Homemade With Holiday Cheer

Every Christmas for as long as I can remember, we've baked up batches of Chex cereal mix for hubby to share with his friends at work. But because of our situation this year, I mentioned that I might not have the time to decorate the bottles like I usually do. He simply shrugged his shoulders, "That's okay" he said, "They don't care what it looks like on the outside, they just want what's inside." Uh...typical male response? Honestly though, I truly believe he was trying to sound supportive... maybe just the wrong choice of words?

Even so, I was determined to create a label for the bottles, even if was a simple one. I was lucky enough to make it home for a few hours on some weekends to quickly design and print up the labels and cut the pieces for this peeking snowman from Treasure Box Designs. As with our Christmas cards, I took all the pieces with me and glued and assembled after my parents were asleep. Got 30 of these bottles decorated and ready for giving on time!

By the middle of the month, mom was doing so well that I even had time to put these little babies together. I wasn't able to do any Christmas shopping so nearly everyone on our gift list got gift cards this year. But I still wanted to have some cute way of presenting those gift cards...then when I spied this adorable Santa Patio Paver Box over at My Scrap Chick, I thought it might be perfect for what I had in mind.

Really liked how these turned out! I love the unusual shape of this box, and they were so much fun to put together that I didn't even mind having to make 12 of these cuties.

Here's a shot of the inside of the box. The depth of these boxes is over 1-1/4 inches, so there's plenty of room to add in lots of goodies.

Okay, so since I enjoyed making all the Santa boxes so much, I decided to try a couple more...

Here's the Penguin...

...and the Gingerbread Cooky...

...and here they are all together!

I had three gift cards for my sil's family so I thought it would be cute to put them each in separate boxes and create the look of a "gift set".

For the outer gift box, I cut and re-sized a regular shirt box, covered it with cardstock and embellished with various snowflake die cuts (Sizzix, Cheery Lynn, Die-namics) and adhesive backed rhinestones.

That's about all for my Christmas crafting this year...so happy it's all done! So looking forward to the New Year! So ready for a fresh start...LET'S GO-O-O-O!!!!!!!

Happy Holidays! (...just a little late...)

WHOA!!!! Is it over already? It's only been a month since my last post, but it feels like it's been a lot longer. Got back home about 2 weeks ago, and didn't think I could do it, but got all my holiday cards and packages done and mailed out in time, plus a few more things. Yay for me! Whew! Don't want to sound like a GRINCH, but man, I am sure glad Christmas is over!
For our cards this year, I decided to do a waterfall type of card. Created the prototype for the card a week prior to mom's surgery, then went crazy cutting all the pieces needed to make our 80 cards. Turned out to be a good plan as I found enough free time late at night after putting mom and dad to bed to put all the pieces together and assemble the cards.

 I found many tutorials on YouTube for waterfall cards, but I tweaked mine just a bit so I would have just two oversized flaps. And in place of the brads that usually hold the sliding mechanism in place, I simply used staples. I used the tiered O Christmas Tree cutfile from My Scrap Chick for the front of the card and a circle punch to cut the simple ornaments from red foil. I was a little sad that my poor tree looked like a pre-schooler had put it together but since I didn't have access to any of my crafty supplies, there wasn't much I could do. LOL, all I could do was hope that the fun sliding and page flipping movement of this card would make everyone not notice the sad tree as much!

Pulling down on the tab on the bottom of the card brings the first flap up with a photo of our funny Santa doggie, sitting in a gift box.

Pulling down on the tab further brings the second flap up with our family photo. A little time consuming to assemble, but not too difficult at all.

Uh oh...look who got curious and wanted to help while I was taking pictures for this post! Hope everyone had a joyous Christmas! Still have a few holiday projects to share...hopefully I can get them posted before the New Year!