jingling our stash??!

this week my two favorite blogs... ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and shopping our stash, obviously... are teaming up to give you one assignment with two link-ups and a chance at two lovely prizes. sound good? i thought it might, lol. i bet you can almost predict what we're going to ask for, can't you, darlings? especially if you remember a similar team-up we did last year? yepper, the jingle belles part is to make a christmas card (well duh, lauren!) and the SOS part is to use something from your stash that is at least a year old; oh yeah, and you need to tell us what that item is, so we can marvel at how cleverly you've used it! in my case it was reallllllly easy because, as you know, i have TONS of old stuff and i love to use it up, so apart from my glossy white cardstock cardbase, every single thing on this card is at least 3 or 4 years old... minimum... and some of it's nearly old enough to vote!!! :)

furthermore, since miss stephanie and i had the very great pleasure of spending crafty time together last week at my house, the two of us decided to add a little *extra* level of challenge to our own cards by using the exact same stamp. which DEFINITELY qualifies as senior stash, being as how it's from D.O.T.S. --a stamp co that's been gone for at least a decade; and the stamp wasn't new then! i confess that this part of the gig was nearly my undoing because stephanie is almost always more organized than i am, and is absolutely always a faster worker than i am, and she got in first with a gorgeous card that just happens to use two of the ideas i'd been counting on: handmade colorburst papers and lots of bling! so i had to get creative... or rather... more creative!

one of the first things you notice about this stamp is the fact that it has a bunch of horizontal layers within the tree. what would happen if i stamped the tree on several different scraps of green paper and pieced them all back together at the end? as a matter of fact, the results were super-cute, but when my tree didn't quiiiiiiiiite fill up the green panel, i thought i was sunk. and then it hit me: if i was adhering separate layers to each other anyway, why did i have to stop at just four? so i didn't! problem solved.

i've used the layout of sweet sunday sketch #285 to guide the placement of my stash-based schtuffs. i was fairly faithful, apart from the fact that i played with the proportions of the elements!

there are two places to check out more SOS + JB design team cards this week; namely shopping our stash and ♥JINGLE BELLES♥. so off you go for lots of extra inspiration!