Favourite Christmas cards of 2015

Welcome and I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas with lots of family fun.

My Grandson has gone to his other Nan for Boxing Day so the house is v v v quiet now. Even Max the dog is calm after yesterday's activity. He must have walked further yesterday as he followed me around the kitchen with his nose in the air, than if he had been on a log walk across the fields!

Any way back to crafty things.

It's becoming a bit of a tradition to look back at the past year and go through all those favourite makes.

As in previous years, Debby is hosting the favourite Christmas creations of your year, so I've been looking through my pics and trying to choose just 5 of my Christmas faves.

As usual it's a hard task as they are all loved to some extent but after a lot of deleting of possibles I ended up with a group that I think reflects my varied taste.

So here goes!

I've made Christmas cards all year around this year but in the end I seem to have gone with some of my more recent designs.First off the block is this card using MB's 'Glowing Candles' and my newly found product Inka Gold waxes, thanks Loll.

Love this die cut and I used a panel of embossed card coloured with washes of DI with the raised bits rubbed over with gold Inka Gold wax as a backing. The candles were cut in white card, then the foliage cut again in gold and green, trimming and overlaying to create this effect.

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This little fella was made for a DT post for Cards und More and was chosen

as it reflects my passion for colouring and fussy cutting and for LOTV stamps.

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I love a bit of masking and inking to create a scene and I chose this one because it had a bit of a twist, with the popped up circle.

 I had seen a similar design somewhere and had wanted to have a go for quite a while so my DT post at Fantasy Stampers was just the right time. I 'd eyed up the Christmas tree stamp from Heartfelt Creations for sometime and eventually bought it early in 2014 and have used the trio of spruce trees on quite a few occasions.

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This next card reflects my CAS tastes, but I had to include this new stamp from LOTV, I purchased at my first ever visit to Port Sunlight Stamp Fair on a very foggy October morning this year.

I've been, vainly, trying to use up some of my old stash and I used some of my 4 year old linen effect cards for this one. The penguin is a trio stamp and I ended up using each stamp for 3 separate CAS cards. A little off cut of LOTV Frosty Christmas paper is tucked in behind this cheeky penguin.

My final card is a take on one I made last year which also made my top 5. This time I went flat as I knew exactly where this one was destined and needed to be post friendly.

Penny Black freebie stamp inked up with Festive Berries DI then w/c washed, masked off, then Stampendous Christmas words stamped and embossed in white. The florets were coloured then a little bit of glossy accents for depth and a few freehand leaves washed in with more green DIs. This time I used HP w/c paper not sure it worked any better than normal card but I was v pleased with the end result.

So that's that, as always a difficult decision but hope you liked them as much as I did making them.

Thanks for stopping by and many thanks to my followers old and new and all the wonderful people who have left such positive and encouraging comments over the last year,

Hope you all had a

 MERRY CHRISTMAS