Brown Bags at Christmas - bag one

I am not a fan of those generic looking Christmas gift bags, paper or plastic. They're usually not very cute (or the cute ones are super pricey) and while they can be reused, they just don't like them. Since I'm giving a few crocheted blankets as gifts this year I gave some serious thought as to how to give them. I decided to go with brown grocery bags, that I picked up at my grocery store. 

I carefully flattened it out, creasing it along the inside bottom fold so that it would lie flat while I worked on it. (Clips came in handy for this!)

I gave it a layer of white acrylic paint and then a layer, while it was still wet, of some red Martha Stewart glitter paint. It's a very delicate layer of glitter, which is what I love about her glitter paints. I just kind of...did whatever. Sounds lazy, doesn't it? I didn't want to put a lot of thought into it because when I do that it turns into a big production and this is meant to be a quick project. I took some markers and doodled some lines. I layered a few paper strips, half a doily. Some foam and glitter snowflakes. Deciding it was too plain, I stenciled some mini stars in Festive Berries Distress Ink all over and topped it off with some silver letters. For this one I'll probably just leave it open at the top and add a hanging gift tag. 

bind-it-all - product name or swear?

how about both??

i recently purchased the bind-it-all having this grand idea of making wire bound books using a lot of my paper stash. i've been working in a plain paper art journal and when i'm done i'd like to use mixed pages, which is where i got the idea.

it looks easy enough. and is easy enough once you figure out how to use. the swearing comes in when i realized there are no clear or detailed instructions that i can find on how to punch a large cover bigger than 3x3. (which is what the size of this book is.) the zutter website was pretty much useless and so is the little instruction booklet you get with your bind-it-all. everything is written in such ... technical ... terms that my brain can't process it. the only pages i found easy to understand where the tips pages at the end of the booklet that step by step guides you through pushing your binding together.

what i learned: that scrap paper is your friend. just figuring out the punching mechanism and how to do a long row require just lots of patience and lots of scrap paper so you aren't ruining your project. i learned the hard way.

i'm not going to give up though! i need mixed paged books!

before and after

before: a page from my sketchbook covered with two used dryer sheets. glued on with lots of patience and glue and seal.

after: same page, trimmed and colored with distress ink (festive berries) and glimmer mist (rudolph the red nosed reindeer)

i don't know what i'm going to do with it but it's got a lovely texture to it!

National Letter Writing month

Did you know that April is National Letter Writing month?

I am a frequent writer of letters. Real letters. On paper, sometimes with goofy little drawings to illustrate whatever I'm talking about or to give a better feel to the people I'm around. (You know, like when I'm sitting in Starbucks working on a letter and there's a couple next to me I'm eavesdropping on. Of course I provide little pictures of them!) I send on a regular basis (read: at least twice a week) to my friend Katie. I also send to my friends Sara and Leah, my cousin Brooke, my Aunt June, and my friend Erin (who lives about 15 miles from here but I don't see her often.)

Only, I just realized that I haven't sent to that last group for over two months, so that's a bad example, probably. I need to get on that!

I digress.

I love a handwritten letter. Or a card. Or a postcard. (My cats send postcards too!) While Katie and I email each other Monday through Friday with long missives about our day/previous day, we still write actual letters. I look forward to those email, but the letters always make me do a little happy dance when I find one in my box.

In honor of National Letter Writing month I'm having a blog give-away. Letter writing is truly near and dear to my heart. Whether I'm writing them myself or reading them in a book like any of the Aunt Dimity series I get a special warm fuzzy feeling. There's something so intimate, so personal, so sweet...so old school...about getting a hand written missive that can't be replicated in any other way.

So, I have two packs of stationary bits from my own collection to give away. Cards, envelopes, papers, and while not pictured, some little bits of things to jazz up your letters.

