Beyond the Holidays: A Guide to Using Christmas Stamps All Year Round

Did you know those festive Christmas stamps can be used for so much more than just the holidays? In this guide, we'll explore simple techniques to turn your seasonal stamps into versatile art journaling and cardmaking elements you can use all year long!

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Christmas stamps but not for Christmas!

Now, you might be thinking, 'Christmas stamps in any month but December?' And you'd be right! That was precisely the fun of it. The goal was to challenge myself to see these festive designs in a new light, proving that with a little imagination, they can be so much more than just seasonal.

Using the beautiful  Personal Impressions woodless watercolour pencils and changing the colour up to be more Spring or Summer, the whole vibe of this page changed. Their creamy texture and vibrant colours are just a dream to work with, and they blend so beautifully on the page. Did you know you can also use the pencils with stencils and a blending foam, to stamp with and to colour images? I really want to share that your colouring mediums can also do so much more than the intended!

Also not to underestimate the power of adding a shadow! But rather than using black or grey, I choose to use a turquoise blue/green as out shadow colour. This makes our eyes focus on the parts of the stamp we want to be prominent and the Christmas elements could recede backwards or disappear altogether. 

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Adapting the layout & colours to create new ideas

The magic doesn't stop there! Once you grasp the core techniques, the possibilities are endless. It's all about playing with different layouts and colour palettes to create completely different vibes. Adding a different quote or sentiment can change the look too.

A vibrant summer page

For this page, I have repeated the main Shady Designs It's A Wreath stamp 3 times and added smaller flower & circles stamps to fill the page. Also, rather than use a stencil this time to add to the background, I have used the sentiment. To hide the baubles, I have coloured them green to appear as if an extra leaf! A few white splats and dots here and there, have finished off the page.

Inky background & commanding shadows

The above art journal page is very similar to the others. For this page I kept the stencilling inside the It's A Wreath design which gives a more contained, circular vibe. The washes of blue were just that and I wanted them to be looser and as if they are in the background and not over shadow layer.  The accent flowers are also softer too as the outlines were stamped in the same colour as the flowers would be coloured.

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Opening our eyes to endless possibilities

This post is about looking at our designs as shapes rather than as a specific season or theme. Below are the stamps and stencils I have used to create all the pages featured in this post and when you look at them as shapes or words, suddenly you open up new doord for both them and us crafters too!

 The stamps chosen to do this were It's A Wreath & Those We Love. We combined this with Pucker Up stencil.

The Techniques I Teach in My Workshops

Why add this in to my blog post? When I teach workshops its precisely ideas like the one in this post. It is about passing on these tips, tricks and techniques and making sure we don't "pidgeon hole" our products - guilty of that too!

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I hope this post inspires you to look at your Christmas stamps in a new light and see how you can adapt them to be used all year round. The beauty of crafting is its adaptability, so don't be afraid to experiment and have fun!

Until next time, take care,

Lou

xxx