So, I would like to say, I am so very pleasantly surprised that I haven’t been inundated with Christmas themes and snowflakes through out the shopping world.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas and all the decorations that go with it, but I love me some Thanksgiving too.  I like all the warm colors that are associated with fall and pilgrims.  I am not ready to let go of pumpkin everything and red and orange leaves.  So I would like to give a very special thank you to the world around me for holding onto fall for just a few more weeks.

That being said, it is Holiday Card central inside my house.  This year, I have the time and the will, so I am crafting all our holiday cards, and needless to say after 11 years of marriage and five moves, we have a rather lengthy christmas card list.  So while the world outside is holding onto fall, I’m playing the nutcrackers suite inside here.

The first card here is a little winter wonderland theme I knocked out for the Friday Mashup.  This week they were asking for us to mashup both a winter scene and a color theme using Mint, Pool, White and Slate.

The winter theme was in no way shape or form going to be a problem, but the colors mint and pool had me boggled.  It wasn’t that I didn’t like the colors or agree that they would work with a

winter theme, it was that I was seriously short on having material or ink in those colors.  And I won’t lie here, I still not quite sure what the color pool actually is.  Is it the light blues in the inspiration picture or a darker on.  Anyway, I figured how to push forward when I found an old ink spray called peppermint that looked like the right color of minty green.  I not sure I still found the right color of pool, but I love the cold winter feel the card gives none the less.

The next card I have it from Sweet Sunday Sketch Challenge who gave us very detailed sketch to work with this week.  They wanted a circle element, a rectangle element, and vertical stripes.

I knew I had this merry line stamp from Recollections Merry Merry stamp pack that would make the perfect vertical stripes and from there launched my card.  A little glittery emerald green paper and

an ornament stamp from Hero Arts Christmas Crystals stamp pack, colored in with my Spectrum Noir markers and we had a clean and slightly new age card.  I added the definition of merry from a Momenta holiday stamp pack to pull the red from the lines together with the ornament. I finished the whole thing off with a couple of red crystals to give it some bling and called it a day.  The card is very different from my usual style, and honestly I’m not sure I like it.  But I do find it intriguing.

The last card I have is from The Paper Players.  They gave us a lot of freedom asking for just a ‘clean and simple’ christmas card.

Now I’m not usually a clean and simple kind of girl, but I can rise to almost any challenge.  I had a new stamp pack (at least to me) from Penny Black that I have just been itching to use, so this

seemed like the perfect chance.  I grabbed a sheet of water color paper, and stamped the two images from Penny Black’s Christmas with Mimi on the page.  I colored the precious little images in with my Sai Japanese watercolor pens, and got a pretty good blend out of them.  I think I failed a little with the clean and simple theme when I watercolored in the background with the blue, but trust me when I say it needed the color back there.  Regardless, I think the girls came out sweet, and as a girl stuck in Southern California for the holidays, I wish a little angle would send some snow my way.