DECATUR - It's more than six weeks until Christmas, but students making holiday cards Saturday morning at the Madden Arts Center had too many possibilities and so little time.

After warming them up making Santa gift tags, teacher DiAnne Evans turned them loose creating two different cards using construction paper, scissors, glue sticks, stamp pads, silver brads, wire and a hole punch.

"There is no messing up in art," she assured them. "Almost any mistake can be made to seem like you intended it to look that way."

"Even when your Santa Claus has no feet?" asked 10-year-old Marilyn Hughy, a fourth-grader at Mount Zion Intermediate School who managed to impress Evans anyway by coloring a blue suit on the jolly old gent.

Evans showed the children how to avoid blank spots by smartly tapping the stamp on the ink pad and checking the result on scratch paper before stamping the card itself.

She also demonstrated how to get the edge you want on torn paper by choosing which hand holds it and which hand tears it. "You can have a fuzzy edge or a sharp edge," she said.

Later, when showing the students how to curl their pieces of wire around shish-ka-bob sticks, Evans grimaced and joked, "It helps if you make a face like this."

Emily Forbes, 13, and Jessica Blunt, 12, both seventh-graders at Cerro Gordo Middle School, were taking their second class with Evans, having enjoyed a three-day scrapbooking session with her this summer.

"I like doing everything," Emily said. "I love working with wire, even when it makes my fingers hurt."

Lighting up the eyes of 10-year-old Dillon Frame, a fifth-grader at Maroa-Forsyth Grade School, was a promise by Evans that they would apply glitter to the Christmas lights they had colored for one of their cards.

"My brother's not allowed to glitter," he volunteered. "He spilled a whole package in our dining room when he was 5, and the carpet still sparkles."

Making the biggest impression, however, was the heat embossing Evans used on the third and last card they had time to make.

"Whoa!" Dillon exclaimed as he watched the black dust Evans had sprinkled onto an adhesive design melt into solid plastic as she blew super-hot air on it. "That's cool!"

Jessica said she planned to give her embossed card to her grandma "because it's my favorite one."

Evans instructed her students to color their embossed designs at home with markers or watercolors, rather than pencils, lest they break off pieces of the plastic.

Then she threw up her hands as their time together was nearly over. "Glitter! Oh my gosh!" she cried and hurried to the back of the room to break out the glitter and glue pens.

Dayle McMahon of Decatur, a 12-year-old seventh-grader who is home-schooled, showed Evans how she had colored some yellow outside the lines of her Christmas lights and applied glitter there also to make them look like they were glowing.

"What a cute idea!" Evans said. "You taught me something. Thank you, Dayle."

tchurchill@herald-review.com|421-7978