are going to focus on tips and tutorials. Here's my list of Best Free Digital Editing Software, Printing Ideas and Tips.  

Also, if you have purchased any of our Creating With Vintage CD's, each one has a Step by Step Tutorial by expert Patty Debowski from thedigitalScrapbookteacher.com showing how to change colors, re-size, crop, layer and build a layout using Photoshop Elements.  (each CD shows wedding layout using CD #1 paper & embellishments). She even included small photo's with arrows for dummies like me.

When I came across these Kewpies from an 1916 magazine I couldn’t resist turning them into a new Digital Art Stamp Set because I love how big some of them are!  I just wish it wasn’t so close to Christmas but I didn’t want to have to save them until next year. 

Christmas Kewpies is a fun Digital Art Stamp Set for $6.95 that includes 12 separate re-sizable PNG files in a mix of illustrations and greetings sure to produce smiles. The Kewpies hanging in the stockings are 8” long, big enough for a scrapbook page or pillow. The Kewpies with the wreath are 7.5”W.  The dancing puppy is the smallest stamp and just over 1” H.  The whimsical lettering adds to the charm with the sentiments.  

Anne from the UK created this fantastic Alice birthday card booklet for her grown daughter Anis who still loves Alice in Wonderland.  Anne used our Tea With Alice Clear Art Stamp Set on sale for $15.50 and thankfully we still have about 50 sets left. This set and our Greetings From Wonderland Stamps are being turned into Digital Art Stamp Sets for $9.95 and the images will be larger and in PNG format so you can layer them. Our matching 18" Wonderland Tea Scraps are also on sale for $2.50.

I love how Anne used the stamps from the set in the background and all her die cut layers.  She explains her techniques and shows more pages here on her Blog

I keep forgetting to say that our Christmas Mail Digital Art Stamp Set is a free gift with any order placed this month in our Crafty Vintage Girl Store. It's marked as 'Free' so just add it to your cart (one per month). Mailed orders also get a little gift included

 As a small business owner I'm usually rushing around trying to do too many things but this week has been extra hectic as we leave for a week vacation tomorrow.  We have been planning this big family vacation since last year to Mexico and I am so ready to relax!

Cindy, Mona and Jessica will be here in the office and we have friends house sitting.  
DT Leader Vicki will do a Guest Blog Post for me mid week. We get back a couple of days before Christmas and we are doing our annual Christmas day brunch and having the whole clan here for dinner but this will be the first year ever we are not doing gifts and it feels so weird! 

I've been in and out of the office all day on errands and keep hearing about the  horrible shooting at the school in Connecticut.  It's so heartbreaking. As a Canadian I can tell you everyone I met today is mourning with you. I'm sending everyone a big hug.  

Sandy Redburn
Owner
See Our  CraftyVintageGirl.com Store
 Our Online Shopatron Store  (sorry No digital downloads)

Visit us on Facebook

This Blog: http://heartwarmingvintage.blogspot.com
Our Website: http://www.craftysecrets.com
 
Toll Free Phone or Fax 1-888 597-8898
Local Phone 604 597-8817
 
Crafty Secrets Head Office
15430 78 A Ave.,
Surrey, BC V3S 8R4

USA Warehouse
250 H. Street, #436
Blaine,WA 982