Holiday Treasures

Hope everyone is recovering from Christmas and raring to go for the upcoming New Year! For my last post of the year, I want to share some of the amazing papercrafted Christmas treasures I received from my super talented friends this year...

As always, my dear friend, Patti of Creations By Patti blog from the San Francisco wowed me with her creative prowess!

Patti's Christmas card is so elegant and beautifully intricate, with glittering ornaments hanging from a bough of paper punched sprigs. Love, love LOVE the embossed background with the flurry of delicate silvery snowflakes!

And how about this cute little gingerbread house box Patti put together as a super SWEET TREAT! Look inside to find yummy Reeses chocolate peanut butter cups, all dressed up with colorful stamped stickers. And as always, so intricately, beautifully done!

Another holiday surprise, these from sweet Karen of Have A Scrappy Day blog on the Big Isle....
I was so excited to receive this little panda coaster calendar! Had to put it on my 'frig right away to show it off  to all who came over to party with us for Christmas....and of course everyone adored it! And how cute is Karen's stamped, colored, embossed, and paper pieced Christmas card! So pretty and SWEET...just like Karen!

 Check out these beautiful white poinsettias she paper pieced to embellish her card...the white on white is absolutely stunning!

And these very special handcrafted gift tags created by Gwen (snowman) and Kris (bear) will be treasured for many years to come. It's clear to see all the time and love that these ladies put into creating these wonderful keepsakes!

A fabulously unique holiday greeting came from one of my oldest and dearest friends, Bev. We  look forward to getting her cards each Christmas because she never fails to come up with something new and exciting every year. Woo Hoo!....looks like I might have to CASE this one for our cards next year!

This last holiday gift is not a papercraft, but a special gift handcrafted with love by my mom, who loves to create magic with plastic canvas. She brought this over when she came for dinner on Christmas Eve, and it was the perfect added  festive touch for our holiday dinner table!
Thank you so much to all of you who stopped in to visit throughout the year. And extra special thanks to those of you who always take time to leave such sweet comments...it really means a lot to me! Enjoy the rest of 2013 and see ya soon in 2014!

Sweet Treats for "Deer" Friends

Happy Holidays! Whew! It's 2:45 am Christmas Eve, and I'm finally finished with wrapping the gifts and cleaning the house in time for our family get together tonight at our place. Now I have a bit of time to quickly post my Christmas projects...none of which would ever have gotten done in time without the help of sweet hubby. Not only did he help with the scoring, addressing and stamping of our Christmas cards, he also picked up the jars and helped me make the batches of sweet Chex mix that went inside. I had fun decorating the jars to make them look festive...

The little peeking reindeer is a cutting file I picked up from Treasure Box Designs. The original file was a lot cuter, with colorful little Christmas bulbs wrapped around the reindeer's antlers but with 25 of these to do, I really had to try and keep it simple. Pretty holly paper is a bargain find I picked up last at Hobby Lobby last year...at 25 cents per 12x12 sheet I couldn't resist getting several...and now I'm glad I did! Label was created in Printshop using CAC Shishoni Brush, Pharmacy, Arial, and LD Charming fonts, and cut into ovals with Spellbinders Nesting Oval and Scallop oval dies using my brand new Sizzix Magnetic Platform to center them...what a marvelous invention!

 Had to keep our Christmas cards very simple this year since I got started working on them so late. I decided to do a Joy fold style with a photo of our little Latte holding a wreath I made. It's actually one of those rope chew things from Petco onto which I hot glued holly leaves and berries I cut from felt. LOL, I bought several of those rope type toys this year and we've been training Latte to "HOLD IT!" all year long, just so I could get her to pose for this photo for our Christmas card this year!

I tried to keep the embellishments simple, using only a simple Cottage Cutz mini holly die. The green panel on the left was embossed using a Sizzix holly embossing folder and  the patterned paper is from Frances Meyer.

 On the inside, I used a Spellbinders Labels Two die to cut out the sentiment and added a photo from our trip to Japan earlier this year. Kept the inside panel to the right blank so I'd have a place write a short note.

Okay...I need to take a short nap now so I can get up again in a few hours and start cooking! Merry Christmas, everyone!

Thankful!

Thanksgiving is several weeks past already, but as you can tell, I'm a little behind on my posts...as a matter of fact, I guess I'm a little behind on just about everything right now. Thanksgiving happened to fall on my birthday this year, which was nice because I got to celebrate with family and a yummy Thanksgiving dinner. My dear friend Kris also came by to wish me a happy birthday and dropped off a very special gift and this most amazing birthday card...

Here's the front of the card...beautifully and intricately paper pieced...

Isn't this little monkey pirate and his treasure chest the cutest ever?

Ready for the best part? Slowly open the card....

