Christmas LTC's 2016

I believe this is my 4th year to participate in Beetle's Christmas LTC swap and my card is called, "The Reason for the Season."

 I found my image and carved it right away but I was torn on the background.  I really wanted to glue some burlap fabric to the card. But in the tracker Beetle asks that you don't make your cards too heavy because it is a large swap (30 people).

I was on online looking at craft supplies and saw the Tim Holtz burlap stencil.  I bought it but still had problems deciding how to use it.  I sprayed ink on it, rubbed ink on with a Distress Ink Applicator, and brushed acrylic paint on it.  I didn't like how any of those turned out.

Christmas LTCs 2016: The Reason for the Season

I got to thinking about my card from two years ago.  Here is the link to that Blog post with step by step instructions and photos.  Because this is such a large swap I was only going to make 30 cards.  But I got down to the end and ran out of paper.  I thought about using different paper on that last one but my OCD kicked in and I went to Hobby Lobby and bought more paper.  Now I have 5 extra cards.

In the tracker Beetle asks that you share a Christmas memory with your card.  One of my favorite Christmas memories is performing in the live nativity as a Girl Scout at our zoo.  The zoo provided children's costumes, played the story on a tape, and we would go out into the petting zoo area with sheep, goats, llama, etc.  It was a lot of fun and afterward we would get hot chocolate and cookies.  Our zoo is run by the city so they would never allow that type of thing now but it was fun the few times we did it

This picture was taken in 1987 and I am the magi with the blue hat holding the candle next to the angel.  My mom has a boatload of pictures in her basement and thankfully I only had to go thru 2 photo albums to find this pic.