Christmas in July Shaker Cards

I try to sneak at least one Christmas card into my workshops each time. Those are by far the biggest batch of handmade cards I send in a year. So, for our July shaker card class, I made sure one was Christmas.

Another could be Christmas but it could work for a winter birthday too. The summery card is a "just because" kind of card.

I was inspired to make shaped shaker kits like the ones from Queen & Co. If you've got a Xyron sticker maker and some nesting dies, you're good go. Else, you can buy the whole kit and kaboodle from Queen & Co.

I really liked Queen & Co.'s All Bundled Up kit. I love the chubby little penguin in it. But it also has this cute winter hat, or tuque we would call it here in Canada. I like watching CardsandCoffeeTime's youtube videos. She's on the Queen & Co. design team and I really liked her version of the hat card (<--- click="" her="" p="" post="" see="" to="">
I don't have the kit or dies, but I have a half circle by Frantic stamper. So I used that and made my own shaker hat!

This shaker is filled with seed beads from Dollarama or Dollar Tree.

For card number two, I've been a fan of collage front cards for a long time, but never wanted to invest in the cost of the dies. I finally bought a couple when I found a good sale on Accucut Craft's website. I got the dies for only a little more than the wafer thin, chemically etched dies, but these are steel rule. So, I can cut chipboard and thin wood and other materials if I wanted to collage a home decor piece or something.

These are colour blocking dies, but they are also called collage dies or cover panels. I bought one in A2 (4.25 x 5.5 inches) and one in A6 (4.75 x 6.25 inches) as I make my cards those two sizes almost exclusively. Here's the A6:

I *love* how this card turned out. I used glitter cardstock from Dollarama or Dollar tree. It's thin, but pretty and doesn't shed. I used a handful of paper scraps for the backdrops and then a mix of beads and sequins inside. This type of collage card is *excellent* to use up small scraps! I coloured the bunny with my Copic markers.

Here's the A2 card. I just had to use these penguins from Hello Bluebird. (I love the storybook style of drawings for Hello Bluebird's stamps!) This one is not a shaker. I wanted to see how well it looked just flat instead of a shaker. Isn't it cute? Mommy and Daddy penguin are by the mistletoe while the kids have a snowball fight.

Back to the shaker cards! Our last shaker card for the workshop was a springtime Yeti (a.k.a. abominable snowman, a.k.a. sasquatch). I could have coloured him brown like a sasquatch but I didn't.

He is also a Hello Bluebird stamp, along with the sentiment. I wanted to show my creative crew how, if you use vellum instead of acetate for the shaker window, you can tone down what's behind it. Here, we stamped on the vellum, but you could stamp on a strip of paper and lay it across the vellum. (If you stamp on vellum, you must use Stazon or other archival/permanent ink because vellum is non-porous.) Because the vellum tones down the shaker filler, we used all sequins in this shaker. There's a mix of 5 warm coloured sequins in there.

We used my homemade cloud stencil and some Dollarama make-up brushes to create the sky. The round balloons are from a Stampin' Up! punch that I have and the heart shaped one is from a Marianne Design die set. Again, I used Copic markers to colour the Yeti and the bluebird.

The crew enjoyed this workshop. Having the shakers as a whole kit really made them go faster for the participants. Hooray for Queen & Co. for doing the heavy lifting and offering simplicity to their shoppers which inspired me to do the same for my creative crew.