Stitching with Elli

The dolls have been working on putting up the tree. But they need Emily’s help to finish it (little problem of not being tall enough 😉 ) Emily said unfortunately she couldn’t help for a day or two. She was very busy with some other things.

Instead of putting up the tree, Rose, Emma and Lea decided to work on making Christmas cards.  They wanted to make sure the cards would arrive in time for Christmas.

Rose and Lea decided to work together as a team.They said they would get done twice as fast that way. They started looking at stamp sets to get ideas.

Emma preferred to work on her card by herself. She said a third person would just get in the way working on a card. She found a big book of pretty patterned papers to look at.

Rose and Lea were discussing what stamps to do. Rose was partial to the carollers stamp. Lea liked the little children on Christmas day.

After Emma finished looking at the paper, she decided to look at stamps like the others. Rose showed her a stamp she thought Emma would like.

Emma did like it! She lost no time getting started…first she inked it….

Push hard to stamp it!!!

Yay! a perfect image!!

Don’t forget to clean the stamp off!

What to color it with? Copic markers? Pencils? chalks? Watercolors? Emma decided to work with the watercolor pencils. It made the artist side of her personality happy.

Soon she was settled in and happily coloring.

While she is coloring, lets see what Lea and Rose are up too..

“What do you think about this stamp?” asked Rose.

“I like it! What if we did the polar bear and penguin walking outside… I could put blue ink on the top of the card.” replied Lea.

Rose liked that idea, so they got started. At first Rose thought Lea might need help spreading the ink with the brayer roller.

But Lea said she was okay doing it by herself…so Rose started working on stamping the polar bear.

“Don’t wiggle it!” Lea warned her….she had finished coloring the card blue so was able to turn her attention to making sure Rose was doing a good job.

“I’m just making sure I lined it up correctly ” Rose replied. “You can’t rush perfection.”

“Oh!” said Lea very impressed ” Are we making a perfect card? That sounds intimidating.”

“Well if it doesn’t turn out perfect it is fine, but we should always at least try to make things turn out just right.” replied Rose vaguely. (She had her colors out and was trying to decided if she should make the penguins hat red and green or blue and green.)

Lea thought red and green was the best idea, so they went with that. Lea colored the polar bear while Rose did the penguin.

“Do you think this grey is a good idea for shading the bear?” Lea asked Rose.

There wasn’t much to color, so the coloring part went fast. Soon they were cutting out the design.

Emma had finished coloring her design and was finishing it by blending with the water to make the colors more vibrant and even.

Then it was time to cut it…and then she decided to punch the corners…

“Rose can you please come help me? I messed it up..” Emma said sadly.

“I’m sure it can’t be that bad! What happened?” Rose answered.

“I didn’t get the corners right,” sighed Emma very discouraged. “It looks all wrong.”

“Ooo! You colored it so pretty!” encouraged Rose. “About the corners…hmm…Could we add snowflakes to cover it up?”

Then she got the idea to put ink on the snowflakes. It would be prettier if some snowflakes were blue and some silver.

Emma felt much better and was ready to finish the card by herself. In the meantime Lea was adding glitter to their card. After all, isn’t everything better with sparkle and shine??

When Rose came back, they added a sign that said “Merry Christmas” to the card….and they were done!

Whew! Making cards takes a long time!! However, they enjoyed the process and were very excited with the results. They can’t wait to mail them!!