I made these little calendars last year using a template from Tracy Harp at Inky Doodles and they were so popular that I brought them back for an encore this year:
January uses the Awash with Flowers stamp set
February uses the Ain’t Love Grand Hostess set
March uses Fabulous Florets, one of my personal favorites
These little calendars are just the right size to sit on a cute little easel in my kitchen.
You can hardly see the forest for the trees:
These little pennants make such cheerful little trees. I may or may not have indulged myself in a rant about triangles and my inability to make them look right. It always seems like one side is a little off – so I trim it – and then the other side is off! It’s geometry. Some have it, some don’t. I know a triangle when I see one, I’m just not very good at cutting one.
But honey, I can punch ’em out like nobody’s business! (The more I blog, the more I realize that I posess a ridiculous number of inane and somewhat meaningless expressions. I make no excuses.) I love punching these pennants and finding fun things to do with them.
And check out that little spotty dotty tag:
As a matter of fact, I need a few more tags and I am going to go punch out a bunch of these. Right after I finish my pie. Because I must admit, I make a fabulous pumpkin pie.
Merry Christmas.
One of the many things that I really enjoy about attending someone else’s class is that other people use colors I would never dream of putting together:
This is a color combination I would never have used for Christmas, but look how pretty it is! Not one, but two shades of pink…well worth the trip out to Haiku.
If you live on the mainland and have a 75 mile commute every day – one way, uphill both ways – then you might as well go on to the next blog post, because you are not going to get this. You see, Cheryl used to live 5 minutes from me. She was just up the hill. The year she became an empty nester, she and her husband decided to do the Green Acres thing (if you are younger than dirt, ask an old person about Green Acres) and they moved out to Haiku. They have two gorgeous acres and a horse (maybe two, we aren’t sure) in the pasture – more about that another time – but the word you need to pay attention to is “OUT”. Haiku is a 45 minute drive. There is no more “Hey Cheryl, come down here and look at this and tell me what it needs.” I don’t call her to see if I can run up and borrow a few sheets of Riding Hood Red. We have to make DATES for coffee, for Pete’s sake. (Don’t ask me who Pete is. He’s older than dirt too.)
Anyway, if I want to see Cheryl I have to pack my overnight bag and load up some provisions and feed and water the horses (I mean put gas in the car) and then DRIVE. And I don’t really like to drive. Matter of fact, as each of my children have gotten their respective driver’s licenses I have made they my chauffeur. Turn-around is fair play. But I love Cheryl, and spending time with her is like being in the sunshine – you just have to do it, and you feel so wonderful when you do. So I drive out to the hinterlands in Haiku where everyone wears sweaters and shoes and we stamp. And it is totally worth the drive.
Thanksgiving weekend I went to stamp camp at Cheryl’s:
Just look at this bag – the colors, the snowflake, and as Cheryl would say, that dang penguin! Just LOOK at him!
There. Now you can really see him. I had my contact in when I was coloring his scarf – looking at it this closely, I realize I should have put my glasses on. I wear a single contact in one eye for reading – my left eye is my “reader” eye and my right eye is my “distance” eye. It took a week or so, but amazingly enough my brain sorted it out and it works well – except for fine detail like coloring a little penguin scarf. Then my brain says “whoa whoa whoa” and starts making the lines jump around like little drops of water in a hot frying pan. Just in case you were wondering…
But what I really wanted to tell you was that it was absolutely luscious going someplace else and doing someone else’s projects. I didn’t have to come up with ideas, order the supplies, and prep all the paper – I just showed up and stamped. What a wonderful treat that was!
I got a couple of swaps at convention that used this fun layout:
This idea is easy to customize to any holiday or occasion. I had a blast putting patterns together – kind of reminded me of the way my grandmother used to put outfits together as she got older. We called her “test pattern Grandma”. (You readers who are younger than dirt will have to ask an old person what a test pattern is. Since I’m older than dirt, I already know.)
