Hello Kitty Rides In with the Year of the Horse

Totally driven and inspired by blogging friends Karen (Have A Scrap Happy Day) who made close to a hundred coaster calendars to include with her Christmas cards, and Lynn (Lynn's Craft Blog) who made easel calendars to be sent out as her holiday thank you notes, I decided it was high time for me to actually use the Vippies calendars I buy every year but never ever use.

I think part of my problem is that in the past I've always tried to use a traditional Chinese papercut style image to dress up my calendar but have never been satisfied with the outcome, resulting in me giving up before I even got started. This year I decided to change and go with "cutesy" instead of traditional. Searched all over for an image of Hello Kitty with a horse but the only one I could find that I liked was a photo of some Hello Kitty fabric.

I ended up tracing the image from the photo by hand, trying to simplify and redraw it on my own to get an image that MTC could render into a cutfile.

 Placed Hello Kitty and her horsey on some cloud/sakura patterned paper from My Little Shoebox and added the kanji for "horse" or "uma" to make a bunch of easel calendars which I plan to send as my holiday thank you notes. These were fun and surprisingly quick to put together and though I wanted to do more, I ran out of calendars. So I resized the cutfile to a slightly smaller size...

...to make a few matching octagon shaped boxes...

The cutfile for the boxes is called "Creepy Crawlers Trio" from My Scrap Chick, and I have to admit, they were a bit of a challenge to put together. But after doing several, I think I finally got it figured out. I'll be baking batches of almond cookies this weekend to fill these boxes for giving at Chinese New Years. And hopefully, even after the cookies have been eaten, these boxes will be cute enough to be repurposed...