I recently realised that although I’d updated the galleries with my Christmas cards I hadn’t actually highlighted them in a post so here goes. This is the first instalment of batch made cards. I have been batch making my Christmas cards for a number of years now. Because of the numbers involved ( over 100 ), I try to keep the designs as simple and easy to reproduce as possible. I’m laughing as I write this as my first batch proved to be anything but simple, but they were such a lot of fun. I saw the stamp set Christmas Green Things Sprouts (CS250D) by Hobby Art Stamps and fell in love with the cute fun designs. There were loads of great examples using the stamps on the hobby Art web site. I decided not to go for a detailed background, I thought it would be a lot easier to leave it white. To save spoiling my cards blanks by making mistakes, I opted to avoid masking techniques and stamped three of the sprout designs out, numerous times, on sheets of card stock and heat embossed them with clear embossing powder. I used Tim Holtz distress re inkers in various shades of green to watercolour the images. I then added glossy accents to the eyes and noses. I stamped out the various sprout ‘toppings’ i.e. Santa hats, icing and holly etc onto card, heat embossed and water coloured those too adding glossy accents to finish off. I spent many an hour fussy cutting all the sprouts and toppings, whilst watching tv. I decided on my design layout and using my stamp press, I positioned the stamps for the sentiments, the sprout arms and legs and the fork where I wanted them to be on the card fronts. I marked where to place my card blanks so that they would all be exactly the same, then I stamped all of the card bases and heat embossed them. I water coloured the forks and the shoes and added glossy accents to the hands, feet and forks. I then glued the individual sprouts into place adding either a Santa hat or icing and holly. The 3 different sprouts and two different toppings gave me 6 different finished designs. I made 72 in total. They were great fun to make and were very well received. I have a few left over sprouts to play with this year too.