Christmas Placemat

Hello blogger friends!  Today I'm showing you a place mat that I embellished.  I bought a few of these place mats from "The Christmas Tree Shop"  for $1.00 each, for the purpose of seeing what I could do with them to alter them a bit.  Below you can see what I am doing with them.   

We will be having an Open House for our business this weekend will be serving some yummy cookies and warm spiced cider.  I plan to use the mat with one of my favorite Christmas dishes to serve the cookies.

Here is a close up of the embellishing I did.  I used the Holly stamp (#15701) from QKR Stampede and stamped it with Versa Fine Black Onyx ink.  I then used Keepsake Colors Fresh Foliage Gel Paint to paint the leaves green.  I have had this paint for quite a while, got it on clearance, but had never tried it.  The label says for "Scrapbooking and Photo Tinting", but I figured I would give it a try.  Let me just say that a little goes a very long way.  It does tend to bleed, so you need to be very careful to only use a small amount on your brush and start in the center of the image, but using just a tiny bit at a time, worked very well. 

I used Stickles on the berries and that gave it a bit of sparkle and pop.

I have been experimenting with different kinds of inks and paints and will be making more of these embellished place mats.  I'll post more when I get them done. 

Thanks for stopping by today, I hope you like my latest project.  Try altering some things like this, it's a lot of fun and a fairly inexpensive gift that can be made for a teacher, neighbor or as a stocking stuffer.  Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Until next time, Happy Crafting!