What Happened to December?

WHOA!!!! It's a NEW YEAR already and looks like I was left in the dust! I guess it may have seemed that I fell off the face of the blogging world, but only because I was struggling to keep up with the holidays. As a result I'm embarrassingly late in posting my holiday projects... I hope you'll bear with me for my next few posts as I scramble to try to catch up.

Every Christmas we make batches of Chex mix for hubby to share with his co-workers. In the past we've given them in plastic jars I've decorated, but lately it's gotten more difficult to find the jars on sale so we opted to do something different this time. Picked up these cute take out boxes at a local restaurant wholesale supplier and decided to give these a try.

Kept it simple by tying on a big bow with some wide grosgrain ribbon and adding a homemade Santa tag. Cutting file for the Santa comes from My Scrap Chick. This came together much quicker than decorating jars, and so much easier to carry to work. Definitely will do this again next Christmas.

And here's Latte's gifts to her friends...a jar of people treats for her sweet friends at the pet clinic, and goodie bags filled with doggie treats for her canine pals.

For these, I used my favorite furry puppy from Little Scraps of Heaven's "Puppy Love" cutting file together with the holly border from Kadoodle Bug Designs' "Holly Bear" file.

Here a few of the tags I put together for our gifts. Used metal dies for these. Snowflakes dies are from Die-namics "Let It Snowflake"; peeking teddy is from Cottage Cutz "Peeking Santa Bear", and round tag from Lawn Fawn "Stitched Circle Tags". Had fun making these...wish I had time to do more!

And finally, the holiday cards we sent out. Started working on these in November but ran into printer problems which set me back and ended up taking way too long to finish. Photo on the front of the card is our sweet furbaby Latte wearing a string of battery powered fairy lights Used Sizzix "Stars and Swirls" embossing folder for the white panel backed with silver metallic cardstock from Hygloss. Ornaments were die cut using Memory Box "Classic Ornament" die, strung with silver metallic cording.

On the inside, a simple accordion flag pop up style card inspired by a holiday card by my friend Patti of  Creations By Patti blog a few years back. Tutorial for Patti's card can be found here.

I used photos taken during a recent Disneyland vacation for my "flags", increasing the dimensions of the card slightly to accommodate the width of the photos. With hubby's help scoring the cards and with backing the photos, we were able to get 80 of these in the mail just in time.
Okay, on my next post I'll be sharing some of the fun gift card holders I put together for holiday giving. Hope you'll stay tuned!