while shepherds watch their flocks...

we're celebrating animals at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ this fortnight, so bring on your reindeer, your moose, your cardinals, your penguins, your narwhals, your yeti, your monstas... well, i think you get the theme now, right? and you've probably sussed that we're defining "animals" pretty loosely, in fact you could swap in the word "creature" and still be good to go. i know this will SHOCK everyone who knows me well, but i did not make a christmas monsta card this week!!! i've actually got a perfectly normal, perfectly adorable reindeer! (don't worry, i'll whip up something EXTRA weird for ya next week, lol!)

merry christmas washi tape, skinny hearts washi, stockings tape, santa tape, red tree tape, antler and heart brads: eyelet outlet; patterned paper: authentique + a bit of vintage sheet music; ink: colorbox; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape

i'm still pretty smitten by the adorable doodlebug reindeer stickers, and i still had a set of eyelet outlet antler brads, and the pairing is apparently quite irresistible to me at the moment, so i just went with it. i've used my "washi tape letters" trick again, too; because it's such an easy way to make 100% custom sentiments for my projects. and i may have just happened to get my hands on a few new UBER-cuuuuute tapes i couldn't wait to use, lol. this time i traced some rather elderly heidi swapp acrylic letters (i really like this font!) onto scraps of cardstock covered with neat strips of eyelet outlet washi tape, like this:

and yes, the one drawback of this technique is that you need to do a bit of hand-cutting, but i don't really mind that. if you loathe that sort of thing, though, you can use alphabet dies. another fun trick to fancy-up your titles is to either swap out the letter O for something else that's round-- (a snowflake, a flower, a snowglobe) --or use it as a frame for... ohhhhhh i dunno... a very sweet reindeer, maybe??!

i've used this week's layout from retro sketches:

the delightful miss stephanie also has a fabulous card to show you, why not hop over to ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ right now and enjoy that?!