A Christmas Card Explosion

Thanks to my friend Terrie, I've discovered a new technique that I absolutely love. Terrie hosted the challenge this week at Cardmaker and asked us to use the "distressed newsprint" technique which I had never heard of before. So, I watched the video and gave it a try and made this card with one of my all-time favorite snowman stamps (yes, an actual wood-mounted stamp..GASP!) You can watch the video from Stamp TV HERE. The distressing is done with Tim Holtz Antique Linen, Old Paper and Frayed Burlap distress inks. The simple coloring on the snowman was done with about four Copic markers.

I really loved how this card turned out so I made some more, although I made these ones longways/horizontal..however you want to describe them. I had just enough newspaper to make twelve of them, so that's what I did:

And a close up:

While I was making these I was wondering what the Christmas Cards All Year Long challenge was going to be for July because it hadn't been posted the last time I looked. I was hoping that maybe somehow my cards would work for that. Turns out, the challenge is "Anything Goes" so I'm entering these cards in that challenge. If you've never played along before, the challenge is to make five Christmas cards in a month based on the given theme. Since you can do anything you want this month, why not give it a try and jumpstart your Christmas card stash?
I'm not finished yet, the second challenge this week at Cardmaker is a sketch brought to us by Mrs. Jones. Since I've TOTALLY caught the Christmas bug, I decided to make this a Christmas card too. This is from a new image I won from The Stamping Boutique. Of course I had to use my Snow Dots embossing folder!

Now I'm finished. I'm going to post this and then go add FOURTEEN more cards to my Christmas card totals on my sidebar. WOO HOO!