'twas the week before new year...

...and all through the ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ house, stephanie and lauren were getting pretty excited about an imminent second year of holiday creativity, friendship and fun!

2011 was awesome, especially the part where we had nearly *FIFTY* cards completed on november 30th, and were able not just to take december back, but actually take december OFF!  we spent the holiday season doing holiday things instead of frantically mass-producing festive greetings, and it was FABULOUS!  :)

if you played along with us this year, then you know exactly what we mean, and we hope you'll be inspired to come back on january 1st and help us kick the whole thing off again!  if you've just discovered us, we hope to see you next week, so you can get in on the action:  trust us, this whole "spread the work throughout the year" lark has HUGE holiday benefits; plus it's just a whole lotta fun, too!!!

this time, we're going to try something slightly different:  we'll be posting our new prompts every other week!  we'll still start early on fridays, and wrap up on wednesday evenings, but we'll be giving you TWO weeks to make and link up your cards for each theme.  we hope this will give everyone a little more time to create, and thus a better chance to participate!  on the other hand, it means we'll be only be posting *24* creative ideas to inspire you (as opposed to 48 this year) so if you need to produce 50+ cards in total, you'll want to be making more than one for each prompt. (lauren's note:  i still plan to make one card per week, and may post both here... or sometimes just do a "follow up" on my own blog.) 

once again, we'd like to remind you that we think of this as a group project, and so we LOVE including as many of our fellow belles as possible, in as many ways as possible!  so of course we welcome your ideas, your sketches, and your inspirations! you can email us anytime at  jinglebellesrock @ hotmail [dot] com. many of our favorite prompts last year were suggested by readers, and here's a little secret:  we used nearly ALL of the wonderful ideas your fellow belles dreamed up!!! even if you wouldn't like to set one of the prompts, we'd love to have you as a "lovely guest star"-- just write in and we'll fix you up with a date and an "assignment"! we’ll be starting the festivities with a few “regulars” from last year whom we’ve invited to make cards for the debut prompt!

the most important thing is to make this work for you, and--especially--to make it fun! the best thing we learned in 2011 was that the more friends we have with us, the more likely that is to happen, so we hope ♥YOU♥ will join us!

xoxoxo
stephanie & lauren