Three of my granddaughters requested Target gift cards. I made sure to pick our three distinct designs so there'd be no confusion about whose card was whose! It was also helpful when I set about making gift card holders. I used Pinkfresh Studio's Fillable Gift Card Holder for all three. These easily fit into an A2 envelope.

The oldest is eleven now, and I chose the snowflake design for her. The My Favorite Things Snowflake Window die was just perfect. It's impossible to photograph, but the snowflake was heavily misted with Glimmer spray and is lovely in person.

The middle granddaughter is eight, and pretty savvy, so I'm not sure if she believes in Santa or not. I decided she wasn't too old for snowmen, and all her gifts are wrapped in a cute snowman pattern. I stamped, colored, and die cut designs from My Favorite Things Present Time and MFT's Jingle All the Way to decorate her card. The snowflakes are from Papertrey Ink's Winter Hills set.

The youngest is six, and I'm pretty sure the older two have not ruined any ideas about Santa for her. The images on her card are also from MFT's Jingle All the Way and Papertrey's Winter Hills.

I'm sending these over to Just Add Ink Challenge where they're looking for anything except a card, to Christmas Kickstart where you can link up anything Christmasy, and to the Four Seasons Challenge: Anything Goes Winter.

The Paper Players theme for the current challenge is: Santa. 

I have some Santa tags to share. I purchased some snow globe/music boxes for my grandchildren and found the cutest boxes to package them. I photographed only three of the five. 

I'd been waiting for an opportunity to use the Ornament Options stamp set and die by Simon Says, and it was just perfect for these boxes. These are the first tags I've made this season, but I have a lot more to create, and there are multiple options for the words around the circle. I opted to use my favorite Santa image from My Favorite Things Jingle All the Way to embellish them. I stamped them, colored them with Copics, and then die cut them before adding them to the tags with some dimensional tape.

All I had to do was tie them onto the box with some red and white twine. Probably the easiest wrapping I'll do this year!

A year or so ago, I participated in a Woodblock Wednesday "challenge." I'm not sure if they were discontinued, but I lost track of them for sure. Last month a friend posted a card for  Woodblock Wednesday, and I investigated. The challenge to use your old wooden stamps is posted for just one day, so I missed the November link-up. Today is the December posting, and I had a fine time over the weekend making cards with three different woodblock Christmas stamps. I still have a small, but lovely, collection of woodblock stamps, including the sentiment stamp on three of the cards.

I'll start with the most traditional stamp, and the only card where I also used some newer products: the beautiful Tapestry embossing folder by Gina K Designs, and a sentiment strip stamped with a Reverse Confetti stamp.

The image is one from Magenta. I loved their detailed stamps and have saved several of them. After stamping it in a lovely green ink, all I did was to color the berries.

The embossing folder is so elegant, and the Waffle Flower Nesting Oval Frame sets off the main image. I'm entering this in the new Shop Your Stash Challenge: Holly & Ivy (any holiday greenery). This stamp has been in my stash for years!

Here are the cards I love the most. A much more modern feel, especially because the trees are stamped in non-tradidtional colors. I'll chose one of these to upload to the Woodblock Wednesday post. These are, of course, my favorite Clean and Simple card design.

These two use three stamps by Hero Arts: Small Holiday Trees. Lining these up is  so much more time consuming that I'm used to with acrylic stamps and the MISTI stamp positioner.

The only embellishment was some thin gold twine and a gold pearl for the second one. The sentiment was purchased years and years ago on my first trip to Seattle when I discovered Impress Stamps. My last trip to the store was in 2019 during our last visit to Seattle. Since then the retail store has closed, but there continues to be an online store. This stamp and the inside sentiment are both Impress brand stamps. I have three other inside stamps that coordinate with "wishing you . . ." for other occasions. It was so easy to line up straight I need to remember to use it more frequently.

This card uses very similar, but larger, trees: Three Trees by Hero Arts.

All of the tree cards were stamped with the same inside message. 

Hope your week is going well. Thanks for visiting!

