Seasons Greetings, 2009

These dainty little snowflake favor boxes were created to share at the Cricut Club meeting held in November at Photocraft Hawaii. The whole concept of this design was actually lifted from the cute little Halloween spider favor boxes shared at the previous month's meeting by my good friend, Kris. At the meeting, one of the members commented on how cute a snowflake would be on that box for Christmas. I thought it was such a great idea and decided to do a cutfile with Design Studio for it. I really liked how these turned out. I used George and the Joys of the Season cartridges to create the cutfile for these. Wasn't too sure at first what to use for the box base, so I experimented with different types of paper - vellum, Bazzill bling (blue), and clear shrink plastic. I really liked how they all turned out, still can't decide which is my favorite. Snowflakes were simply cut with white cardstock and embellished with stickles and some Robin's Nest dewdrops. Boxes were then filled with yummy Hersheys Kisses.

Here are some of the other wonderful Cricut projects that were shared by members at the last meeting. Super cute snowman gift tag was created by Michele...the snowman is from the Hello Kitty cartridge. List organizer folder was shared by Kris...the festive "Ho, ho, ho" font is from the Storybook cartridge, welded in Design Studio. And the fancy pillowbox favors/ornaments are a brainstorm of Robin...she used the Wedding Solutions cartridge to create them.

Photo Craft store owner Brian was kind enough to make individual kits with all the pieces cut from the Hello Kitty cartridge so that all of us who attended the meeting could do this cute Hello Kitty "Make and Take" Christmas card. Isn't this holiday Doodlebug patterned paper the cutest? BTW, for anyone that might be interested, the next Photocraft Cricut Club meeting is scheduled for Sunday, January 10th at 12:30 pm. It promises to be another fun afternoon of informal sharing of ideas, tips and projects.

I didn't get to do too many crafty holiday things this year because I just got started too late. But I did get to do at least one simple gift card holder for our mail carrier. The template and instructions for this are shared by Dawn Griffith of Dawn's Stamping Thoughts on a video tutorial here.

For my card, I used a cutfile I created on Design Studio using George. But if you watch Dawn's tutorial, you'll find this card is so easy that you can quickly put it together even without a cutfile. The cute little reindeer is from the Doodlecharms cartridge, and holly and berries are cut from a QuicKutz die. "Happy Holidays" is a QuicKutz SkinniMini font called Banana Split.

The only other Christmas card I made this year was the annual family Christmas card. Funny thing, when I first came up with the idea for this card this summer, I thought it would be fast and easy because I knew would be using my Cricut to cut all the pieces. I guess forgot to take into consideration how long it would actually take for my Cricut to cut all the pieces (7 for each card), as well as the time it would take to assemble my 90 cards once all the pieces were cut. Then there were the unanticipated mechanical difficulties. Halfway through the cutting phase, Design Studio and Cricut suddenly stopped communicating, and I found I had to let the machine rest a good 15 to 30 minutes between cuts. Thank goodness my dh and dd helped with the production and mailing of these.

Here's what the finished card looked like opened up...a slightly altered gatefold style card. I used the round card cut from the Wild Card cartridge to create the base, George to cut the circle inserts and photos, and Joys of the Season cartridge to cut the wreath.

Hope everyone had a wonderful time with family and friends this Christmas! Happy Holidays!