Love is all you need

It's my day over on the Make the Day Special Stamp Store blog again today and my card was inspired by the current 2 week challenge at Less is More http://simplylessismoore.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/week-151-merry-christmas-everyone.html which is to select any of their previous challenges to have another go at.

I decided to have another go at metallics and one other colour from a few weeks ago (Challenge 149) although my card would also fit challenge 24 - circles.

I wanted to use one my holiday sets to show that there is versatility beyond Christmas in some sets if you look for it so I decided to play with Strictly Sentiments 3 from WPlus9 and pair it with a matching styled sentiment from Mama Elephant's Smitten set.

Now whilst this set looks aimed squarely at Christmas with it's big sentiments - I was actually more interested in the striped circles that come with it and used those in 5 shades of pink to create a bubbly border down my card.  I then ignored the two Christmassy words and just focused on  LOVE and found another "LOVE" in Smitten which had the same style and another sentiment which paired with love perfectly.  I carefully cut the sentiment apart so I could rearrange the words in the famous song and just embossed all the words in silver for my metallic element of the challenge.

Cosmic

One of the reasons I bought the Cosmic Stars set from Mama Elephant was because I thought it would make a really cute calendar.  I have some desk calendars holders so I used one of those and I intend to make a few more -  they're a lot quicker and easier than you might think and make really inexpensive gifts for Christmas so I made one as my project today for the Make the Day Special blog (their shop is currently the only place in the UK where you can get Mama Elephant stamps)

I'll not fill the blog with 12 pictures - you'll get the gist from the couple here:

The actual calendar part is a free printable I found on the internet (here) and I just saved them as pictures and added them to a table in a word document where I sized each "cell" to the size of my desk calendar and then printed them on copic colouring card.

Then it's just a case of stamping each star sign to the left, adding the name from the starry nights companion set underneath and colouring in the images - you could easily knock out half a dozen in an evening I reckon.

I also had a cute idea using the same images to make a card for the current Less is More challenge "to use DP in a CAS way" which I combined with the new sketch at retro sketches.

I just used one scrap of DP with tiny hearts on (Knee Highs stack) and overlayed it with a strip of vellum and embossed a sentiment from Mama Elephant's Smitten set over the join using a little wacky tac to secure it.  I coloured the character with copics and used a craft knife to cut around it so you could see through the bow and arrow.