Christmas Card Club Challenge #25- Cute

Well, here we are at the last Challenge for this year, and it's been chosen by Sylvie, who wants to see Cute. I actually seem to have quite a number of stamps that fall into this category, and I admit they don't get enough use.

 Mainly because most of them need to be coloured, and until I discovered how enjoyable Prismacolor pencils were to work with, I avoided colouring like the plague. So we have 5 Christmas cards, and 4 more gift tags to the collection.

These two penguin images are by Whimsy Stamps. I've added Glossy Accents to the Candy Canes, and also used Inkylicious Fluffy Puffy Stuff for the fur on the hats. I'll share how I found it worked best further on.

This is another Whimsy stamps image, and Beloved Hubby bought me all three last year for Christmas. He couldn't find them in the UK, so got stung for Import Duty ordering from the USA, but when we visited the Papercrafts Show at the Motorcycle Museum recently, we discovered Dies to Die For, a UK company who stock many of the well known US brands of stamps and dies, such as Altenew, Lawn Fawn,Mama Elephant, Pretty Pink Posh, and Whimsy.
 I used the Fluffy Stuff on these too.

This is a Hobby Art stamp, bought at Happy Stampers a couple of months ago. Called Archie & 5 Pals.

Another Hobby Art stamp, Paws for Thought.
 Both of these are Rubber stamps.

These Penguin tags are also using a Hobby Art set, clear stamps this time, called Round Penguins.

 The Polar bear tags use stamps from Inkylicious, on the left, and a very old Woodware set on the right.  Laughing right now, as I just did a Google search to see if it was still available. The only two images that showed up are both from my blog, so I guess not!

So, I said I'd tell you about the Puffy stuff.
 It says on the bottle to apply a line of it, then heat with a heat gun. That works fine, especially if you are trying to line hills or trees for instance, but I found didn't produce the look I wanted for the fur.






So what I did was to add a thickish line of it onto the fur trim, then used a cotton bud to dab it all over.

I bought these cotton buds in Primark recently, you can find them in their make up/beauty section. They are great for crafting, as you have a thin pointy end, and the other end is flat. I used the pointy end to dab the Fluffy stuff over the fur areas, then heat set. You want a fairly even level, not too thick or it will puff up too far, but not too thin either, otherwise it doesn't puff at all. However, it's pretty forgiving- if you haven't got enough on, or have bare patches, you can just add some more and reheat.




If some areas puff up too far, you can flatten it down- the flat end of the cotton buds was perfect for that!

It's a really great little product for adding some dimension and texture to your Christmas creations.











And so we are done for another year, and I'd like to thank everyone for making this such a fun challenge. You've all provided so much inspiration, and often, reminded me of stamps I have that I'd forgotten about!

It's been great for taking the stress out of Christmas Card making, and made it something to enjoy through the year instead. As I wrote out and sent almost 70 cards earlier in the week, then another 30+ for work colleagues, and 20+ for family, I realised why in previous years-when I didn't start till November- I'd got heartily sick of the sight of them long before I was finished. So thank you ladies, and I hope you all have a quiet, peaceful and Happy Christmas, and thank you all for the lovely Christmas cards that have arrived!