Merry Christmas!

Whatever your tradition or faith, I hope you are having a beautiful and blessed night.

Giving and Receiving

Hello Pocketeers, long time no see!  Sorry I haven't blogged in a few months.  I have been making things, though, so I'd like to catch up a little.  Most of what I've been making has been for a swap group I joined on facebook.  Most of the swaps I've signed up for in the group have been ATCs, but I've done a couple of tag swaps.  Here's some of what I've sent out:

Black Cat ATC

Tea Time tag

 

These sets were for an Earth, Wind, and Fire ATC set swap with a group of 5 of us.

An Apple A Day tag

Christmas Tree ATC

 

It's kept me busy.  I've done a bit of my own stuff, though.  I started a cigar box with the apple themed papers from Authentique from a year or two ago...  You can see it in the photo from the last post.  And I've done a few of my 52 Card Pick-Up cards:

I'm only making one Christmas present this  year, and I can't really show it too much of course, but here are some sneaky previews of my super sneaky secret project:

I have yet to make my gift tags, but I'll post those once I make them.  I'm excited for Christmas, but this year I haven't done much Christmas art.  It's taken a while to get into the spirit.  And my art space is such a mess, it's not very pleasant to work in right now, so I haven't been as active in general.  Ah, well.  I'll get it cleaned up and get in there more often soon!  In the meantime, I plan to share some Christmasy stuff with you this week.  See you soon!

Thursday Theme: Frozen

Hi all!  Back to posts with photos!  Although, ironically after all those posts about inspiration and personal style and such, I have been seriously off my groove.  I have wanted to make things, but just haven't had the inspiration.  I've been keeping up with my sketching, but don't have anything more than a few studies yet.  It's like my artistic impulse and inspiration have been frozen solid by the sudden decisive onset of Winter. 

But last night I sort of forced a thaw.  I had some gift tags to make and some boxes that needed to go out in the mail for some far-flung friends.  I decorated the boxes first, and it was kind of rough.  For a while I just sort of sat there looking at all my stuff, as though I didn't know what I was doing.  I pushed myself to just get started, though, and so I'm not all that thrilled with how they turned out.  Well, they're just shipping boxes, so they're not meant to be kept...

But once I got started on the tags to go with the gifts in them, I started to warm up a little better.

Isn't it strange how you can get so thrown off, and freeze up and feel like you can't do anything anymore?  Or maybe it's just me that happens to.  Well, hopefully I can keep warming up and get the fire burning again.  I have so much to do for Christmas!

Thursday Theme: Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String

Less with the string, more with the brown paper.  But still.

Merry Christmas!

Okay so I'm a couple days late, but it is still the Christmas season until January 6th, so merry Christmas anyway.  I hope you had a good one, whatever you were doing.  Mine was great, and though I had absolutely nothing to show last week (I had been doing some sketching but that will show up later), I have two days' worth of gift wrapping to show this week.  Yep, it took me two full days to wrap gifts in my usual brown kraft paper.  Normally it wouldn't have, but this year instead of doing a tag for each box, I had the brilliant brainwave to decorate the paper itself.  Still not really sure why I do these things to myself.  And I put clues on all of Mr. Pocket's gifts (though some were kind of a stretch).  Anyway, this is going to be a VERY picture-heavy post, especially since I went a little overboard for Mr. Pocket.  Here we go!

This was a mug and some tea for Mr. Pocket to take to work.

Pajamas, something I'm making a tradition.

Custom Achievement Hunter t-shirt with his XBox gamertag on it.

Socks.  Yeah, I know.  He always wants socks for Christmas.

Cut the Rope boxers.  Om Nom is green.

Lego Lord of the Rings for the XBox.  Santa's helpers are elves, and there are lots of elves in Middle Earth.  I know, kind of a stretch.

Next, two gifts for Pocket Papa (my dad):

 

 

And for Mom:

 

 

These were for my brother and my sister-in-law:

And then finally, a gift card tag and a plain tag for my brother-in-law and my mother-in-law.

I had so much fun doing all of this, but I think next  year I will probably go back to tags for the boxes rather than decorating the paper itself.  It took five forevers.  Or, you know, two days.  Perhaps if I hadn't been so type A and wrapped the paper around the boxes first to get creases in the right places to guide where I had to decorate and then decorated the paper and then wrapped it back on the boxes, it wouldn't have taken so long.  But it also wouldn't have looked as good, and I wouldn't have been satisfied. 

I hope the post-holiday letdown isn't too bad, and that you have good plans for New Year's.  We're taking it easy this year and staying home.  Looking forward to a better year to come!

What I used:
Stencils:  by Michelle Ward
Stamps:  by Tim Holtz for Stampers Anonymous, by Inkadinkado (the adorable birds), by HeroArts, and I don't have the label anymore for the letter stamps but I got them at Michael's and I think they were Recollections (maybe)
Die Cuts:  Sizzix by Tim Holtz, and some random holly leaves that Mom had gotten at Michael's.  Cut from Core'dinations and some random gold and silver cardstock we've had for a few years, probably Recollections because I know I got it at Michael's
Inks:  Distress Inks by Tim Holtz for Ranger, some random gold and silver pigment ink that Mom had, and Tsukineko embossing ink
Embossing Powders:  I think they were all Stampendous
Sprays:  Perfect Pearls and Tattered Angels mists

Thursday Theme: Evergreen

Been a little more artsy this week.  Yay!  With an unexpected twist.  See, a couple weeks ago, I had cut a bunch of tags out of plain white watercolor paper with a torn bottom edge, planning to do a lot of white backgrounds with simple motifs.  But... best laid plans of mice.  You know.

Green happened.

More specifically, Iced Spruce, Evergreen Bough, and Pine Needles in the Distress line happened. 

I blame Mom.

But it's okay, because I really didn't know what I was going to do with all my pristine white tags, but then I started playing with Mom's Distress Stains and Perfect Pearls, and the next thing I knew, I had a whole theme for this week.

All of these backgrounds were done using Distress Inks or Stains in various combinations of the above listed colors and Perfect Pearls mists in Heirloom Gold and Biscotti, using the wrinkle-free distress technique, which is my current favorite way to do a background.

Here I used that embossing powder resist technique that I used on the last acorn tag.

I used the Fabulous Flourish stamp from Hero Arts.

Even with the embossing powder melted off, you can see where the ink pooled in the curls.  I love it.

This one shows more blue than green, but I promise, it's the same inks.

I also had some fun with my Michelle Ward stencils and some gold Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic.

 

This is actually a monoprint off of the Maltese Small stencil after using it on another ATC.

And since green makes me think of trees, and Winter makes me think of evergreen trees, I played with some tree motifs, too.

Tim Holtz tissue tape gives me my strong vertical here.  The trees were cut out with a new Tim Holtz die that does a pine tree border...

...and I coated them with embossing ink and used copper embossing powder on them.  Look how the torn edge soaked up that ink.  Yum.

I decided that rather than let the back be messy, I'd just ink that, too.

Finally, a new insert for my clear iPhone case.  Just the Iced Spruce ink and Biscotti Perfect Pearls for the background, with Tim Holtz stamps and tissue tape.

 

So much for my white backrounds.  Although I do have one project in mind that will be all white backgrounds.  But green really has caught hold of me this year.  Is there a particular color that you find yourself using predominantly this year?