...to see the monkey pirate slide across the plank to fight off the enemy! Too CUTE!!!! Totally, TOTALLY LOVE these interactive action type cards...

Wow! Imagine all the time Kris must have spent cutting and piecing together all these adorable little monkeys. These cuties are from  the "Pirate's Life For Me" cutting file from Scrapping Bug Designs. Gotta say that this amazing card certainly brightened my day and made me feel extra special on my birthday....thank you so much, Kris!

 

Also want to share yet another surprise RAK from my sweet friend, Lorna. How CUTE is this?!! Who'd have ever thought to use a ship shaped box for a clever little Thanksgiving treat holder? Yes, this lady's creative genius is unstoppable! Treat box is filled with pretty blue foiled kisses and if you look closely, you'll see that the mast holding the sails is a See's lollipop turned upside down...super COOL! Thank you, Lorna!

 

The last of my Thanksgiving/birthday surprises came from hubby...this one is becoming a beloved tradition with us. Every year for the past few years, "Latte" comes to "visit" and wish me a happy birthday at my workplace...

Here's a shot of "Latte" and Latte....will the REAL Latte please stand up!....LOL!!!

 



Birthday Wishes for Some "Bunny" Special

Got another "box type" of card to share with you today. This one is actually very different than the sliding box cards I've recently been hooked on. For one thing, windows on this card are on the panels rather than the corners of the box. The second difference is that there's no sliding mechanism. The pop up mechanism I used on the inside of the box which anchors the cut out images is the same as is used on most simple pop up cards. A little time consuming to put together since there are four windows to fill and embellish, but worth the extra time for someone very special, right?
Here's a look at each of the four panels...

I used MTC to create each of the box panels with the oval  cut out window; and the cute baking bunny images are from Kristi W. Designs which I purchased a while ago as a svg cutting file set called "Bunnies Making Cupcakes" from Kadoodle Bug Designs.  Hmmm---must have been quite awhile ago because it seems to have since retired and is no longer available on the Kadoodle Bug site. Daisies are from an old Quickutz die and label is another Pinterest digi find rendered into a cutfile with MTC. Sorry, the photos aren't very good because of the poor lighting and shadows created from inside the box, but if you click on the photos you should be able to get a better look at those adorable baking bunnies.

Here's a birds eye view of the card from the top which shows the strips of cardstock inside, glued together to form rectangular "boxes" which served as the base for mounting the bunnies. I first saw a card similar to this created and shared by Monica Soto on the Scrappy Dew website. I totally fell in love with Monica's card (she calls hers a "Go Round Card") but never could figure out how it was made. Saw this type of card again much later on over at the Instant Cardmaking Downloads site, this time called a "Spring Box Card" and with a free photo tutorial by Beryl's Crafty Creations.  Although I started out constructing my card according to Beryl's tutorial, I ended up having to change it up a bit since the base was unable to support the heavier weight of the paper pieced bunnies. However if you plan on using stamped images in your box, the spring type base in Beryl's tutorial should work just fine.

And here's the final "folded flat" photo. This one is pretty fat so I ended up making a box for it instead of an envelope. A lot of trial and error (mostly errors!) went into putting this card together, but I liked how it turned out and am looking forward to trying another one soon...and hopefully I'll eventually figure out how to do this more quickly...



Still the Only One for Me!

Hope everyone had an enjoyable Thanksgiving weekend spent with friends and family! Wow, can you believe it's December already?!!
Every year about ths time I find myself scrambling to keep up with the holidays ahead. In addition to Halloween and celebrating five family birthdays during the months of October and November, hubby and I also have our wedding anniversary in October.
For my anniversary card to hubby this year, I wanted to use a cute "rhymie-stymie" sentiment I came across on Pinterest..." Of all the fish in the sea... You're still the only one for me!" Thought a pleated center type card would be perfect for my fish themed anniversary greeting.

 

Here's the card opened, with my blue (hubby) and pink (me)  fishies swimming in the center of a heart shaped wreath of  seaweed!

I used the Create A Critter Cricut cartridge to cut all the fish and sea creatures, and Life's A Beach cartridge for the seaweed and coral. Heart shaped seaweed wreath was created in MTC.

Taking a closer look here shows the pleated center of the card where I glued  in strips of clear acetate (to suspend the fish and hearts), and stalks of seaweed in random pleats to add dimension.

Always have fun using this pleated center type card with strips of clear acetate whenever I want to create the illusion of objects floating or swimming...you can find a detailed and easy to follow photo tutorial for this shared by super talented Carol on her blog, Extreme Cards and Papercrafting.

I received a surprise delivery of a dozen beautiful long stemmed roses at my workplace from hubby on our anniversary (he's such a sweetie!)...and all he got from me was this card...and all my love, of course!