Want one? Leave me a comment about letters. Do you love them? Do you write them? Do you wish you wrote them? Do you have a favorite book that utilizes the art of letter writing? Or a movie? What's the best letter you've ever received? So on and so forth -- you don't have to answer them all or even pick one. Just tell me why letters are special to you.

Pack one

Pack two

Points of interest:

Letter Writers Alliance

Books about letters

Where I buy a lot of my vintage stationary

Tutorial for how I made the envelope from Vintage Indie

Drawing for the contest will be on Tuesday, April 13th! Leave a comment and pass it on!

I love re-learning things

From a tags class I took yesterday:




(if you are wondering, everything was made using Tim Holtz products.)

Booklets!

Folding paper and getting it to line up perfectly is NOT my strong suit. I love making books but my lack of skills in the folding department make me shy away from them.

These are a little on the crooked side and I couldn't get the tabbed part for the pocket to work out, but I do like how they came out! I did two plain paper, two graph paper.


The tabbed inside pocket -- I ended up just taping it together. Works just as well. I also bound it together with my sewing machine rather than by hand.


Originally found here.

Video of the creator cutting it out and putting it together, here.

Hearts already

It's kinda funny because a lot of people don't realize that when you sell what you make holidays are for us like they are for big stores: Valentine's Day prep starts the day after Christmas ends. And when Valentine's is done, it'll be Easter, then Mother's Day, and so on and so forth. There's a lull there over the summer, but once September hits it's time to gear up for Halloween, thus beginning the cycle all over again.

One of the first Valentine's of 2010. And true to form, I'll be sending Valentine's to all my female friends. (If you want one, drop me a line!)

ahead of the game

A sampling of the 25 cards I made for my personal Christmas card giving: (click to enlarge!)



Materials:

Coffee sleeve and the embossed token they have on their gift sets from Starbucks. (the wish medallion and the cardboard piece in the first picture) (I really love their whole "wish" holiday campaign this year.)

Paper and embellishments: Basic Grey's Eskimo Kisses and Cosmo Crickett's Jolly By Golly sets.
(pretty much every embellishment each set has. They were too cute to resist!)

More JOY

craft day

Yesterday was craft day and I was productive!

I made this little journal for my trip to Atlanta at the end of this coming week. It's full of pages and envelopes so I can write things down as they happen. When I return I'll print out pictures and add more pages so it's a complete book. It's the perfect size to carry in my bag.



Topiary tree from Oriental Trading


Covered with paper, stickled, with a little ribbon and an American Crafts chipboard flower on top. I'm not sure I like how it looked, but it works. I think.

yesterday and today: mark them as productive

Wedding favor labels, before: (I had to make 100 of them)


Labels after:


What I did with the leftover label centers and the extra tags on the sheets: (because you can never have too many stickers.) (Can you?)


I used some more of those rub-ons from last post to make a wedding shower card:


I made this as a test tile but ended up using one of the ones I had made for testing. It was a success! Super-hot tea didn't pull any of the glue or the rub-ons off the tile, so no worries there. This one I added a hanger to and am sending it to a friend as a "happy new apartment!" gift.

Sometimes I like to let my tacky flag fly

My friend Katie, with whom I haven't met in real life but exchange frequent letters and art with, sent me this Girl Scout inspired bag she made.


Isn't it just awesome??


As my thank you, I covered the backside of a manilla folder with a stencil, colored it in with marker, then outlined it with Stickles. Inside I stapled my letter to her.


It's really kind of tacky, but I couldn't help myself. Best of all, I know she'll appreciate it.

No, really, I have!

I have been making stuff every day for the challenge! I have! I made the create letters yesterday. The weather here has been rain all day every day for the last week so it's been hard to get good shots of everything else I've been doing. Does killing the 100 VERY LARGE grubs I found in my vegetable garden count for anything? Because there was a lot of that. (On the upside, I now know what was killing off my plants!)

mirror mirror on the wall

Usually I leave the mirrors to my sister, but I decided I wanted to give it a go.

Mirror: a Malma from Ikea.

