
Hello everyone and welcome to another challenge at ABC Christmas Challenges.
Things are starting to hot up on the Christmas card-making front with lots of Christmas fayres coming up for those who make to sell, and if you've been joining in with us throughout the year, you'll be well on the way to ensuring you have a good supply. I was sad last Christmas to find a few notes with Christmas cards saying that some friends would not send real cards in the future but would send e-cards because of the cost. Of course, I really understand the difficulty of stretching our incomes with ever-increasing costs, but I enjoy sending and receiving some handmade or shop-bought kindness in the post and I'm sorry that inflation is going to kill this off for some people. On another track, am I the only one who misses getting a phone call in favour of a text or email? When I mentioned this to my youngest son, he told me that the younger generation finds actual phone calls a bit alarming and intrusive because they have to drop what they are doing to take the call rather than respond to a text in their own time. He reckons that younger people will still call their parents because it is what they prefer, but will rarely call their friends any more. My big birthday is making me feel old and a bit maudlin lol!!
Anyway, the ABC Challenge this month is looking for
U for Use it up
and
V for vertical
This is my U for Use It Up

For this card, I had a panel in my snippets box that was stamped with the Christmas lights but I had made a mess of stamping the sentiment on it. The word 'Christmas' had not been stamped well and looked blurred. I decided that it could be rescued by colouring in the gaps with a green fine-liner pen, and although it wasn't perfect, it looked usable afterwards.

I added the die-cut sparkle word, cut from holographic card, stacked it and put glossy accents on the lightbulbs which makes a difference IRL.
V for Vertical.

For this card, I took a panel of white card and inked it with some oxide inks. I cut lots of snowflakes of different sizes from snippets of leftover white card and glued them to the panel. I then die-cut a smaller panel from the centre, backed it with white card and raised this before adding it back in.
The sentiment was die cut from silver card, offset on some of the leftover inked card and I added some silver snowflakes around it. I finished off by adding some pearls to the snowflakes.
My talented DT friends have some great inspiration for you over on the
blog and you can enter your creations over there if you'd like to join us this time.
Thanks for stopping by,
Hugs
Carol x