2019 #17 A Vintage Christmas: Snowman with EKC {by Chris Dark}

2019 Topic 17: A Vintage Christmas

Chris has created such a gorgeous vintage effect with Kay's stencil and stamps and ended up with a softly pencilled and painted snowman with such an unexpected but wonderfully Christmassy colour scheme.Her gift bags and tags are really special.

Hi everyone, it's Chris Dark with you today sharing my take on A Vintage Christmas. There are so many ways to interpret this topic and everyone's idea of it will be different but holly, snowmen, snowflakes and Christmas tree ornaments are definitely to be featured in mine so I chose to work with gorgeous recently released Christmas stamps and stencils by Kay Carley. All the stockists for the stamps and stencils I used can be found in this post.  It's nice to do a pretty project like this now and again with lots of sparkle and a gorgeous palette of colours that I feel reflects vintage from Tracey Scott's new Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic Paint release. Stockists for the paints can be found at the end of this post.

I always relish the prospect of working with stencils and Kay's snowman stencil PS161 is a joy. You can build him up so easily as all the parts of the stencil fit together for layering; look at the blog post linked above where Kay shows how the stencils can be used.  It's easy to create a different effect each time but  I've surrounded mine with holly from the PS162 stencil and the EKC32 stamp set. A gel plate helped me make the backgrounds, it works so well with the stencils for more layering of colour and the impression of texture.

I enjoy decorating gift bags and making tags for my Christmas gifts and everyone seems to appreciate them which is nice so I feel it's worth the effort. This one will be for my mum; it can be easily pegged onto the top edge of the bag.

There's a gel print in the background using some of the paints listed above. The Frescos  create a really nice base for stencilling and also for colouring with pencils. The mono print gives an even coating of paint on the card with a little tooth for the pencils to grab.

Die cut some holly, a silver skeleton leaf, silver mini clothes peg, and a silver glitter matting layer all help to add the vintage sparkle.

The gift bag follows on from the tag above in style with a stencilled and stamped mono print and then stencilling over the top. The die cut this time is cut from another mono print where real leaves were used on the gel plate.

The recipients name could be written in the heart instead of using a gift tag.

By using different parts of gel print you can achieve a nice variance in the colours but they all co-ordinate and the new Fresco colours are so pretty together. 

A bit of glitter card is another favourite thing of mine to use at Christmas and some wrinkled seam binding too.

Christmas makes are always my favourites although they are also the hardest makes to fit in at such a busy time of year so I'm glad I've made a start. My colour scheme is set with some of the beautiful new colours in Fresco range and the beautiful stamps and stencils from Kay help to get quick results. I've die cut lots of silver glitter holly for the rest of my tags and bags and I hope you'll join us in the topic! 

Thanks for joining me today and I hope you have some creative time this week.

Chris x

Blog: www.sketchingstamper.blogspot.co.uk

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Find my classes at The Craft Barn