A journaling we will go

Inspired by some awesome travel journals, I set out and made my own. I don't journal often anymore; I used to write all the time but unless it's a letter to a friend or relative, I don't do so anymore. (Sad, I know.) There is a part of me that wants to journal, document events and whatnot and I really got the inspiration bug when I saw Dispatch's journal.

I dug out the ephemera box and with my machine sewed together a few different sheets of paper. Layers of paper, envelopes, and old blank greeting cards to be exact.

(Pages, but my batteries died so I only got one pic!)


I took an old manilla folder and after some clever folding, I covered it with a piece of my favorite scrapbook paper. Then I ran it though my machine to give it a more put together look.


I sewed some vintage ric-rac onto the cover then sewed in my pages. I added two sets of ribbon so I can keep it tied closed. I think I am am going to sew some buttons onto the right side, but I haven't decided yet.


I think I'm going to fill in one of my pages with some receipts and jot a few lines about the boxes I sent for IBOL. I think it's a great start.

Canvas + paper = instant gift

From this:



To this:

I just covered all the canvas with scrapbook paper. I did do some embellishments, like the one above, but mostly I kept them simple because they are a gift for a man. I wanted them to look like tiles.

I love how they came out. You can see all of them here in the Flickr stream.

Supplies, if you were wondering:

Canvas: from Dick Blick. I used all three of the mini sizes plus a few I had lying around.

Paper: mostly Scenic Route and some American Crafts and Sassafrass Lass. I usually buy my paper from Scrapbook.com .

Wrap up

Remember this recent post about a birthday gift for a friend?

I finally got around to wrapping and mailing off her gift. I am so in love with these two photos, especially the second one. Something about the darkness and the mood of it.

Here's the card: I just embellished a retro snowflake card from Paper-Source (they have such great sales!) with some ribbon and a few felt flowers.



It's not wrapping paper, it's Girl Scout scrapbook paper. The pink and green circles is the bulk of the paper and since it wasn't big enough to cover the entire frame, I had to use a section of the dotted circles on the back. (Check out the rest of the Girl Scout line. There's some super cute stuff there! In fact, I see some stuff I might need to buy!) I used the same ribbon and flowers on the package and the little birdie card was an extra from a recent Etsy purchase.



Up today: a birthday present for a favorite fellow blogger!

Swish...back to the tutorials

It's been lost to me that part of the reason I started was this blog was so that I could try other people's tutorials and you know, clean out that massive bookmarks file I have.

My dear friend Carrie's birthday is coming up and I was at a loss as to what to do for her gift. I know she likes birds, but I always do birds. Birds = Carrie. I didn't want to do birds this time around. Then I came across this tutorial over at the Naughty Secretary Club and knew I had to do it.

It's not the best picture, but it's the best I could do at the moment. I hate waiting for things to dry!

The instructions were clear and easy to follow, but I was out of spray paint so I painted. And I put the glitter on the inside instead of the outside. I couldn't find the vintage postcard I wanted to use but thought the paper worked out well. Of course, I stickled everything to give it a little extra pop.



It was totally a use what I had on hand project, but I think it came out well. The only thing I hate is that (the) Lillie's head is cut off (that's how the photo was!) but it's cute all the same.

birthday mix 36

Every year for my birthday I do a mix cd and give it to all my friends. Last years was a book with each page contributed by friends. They gave up a list of the 10 songs they can't live without and I made a page with their track-list and everyone got a book and disc combination. It was so much work, but so much fun.

Every year is different. Seeing as how my birthday is Thursday, these are ready to go into the mail tomorrow!


The cd case, just felt with a fabric heart cutout:



Back of the card:

From of the card: (I know, cute, right?)


One of the envelopes:

Off to the market they go...

My new way of packaging up my cozies. It not only let me use up the zillion labels I have, it allows me to get rid of plastic bags (yay!) and use up my scraps of pretty patterned papers.