Topps Tiles Yuletile Challenge

 

This is my first Christmas post of the year! I love Christmas so hard, not just because of the family times, the gifts, the copious amounts of food or even the films (Muppet Christmas Carol and Santa Claus: The Movie are my faves) but also because of the endless opportunities for DIY!

The lovely people at Topps Tiles invited me to take part in their Yultile Challenge competition and sent me two blank tiles and some crafty supplies and to help me create my own Christmas designs.

Tile 1:

For my first tile I decided to use contemporary colours to create a Christmas recipe board for mince pies, leant up against the wall in the kitchen this is a decoration and a useful reminder to keep churning out batches of delicious mince pies throughout the festive season!

I used Staz On ink pads (great for using on ceramics) in pink and black, some Stampendous snowflake stamps and two sets of individual letter stamps – one for the title and one for the main text.

I started with the text to make sure there was enough room for it all. To keep the  text in straight lines I stuck a strip of washi tape down and stamped along the edge, lining it up with the guides on the stamp block to keep everything neat. I’m not going to lie to you, individually stamping each letter was not a quick process! Unfortunately,  I don’t have any letter stamps that I can build up into words and stamp with – if anyone knows of any good ones please let me know!

The effort of placing each letter though paid off in the end, I’m really pleased with the results.

It’s important to note that any letters that drop below the line need to be done after the rest, so just leave a gap for them, move the tape down to the next line and then go back and add them – see below for an example.

Once the recipe was stamped I used the snowflake stamps around the edge of the tile to create a Christmassy feel.

Here’s the finished article:

Tile 2:

For my second tile I decided on a more fun use for the tile with a more traditional look and feel. This one is also great for getting kids involved in Christmas. I’ve seen lots of ideas on Pinterest for Christmas trees where people don’t have a lot of room and this is an adaptation of that idea.

I used a gold pen to draw some curved lines to represent the branches of the tree. I then used the porcelain paint and porcelain markers to draw Christmassy illustrations all over the tree to show what Christmas means to me. As I say, this would be a great activity for children as they could each draw their own pictures onto the tree branches to be displayed in your home. As you can see, I’m no Leonardo Da Vinci, my illustrative skills are basic at best, but this was an awful lot of fun to do.

To add a bit of an extra dimension I painted a star on the top of the tree with porcelain paint and then covered it with glitter, allowed it to dry and brushed the excess glitter off and returned it to the pot.

Hope you like my entries and that they’ve inspired you for your own Christmas activities, I’d love to hear what crafty activities you’re getting up to in preparation for the festive season – why not leave me a comment and let me know? x