Merry Monday #20

  

Happy Monday to you all---I trust you had a great weekend!  Mondays mean it’s time to make merry—Merry Monday, that is!  Here is Lesley’s sketch for this week to get your creative holiday juices flowing:

When I saw that long center panel, I immediately thought of this Purple Onion holiday block image, and went to work:

This is actually only a portion of the words, as it is a fairly long stamp, so I inked only the area that I wanted to highlight and cut the remainder off.  I find with big images like this, inking a hard rubber brayer first, then brayering the stamp surface, gives me better coverage.  Make sure your ink pad is freshly-inked, too!  I pulled out some older SU paper featuring bold graphics to use as my background.  I also made a little die-cut house and embellished it with a diecut holly, and I have some red glimmer paper peeking out of the heart “window”:

Isn’t that a sweet little embellishment?  The ribbon at the top was a gift from my non-crafting girlfriend---she gives me all her goodies from her Christmas gifts!  What a friend!  I hope you’ll play along with the Merry Monday crafters---we’d love to see your Christmas card creations and are happy that you’re getting a head start on your stash!  Stop by the Always Playing with Paper blog for all the details and to see the other designers’ creations as well!  And always, if you have any questions, pop me an email (it’s on the right sidebar!).

A Mother’s Day photo with an unhappy little granddaughter – it was so nice outside, she just wanted to get down to run & play:

Much happier now with her bowl of strawberries!