Ho Ho Ho..ere Come The Boys

Well it's that time of the year... the new challenge starting today at Here Come The Boys will take us through the Festive Season, and has everybody's favourite theme Anything Goes.  I made  a Countdown To Christmas calendar, I'm not totally happy with the result but I did enjoy challenging myself - and I now have a set of templates and a better idea of the difficulties involved, lol

I made the "stand" simply by scoring a rectangle of silver board near the bottom, bending that forward to make a ledge for the "days until Christmas" block and along the sides, bending them back to make wings to balance the stand.  I punched the top edge with a punch my Mum and Dad brought back from Malaysia.
The number cubes and the block they stand on are simple boxes made from the silver card, I'll have templates made up on my freebies page soon.  The patterns for the numbers and text are a freebie from See Vanessa Craft. brilliant, thanks :-) I added Stickles to jazz it all up - but I'd rethink that, as it went EVERYWHERE, though that's probably due to my impatience - not a problem if you actually let the stuff dry, lol.  The rest of the paper is from my stash.  

Our sponsor for this challenge is the fabulous Dr Digi, I've used Naughty or Nice - it's my favourite Dr Digi Christmas image... but there are a few close seconds :-)  I coloured the image with Copics, adding some shadows and highlights with Prismacolor pencils - and the obligatory gloss to Santas's eyes and some glitter to the buttons.  Allsorts Challenges wants us to be Inspired by a Christmas Song, "...Santa Claus in Coming To Town", Divas by Design want us to Use Some Red, I'm in and Holly Jolly Christmas Challenge have One for the Boys so I'm in there too. Crafty Calendar has Christmas, Totally Papercrafts has Ho Ho Holidays, Corrosive Challenge has Happy Holidays and Stampin' for the Weekend has Feeling Festive so I'm entering those, while Bearly Mine Challenges, 2 Sisters Challenge, Cute Card Thursday,Colour Me Copic, Simon Says Challenge and Through the Craftroom Door all have Anything Goes challenges so entering those too!

Nathan, cheeky little chap

Well that's it for today's project, I'll be back in a few days with a card... or maybe another non-card - depending on how brave I'm feeling, lol.  Hope you get a chance to enter the challenge... it's running for five weeks, so that helps!  Pop over to the blog and check out the rest of the team's inspiration, well worth a visit. 
Now, as promised in my post yesterday, here's some more pics of my gorgeous twinnies; they're eight months old now and crawling - you need to have eyes in the back of your head to watch them both!  They're very aware of each other now too, and know when the other one's getting something or has a toy THEY'D like; Nathan's particular thing is food - he LOVES his solids and taking a few seconds out to shovel some into Emily's mouth is just not on, lol.
They are like chalk and cheese - Nathan is the image of his Dad at that age and Emily the image of her Mum, Nathan is "on" all the time, and Emily is a pretty chilled chick :-)  They've reached their milestones in different order too, Emily could sit really well for weeks before Nathan, he doesn't want to be still and crawled (albeit commando style) for ages before he started sitting.  

Emily, such a sweetie

They've come a long way from the little premmies they started out as, and we are grateful, Emily is still bigger than Nathan, but the percentage is not as high so we hope he'll catch up.
Anyway, until next time, Happy Crafting, Donna.