thinking ahead a little...

My August Studio Calico kit arrived on Friday. The kit is called Summer Camp and I'd seen the contents on their website, so I knew what to expect when the box came, but as soon as I saw all the papers in person, my first thought was FALL! Unconventional fall, but fall nonetheless :) I LOVE the My Mind's Eye So Sophie collection papers - they included 3 or 4 of them and they're all awesome. And the Sassafras Paper Whimsies flowers remind me of marigolds and mums! So cute. So I decided to make some - again non-traditional - Thanksgiving cards.

AND, the kit included my favorite font of AC letter Thickers! I have them in green fabric too and they're the perfect size for cards. Except I noticed when I was using these foam ones that there are only 5 T's! And they included more than 5 Z's! Whose brilliant idea was that? :) Oh well, I can always get more!

Yesterday the mailman brought me some items from Kaisercraft's new Christmas collections. I'm not quite sure how I ended up with them... to the best of my knowledge they're not available anywhere yet, but then I came across them shipping immediately from one of my favorite ebay sellers. So I might have bootleg CHA sample copies in my office, but I'm not complaining!

So, I got portions of their 2 Christmas collections. They're both vintage-inspired and a little distressed, but between the two collections they hit a really nice range of options...

Be Merry is more brightly colored, more graphic, and more whimsical.

(I got the 6x6 pad, the chipboard, the rub ons, and the stamps.)

Tis the Season is very vintage-traditional with deeper colors and lots of damask.

(I got the 6x6 pad and the stamps.)

I'm impressed with the 6x6 pads, although quality-wise they're not my favorites. What I do really love about them, though, is they have papers with flocking, glitter, varnish, and foil. There are also 3 or 4 sheets of small die cut shapes in the back of the pad. I've never seen this before and I love it! The stamps are decent, though again not my faves. I had a hard time getting one of them to stamp with even, complete coverage when I was using my Memento ink. But I don't stamp all that much, and I'm really not familiar with the different types of ink and their ideal uses, so it may just be something I'm doing wrong! :)

Here's what I've made so far...

Look at that damask pattern with Santa in it! So clever! It's hard to tell in this photo, but I actually did emboss resist with snowflakes over the text paper. It's very subtle, very low-contrast, but I like how it turned out with the variation in beige colors.

Thanks for stopping by!