the ghost of christmas present!

hello, JINGLE BELLES! you know that we like to make each week new and different to keep us all fresh; and you know that we especially like to use ideas that come from our fellow BELLES, and we adore a clever title, so we're delighted that this week's prompt does it all! it comes from the lovely clare at miscanthus crafts! before we start, let's get to know her a little bit better:

clare says, "I have always been a crafter and moved to card making at very difficult point in my life (which I’m sure a lot of you can relate to). Fortunately, I’m one of the lucky ones and after lots of treatment for I’m out the other side.

Crafting makes me smile and when I joined the Craft Bubble forum it opened a whole new door, not only did I make lots of new friends, this was when I started joining card making challenges! Over at the forum there is a little group which I’m part of called ‘Craft Mad and Loving it’ we have weekly fun challenges, and I now run a Christmas card challenge along with a couple of other members, why not come and join the forum!

The next step in my crafting journey was blogging and my blog is called Miscanthus Crafts. I’ve have had lots of guest designer spots, been part of the DT at Pear Tree designs and I’m lucky enough to be joining the Bah! Humbug! Christmas challenge team for the month of May."

clare has set us a "recipe" this week, of things to include in our cards.

the ingredients are:

1 - as white as a ghost

2 - a present

3 - a bow or knot

4 - a touch of traditional Christmas colours

and now here's what we cooked up for "the ghost of christmas present":

Clare's Card

Clare says, "When I cooked up this recipe I was thinking lots of white and probably no designer papers. But as you all know us crafters go off on a tangent as our creative juices start to flow and my card design does indeed have some backing papers with cute Christmas colour dots. I have gone with a fairly clean and simple design using a border embossing folder to create some texture on the layering. The cute little present stamp was a freebie off the front of a magazine and I have coloured the image with Promarkers. To emphasize the bow element I decided to paper piece the image using coordinating papers."

Stephanie's Card

Stef says, "My layout is from Chupa's Saturday Sketchbook. I paper-pieced this Noel image from Magenta that had never seen ink ... that's one of the things I love about making one holiday card a week is that I finally have time to ink up my neglected stash of holiday stamps. I combined two different embossing folders on the background for texture and finished with white pearls to decorate my tree & a big red bow. "

Lauren's Card

Lauren says, "you won't be surprised to hear that i was waaaaaaaaay of my comfort zone this time, but that is why i *LOVE* getting suggestions for prompts from all over--it's so much more FUN! i went with lots of different shades of white... loads of texture... and threw in a jolly santa to "deliver" my present!"

and now it's time to see what *YOU* will do: whip up a lovely & spirited christmas card using clare's clever recipe, and "haunt" inlinkz by 6pm next wednesday, april 13th. the keyword for linking at SCS and flickr is JB15.