EnJOY the great outdoors with Jingle Belles

Happy Friday!

You cannot imagine how thrilled I was when Lauren emailed me and asked not only if I would like to be a guest designer, but if I would like to choose the prompt for an upcoming challenge at Jingle Belles!!!

(If you are unfamiliar with Jingles Belles, this is their mission: to avoid holiday mayhem by making unique and inspiring christmas cards, in the company of friends, january through november. won't YOU join us?!)

Well, that was some time ago, but the time has finally arrived!I have a wide variety of interests, but there is nothing I value more than quality time spent with my family outdoors. So many things keep us indoors these days that it can be hard to tear yourself away to get a breath of fresh air. A few years back, we decided we were "hiding inside" a little too much during our long Northwestern Ontario winters. We were getting sick too often and we were lacking motivation to get outside and play in the snow. Well, we introduced the boys to skiing and the rest is history. These days, most of our friends think we are loco because we LIVE for the WHITE STUFF - yes SNOW! * For some people, it is a bad word, but for us it means playtime** - alpine skiing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing - bring it on!!! We bought our season passes in September, and my eldest son is carefully watching the forecast, we are ready! 

So without further ado, this week's prompt at Jingle Belles is "the great outdoors", chosen by yours truly, and here is my card!

I had been wanting to try my hand at creating a collage-style card and this seemed like the perfect opportunity since I was hoping to incorporate a number of things on just one card. I have many fond memories of time spent in the great outdoors growing up and tried to portray some of them here. When I was a little girl, we sometimes went hunting for a tree the old-fashioned way, by tromping through the bush until we found a tree that was just right, no need for tree lots in the country - hence the trees and snowflakes. We all ( I am the eldest of four children) learned to skate shortly after learning to walk, whether it was at the local rink or on the tiny pond in the pasture. We spent countless hours on skates, some of us playing hockey, some ringette, I was a figure skater - so I had to add the silhouette of the skaters. The overall vintage feel of the card reminds me of Christmases as a small girl when we would pack up our favourite new toys, get bundled up warm, and drive the country roads to Nana & Papa's house where we would spend most of Christmas day with family in their big old house - warm & cozy memories!

One of the really fun things about this card is that much of it came together rather organically as a result of rootling through the little baskets of odds and ends, bits and bobs on my scrap table. We all have them don't we? Those little containers overflowing with little bits of things that weren't quite right for another project...this card was so much fun to make!

The process also got me to thinking about how when I was a little girl, we got to have our very own REAL tree in our bedrooms for Christmas. When we were small (there were four of us), my Papa would come by the house a couple of days before Christmas and bring us each our VERY OWN tree! My Mom would find big mason jars to put them in. Usually we had to wrap towels around them and put them inside a shoebox or something to make them stand up. Then we got to decorate! Over the years, we each started our own collections. We each had a special box we kept our own ornaments in. By the time I moved away from home to go to University, I had several boxes of Christmas decor and more than enough ornaments to decorate a 7 foot tree!

So, this project is also for the Tree-mendous Tree Challenge in the Moxie Fab World!

And here is the inside:

I must admit, I love how the inside turned out and am thinking about making a card using a similar layout on the front.

And voila, a peek at the matching envelope:

Thank you so much for your visit! I know you still have at least a few holiday cards to make, so I sure hope you can join in the fun this week at Jingle Belles! Thanks Lauren and Steph for asking me to join you this week!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

(there is snow in the forecast after all ;)

Shanna :)

* I will admit that although I do LOVE to play in the white stuff ...I, like so many of you, do NOT enjoy shoveling the stuff!

** READ avoidance of household duties and other nasty chores that generally tend to get accomplished on weekends. The reality is that lots of playtime= messy house and large piles laundry that is mostly clean but not folded or put away, piles of equipment (goggles, helmets, mittens and ski pants in the process of drying) that simply live near the front door for ease of access and a constant stream of containers and thermoses that are either dirty or drying upside down in the sink, so please keep that in mind if you plan to visit me between December and March, lol! It is actually much safer to meet me at the ski hill than at my house - as I've told my friends that don't ski, the ride up the hill is long and boring - an opportune time for catching up - if you learn to ski, we could solve the world"s problems whilst riding the lift over the course of a couple of weekends!

What I used:

CTMH Winter Wonder D1241 (on envelope)

CTMH Holiday Magic S1110 (trees)

papers: various, mostly from scrap bin

wooden snowflakes: Studio Calico

Kraft Journaling Tags: Maya Road

cricut cut - A Child's Year cartridge

Tim Holtz distress ink