Thrifty Christmas Crafting

I don't even know where I bought these stickers from, but when I saw that they were reduced to 49p, I bought two sets ....

And I thought it would be fun to show you what I created .... I still have a few miscellaneous little bits and bobs left from the sticker sheet, but you can stretch that one set of stickers a llooooongggg way ....

All of the accompanying background and matting papers are yeeeears old.  Good to get it used.  The above paisley paper got put into my Christmas stash because of the colours. 

When you know what to do, why do we then try to take a shortcut?  I was trying to deviate away from the white background for the vellum stickers, but what a mistake!  I knew that already.  In future, just stick to it!  Tsk. 



It's like a mantra - I will, I will get through that peel-off stash that I first bought when I started crafting!  I think the key is to keep the elements uniform - ie use gold peel-offs when you incorporate gold elsewhere. 

The red background was a really glossy dull red to which I added various shades of alcohol inks.  Being matted on a gold card just makes the red pop! I broke out my Krylon pens again, which I haven't used for a long time but smudging some gold around the edge of the stickers helps to tie them in with the background. 

A kind friend gave me some Christmas stash about a year or so ago, and there were a lot of Christmas metal messages from Making Memories in the package. Here I altered them with my gold Krylon pen so that they tie in with the gold theme.

I found a white oval in the christmas stash and stuck the Santa on.  I then misted over the top with a glimmer mist - but where there were patches in the masking, I filled in some of the background by painting with a paintbrush.  I love the misting painty effect here. 





Here I added some red sparkly tinsel fibre to get it used up! 

And now for something completely different.  This is the leftover piece of Sassafras Lass paper when I used the journalling spot inside.  I think it really portrays the ease of making a cute Christmas card using completely non-Christmas stash. 



And here's my favourite card from the pack.  I used my old trick of alcohol inking over used photo paper, and then embossing over the top with gold using a text Prima stamp. 



So - I think that stickers are a great embellishment to use, if you follow a couple of basic rules.  Happy thrifty Christmas crafting!