When I purchased the Papertrey Ink Winter Globe set, I had several ideas for using it. And inspired by several challenges, I had time today to create a new card.

This card uses the globe and the birch trees from the Papertrey Ink set. The starry sky was die cut with a circle die and embossed with Spellbinder's Stargazer embossing folder. The Delighful Deer are from My Favorite Things and are no longer available. The sentiment is a new purchase from The Greetery. There's also a Pierced Frame from Papertrey, but it's almost impossible to see despite taking multiple photos. The Midnight cardstock from Concord & 9th is beautiful, but very dark.

I added some ink blending to the deer for some dimension, and added some sparkle to the stars with a Gelly Roll Clear Star pen.

I managed to get all three of the elements from the current Just Add Ink: Choose Two (deer, trees, sparkle) Challenge in the card. It also fits The Four Seasons Challenge which has switched to Winter, and Inspired By Challenge: Reindeer, and lastly the Time Out Challlenge: Winter Holiday. It's not often one card fits four challenges! 

During one of the pre-Black Friday sales, I picked up a new embossing folder from Spellbinders called Ski Lodge. I think it has lots of possibilities for winter cards, but I have three today that are all holiday cards. I used it to create three different colored backgrounds which I used below, and I have a few extras left for more cards.

The embossing folder is large enough to accommodate a 5×7 piece of cardstock but I almost always make an A2 size card or a square one so I precut the cardstock before running them through in the embossing folder. The detail on this is just lovely. I added the sled and wreath from Honey Bee's Sleigh Bells Ring set which I purchased a year ago, and had not used.  

The sentiment is from Reverse Confetti's Christmas Card Greetings–also new. I purchased it when they closed their business earlier this fall. 

For this card, and the next, I cut strips from the embossed cardstock to create the card designs. Matching up the patterns was easy to do. 

The sentiment was hot foiled with Pinkfresh Studio's Perfect Sentiments: Holiday, and I added a few of their Champagne Glitter Drops. 

Lastly, a similar card but with a different pattern:

Here I cut my favorite part of the Ski Lodge pattern in red and added two narrow strips of the green paper. This sentiment is also from the same Pinkfresh Studio hot foil set.

Some days I'm successful at photographing the wonderful shine of hot foil. This time it was less successful, but here's a sense of it.

I recently came across two new (to me) card challenges. I love the name of the first one: Let's Squash It! It's a card challenge focused on embossing folders so these cards are perfect for their current challenge: Make a Christmas Card.  The second new challenge is Sunday Stamps, and their current challenge is a color challenge. There are five colors, and you must use three of them. I'm sending the last card to Sunday Stamps where I used the red, green, and white.

I'm linking the second card to the current TicTacToe Challenge where I chose the top row across: December Holiday, Use a Die (die cut sentiment,) Embellishment, and of course I'm sending the first to NBUS because this was the embossing folder's first runs through the die machine as well as the sled's debut.

There are two important male birthdays in December—my brother's and my brother-in-law's. Their birthdays are separated by exactly one week, and they often get the same card. That will be the case this year as well. I finished one of them yesterday just under the wire for the Inkspirational Photo Challenge which ends today, and later this weekend I'll make a second card. 

All except the stamped sentiment and the background coverplate (Pinkfresh Studio's Snowflakes Coverplate) are from Papertrey Ink's Winter Globe set. Papertrey has two different globe sets, but this one seemed the most versatile to me. I have some ideas (which I hope you'll see soon) for using the globe with other die cuts in my collection. 

The beautiful birch trees are a circle die cut and the snow (die cut with white shimmer cardstock) is adhered to the top of it. I ink blended the background with five different Distress Oxide Inks in purples and blues.

I die cut two of each deer and layered them for some dimension, but then added a small piece of dimensional tape in addition. The sentiment is from Ellen Hutson's Essentials line: Cake, which I embossed in silver on the bottom portion of the globe.

Hope your weekend is off to a good start! I'm hoping to get the house decorated for Christmas and get a little more crafting done.