Anyone fancy some egg nog?

Ok I have never tasted egg nog in my life, but I know that it is a) a christmas drink and b) can be alcoholic so I thought it would be a good segue into my first make of this week. Another vodka bottle turned up at work last week (wish I could figure out who was drinking them but that's not the point of this) so I decided to alter one again. This time I chose a winter/christmas theme, hence the title.

I started by decopaging the bottle, as I did with the last one. However, i did not add shapes this time pre-decopatching. Once it was covered I used picket fence crackle paint on the whole bottle except the lid. While waiting for that to dry, I got some grungeboard snowflakes, coated them in flowersoft, then coated with glossy accents and distress glitter. Those of you who have seen my configuration box posts will notice that this is the same technique that I used for the word ice in the November part. I used the same technique on the lid of the bottle. In retrospect, I would have painted the bottle with base white first, as you can see some of the decopage paper underneath. I also rubbed blue distress ink over the bottle to give it more of a wintery feel.

The leaves are cut out from vellum which has been inked blue, and the silver beads were from a Crafty Creatives box.

To finish it off, I stamped a father christmas image onto card I had already blended a lighter shade of ink on, then added the word believe and a snowflake from the christmas remnant rubs.

The other thing that I did this week was re-cover a notebook to make it into an autograph book for Disney. 

This is the front. I used some Roald Dahl blue paper for the background, cut out a basic mouse shape out of black card, and used the bow maker to make a bow out of pink polka dotted paper.

Summer was made out of grungeboard, which has been inked and stickled. The background is a grungepaper shape which I coloured with a sharpie.

I was a bit clueless as to what to put on the back until I got my first swag bag from Paper Issues! You get loads of little bits, perfect when you want to sample a lot of new lines. It costs $15.99 including delivery to the UK. I decided to just play around with what I received, and this was the result. I've still got loads left!

At the last minute I decided that, while the front could be used as a little trip report, the back could be used for autographs, so I found my Roald Dahl alphabet stickers.

I'm still trying to hone my techniques in various things. To be honest I used to see my inexperience as a negative thing, until I realised that everyone starts somewhere. Not to mention that crafting is a never-ending journey. If you think you have learned every technique there is, make new ones yourself!