3 Candles and Some Christmas Scavenging!

Hello

Its been a bit of a gloomy week, weather-worn, but today the sun is shining and the sky is blue.  I'd almost forgotten what a blue sky looked like.
This week I even managed to add a midweek blog post - please scroll down and check out my Jaffa Cake box!

As ever, Friday is Daring Cardmakers Day so here's 

this week's challenge:

It's another Anything Crafty challenge this week, and our theme is
Shining Lights
Please join in and Light up the crafting world with us
We're thinking Stars; Candles, Lanterns, Chandeliers,
Candelabra, Fairy Lights.... 
We'd love to see your cards, tags, bags, boxes, table decor.....any kind of craft project is welcome.

 Visit the Daring Cardmakers Blog to see this week's DT creations

I gave my old Memory Box candle die an outing for this one.  I don't use it often as its so fiddly! 

Info

I started by using my favourite ever stencil (by The Crafters Workshop), with some Imagination Crafts glitter gel.  I'm not sure what's happened to this company, or even if they still exist - if not then that's a shame, because they created fabulous paints and other crafty goodies.

This lovely stuff dries quite quickly so by the time I'd die cut and built the candles, and cut the basic snowflake base I could get started on the rest.

I used red card saved from last year's Christmas Crackers for the candles, adding another chipboard layer behind for extra dimension.  Next I cut the shape again in red glitter card just for the wax runs.  The little candle flames were cut in gold card, gold glitter card, and the tiny red bits were saved from the step above. 

To give a bit of extra shape to the candles I ran a large ball tool on the reverse of each candle 

The curvy snowflake border die set by Bright Rosa is my favourite new Christmas die purchase this year.  I just keep coming back to it as its so versatile. 

This time I cut the 5 star base section from an embossed gold card (Tonic), and the extra separate snowflakes from various white and gold card types, plus a few in red.

I also added in some extra die cut and punched snowflakes

At the moment I've got a whole bunch of leaves and 'greenery' dies and die cuts out on my desk, so I thought I'd add some of those into the mix - I like the splash of green, it seems to lift the whole wreath.

For the holly berries I used a few different dies and a mix of cracker scavenged card and glitter card, plus some red half pearls and some red gems too.

To finish I tied gold twine around the top and made the gold tassel to hang from it.  I made a banner for the sentiment and glued it over the joins!

 That's all for today, I hope you like it. 
I would love to know what you save from things like packaging to use on your crafting projects - crackers are my favourite to scavenge from - the card itself is usually lovely and there's often ribbon and berries etc tied around them too.  My OH thinks I'm mad when I go through the cracker rubbish, but hey, why wouldn't you?

Thank you so much for visiting, I really appreciate your messages.  Hope you have a great weekend

Happy Crafting!