The best part is that this card opens up:
Don’t you love it? And it is SO easy. The bottom half of the card is a pocket, the top half a sliding panel. I think you could put some Dotto on the card and attach a gift card. I started pulling out all of my holiday Designer Series Paper scraps to see what else I could come up with:
This is just the size for all those pieces you saved because they were too big to throw away! (I know – we’ve covered this before. I’m not trying to make you feel badly, you know – I’m congratulating you for your frugality and helping you find a way to use those crazy pieces!!)
Now go make some test pattern cards of your own – and have fun with it!
How about another little look at some new Occasions Mini goodies?
Actually, this card uses both an Edgelit and an Embosslit – do you see how perfectly they mirror each other? The Edgelit cuts a perfect edge every time – I cut both the Garden Green and Whisper White cardstock and offset them. The Embosslit created that raised line on the Garden Green cardstock, and a new stamp set provided the little dots – they match perfectly too!
Crafting in January is going to be a LOT of fun!
Kellie sent a bunch of these to swap at our last demonstrator team meeting:
Red and silver glimmer paper turn this simple idea into a holiday sparkler! That’s the tag from the Sizzix Two Tags die, and cardstock has been folded and placed into the die inside of the cutting line to create a book-style tag that opens instead of a flat tag:
We all loved this tag! It was just enough thinking outside the box for all of us to do a face-palm and say “well, duh!” I’m doing a lot of that right now. The “well-duh” part of it, anyway.
Thanks for sending this to us Kellie – we miss you!
My new Occasions Mini catalog demonstrator pre-order arrived almost a week ago and I have been so busy that most of my goodies have had to patiently wait in the studio. One of the things I’m most excited about is a new product called Framelits. I can’t show you the product itself, but I can show you what it can do!!
Don’t you love that shape? I can see so many uses for this! I put these together very quickly (remember, it’s been kinda busy around here) but even a quickie project gets a big boost from framelits!
This is just a little bit of Designer Series Paper (Frostwood Lodge #124002) wrapped around a package of gum. Because was making a bunch of these, I used the Tasteful Trim die to mass produce strips of scallops. A quick stamp, some shimmer paint bling and a couple of dimensionals and I was done! A simple little gift for the holidays that doesn’t have any calories – and heaven knows, I could use a few more gifts like that!
This is a case – maybe it was Robin Merriman, maybe not – but honestly, the past week I’ve been goin’ 178 miles an hour in a convertible with my hair on fire (please say that with your bestest deepest Southern accent, because that’s how I first heard it). Here in the Stamper Household we are T minus 4 days from departure for the land down under. I haven’t seen my oldest daughter for over a year, and I CAN’T WAIT. I didn’t think we were ever going to get to this point!
Ah, but I do have a card to share:
Imagine how many different cards you could make with all of the fabulous holiday Designer Series Paper scraps you have in that scrap box of yours. Yeah, you know the one. It’s full of pieces that were too big to throw away, or that you just loved so much you couldn’t bring yourself to use, or that you can’t remember the name of any more and coordinating colors will be a wild guess. It’s all okay – this is the perfect project!
I used the Perfect Pennants Bigz L die (# 123126 for $32.95, and you know you’ve been so good this year and worked so hard making everything Just Right for everyone else in the family – you deserve it, don’t you??) but you could cut triangles if you really wanted to. I am terrible at cutting triangles. Didn’t like geometry all that much anyway. My triangles always come out catty-wompus (and of course that’s a word, if you read it right here on the World Wide Web, well, you KNOW that makes it a word!!).  Anyway, before I went on that little rant I meant to say that the Perfect Pennants die gives me – yep, you guessed it – perfect pennant shaped triangles every time. No compass and slide rule required. Hallelujah for that.
The other product you don’t want to miss on this card is Teeny Tiny Wishes. (#115370 $36.95). I’m feelin’ the Mom-thing here…if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: You need this stamp set. Seriously. And that’s all I have to say about that.
There’s some Smooch and some Glimmer Paper and some ribbon and bling here, too. This card goes together faster than the reindeer a minute before sunrise and that is some fast my friends! If you have procrastinated on putting together some cards to send to friends near and far, stack up some DSP on this die and get crankin’.   Just stay out of the convertible when your hair catches on fire.
The Maui Stamper 