Delightful Decorations....How Fun!

Hi There! I hope you are having a great day stamping, scrapping, or doing whatever makes you happy!

I was blog-hopping the other day and came across this post by Debbie Naylor and thought "How fun is that?!" So, I had to give it a try myself! I have had the Delightful Decorations stamp set for awhile now, but just haven't had time to play with it. The idea of a one sheet wonder type of project appealed to me, so I gave it a go and this is what I came up with:


I chose a color combination that isn't exactly traditional for Christmas - Melon Mambo, Bermuda Bay, and Lovely Lilac. While not traditional Christmas colors, they are very much "Tammy" colors! I was told once by one of my swapping buddies that they can always tell which swaps are mine - they just look for the ones made with pink, purple, and green! Ever since then I have become conscious of just how often I use these three colors - in different hues, of course. It happens all the time! And not on purpose.....I can start out with a totally different set of colors and somehow I end up with shades of pink, purple, and green - I have no idea how that happens!

Okay, back to my project. The first thing I did was simply stamp ornaments on Whisper White cardstock and punch them out with Stampin' Up!'s new Ornament Punch. It's so great to have a coordinating punch with this stamp set! It makes life so easy! I didn't have a plan for card layouts at this point, so I just stamped and punched a bunch and figured I could always make more if I needed them!

After that, I took a full sheet of Whisper White cardstock and randomly stamped all over it with the three small stamps from this stamp set. This is the "one sheet" in a "one sheet wonder" project - basically you create your own designer paper that coordinates perfectly with your stamps and colors. This really is a fun technique that you can use with just about any stamp set.

At this point, I chose to just go where creativity took me, rather than creating or following a template for my one sheet wonder. The good thing about this is that I made some layouts that I might not have come up with otherwise, the bad thing is that I didn't keep notes, so I'll have to go back and take measurements, etc. if I want to re-create this project.

So, I just cut up my stamped piece of cardstock and using cardstock in my three colors, I matted my stamped pieces and created my layouts. All of my card fronts were stamped all over with Versamark using the "starburst" stamp from Delightful Decorations - they just looked naked without a little something on them. Several of the cards have stamped sentiments on them from the Many Merry Messages stamp set. I stamped the sentiments with Bermuda Bay ink.

I realized that my ornaments needed a little bling - so I added rhinestone brads to some of them, and I tied silver elastic cord around the necks of all of them. I orginally used the silver elastic cord as "hanging cords" on all of the ornaments, but on some of the cards I felt it was too much, so I removed some of them. All of the ornaments are popped up on Stampin' Dimensionals.

Oh - I forgot about the ribbon! I used Melon Mambo and Bermuda Bay polka dot grosgrain ribbon on some of these cards. I have to tell you, I just love these colors! And I just love polka dot ribbon, so this year's in-colors were just tailor-made for me! Anyway, the in-color ribbon has polka dots on one side and is solid on the other - so you can choose how you want to use it! As you can see on my cards, I used the ribbon in two ways - sometimes the polka dots would show on the strip across the card and sometimes the polka dots show on the knot. It's always nice to have options!

The last piece I added to my little set of cards was the coordinating pen. I just rolled up a small piece of the stamped cardstock and put it inside the pen barrel. So fun - and simple to do! This is a little touch that I always like to add if I am giving a set of cards as a gift.

After I finished this set of cards, I decided to translate it to more traditional Christmas colors, just to see how it would look. I chose Garden Green, Real Red, and Ballet Blue for this final card. I chose my favorite layout from the set I had already made, and only created one card with this color combo. I think I like it just as well as the original. What do you think?

That's it for now! Go out and make today a great day!


Tammy