Stripey Christmas tree.

I've been playing with scraps and thought I'd share my Christmas card prototype.



I cut a whole bunch of strips of Basic Grey Christmas paper. The nice thing about most of BG's Christmas collections is that you can mix and match from year to year. And I have years and years' worth, believe me. I varied the width of the strips from 1/4" to 3/4" and every size in between. (It helps to make lots of strips of each size...that way if one strip doesn't reach the whole way across the paper, you can find another one the same width to put next to it.)

Then I ran a piece of cardstock through my Xyron machine to apply a solid coat of adhesive on one side. And I started laying strips down on the adhesive, scooching them up nice and tight against each other. I used 8.5x11" cardstock and ran the strips across the short side.

From this new sheet of striped paper, I cut a bunch of triangles that measured 2.5" at the base, and 3.5" tall. Then I cut each triangle in half lengthwise. When you have an assortment of triangles cut, put two halves together that are cut from different sections of the paper--so that they don't match up.

I rubbed distress ink on the edges of each half (Frayed Burlap) and mounted on a patterned paper background. Then I added a trunk (snipped from a brown scrap of Basic Grey paper so there's a subtle pattern) and a star and a stamped sentiment. Now I just need to make a few dozen of them!

Just a note.

I'm home today working on laundry, so when I found this fun collage challenge over at Green Paper, I sat down and played along in between loads. Here's my creation:


And what a fun blog Green Paper is! I found it through another blog, The Feathered Nest, which is also a lot of fun. It's great to find new sources for vintage clip art and creative ideas.

Saturday doings.

Yesterday I sat down and made my Valentine's Day cards for the nephews and nieces. I found these great papers at the scrapbook store--it's a line called Splendid by Fancy Pants.

The one paper in the set has 12 small valentine images on it that you can cut out and either use for school exchanges or glitter up and put on a bigger card. I did the latter.

I just think they are SO CUTE.

We went down to Portsmouth today and had lunch, and stopped in at The Queen Bee, which is a small but wonderful antique store right across the street from the Biergarten, our favorite purveyor of knockwurst and German potato salad. The woman who runs The Queen Bee seems to have the exact same taste as me, because her store is loaded with old china, vintage hankies and pins, old kitchen doodads, etc. And her prices are very fair. Some things are expensive, but it's because they're rare and in perfect condition. And the things that aren't so rare or perfect are nicely affordable. I can live with that. What annoys me is when I see a dealer trying to sell some chipped, cracked dirty piece for way more than its worth. But The Queen Bee doesn't seem to do that.

I got this, which I don't think is vintage, it just looks that way:

And this, which is definitely vintage:

The owner told me it was a pattern that Jewel Tea sold in the mid-20th century, made by Hall China. I guess their famous pattern is Autumn Leaf, and I can't for the life of me remember what she said this pattern is. I like to collect china made in southeastern Ohio, and this dish is stamped "Cambridge" which is about an hour from where I went to college.

A cursory Google search reveals that this topic is far more complicated than I have time for at the moment. I may have to call the store and find out exactly what this pattern is called. But anyway, I've been thinking about getting a small casserole dish, since our two-person meals don't always require big dishes, and this should fit the bill.

I am extremely disillusioned with my Pfaltzgraff dinnerware and I decided I'd like to replace it with something American-made, but the options are very, very limited. So now I'm thinking about leaping into estate-sale season with a goal, when it starts up here in the next couple months: a new (old) set of dishes. I'm kicking myself for selling the like-new set I picked up at an auction two years ago for five bucks, but at the time I didn't have a place to store it. Now I wish I'd kept it, now that the Pfaltzgraff is cracking and crazing and making me mad.

All right, I'm off to pry up and paint some bathroom trim. Yippee!

More stuff.

Just a few more of the Christmas cards I made last week. I moved to a blue/brown color scheme for most of these.



Now I think I'm done. I made 72 Christmas cards and had a really fun time with it. Now it's time to move on to some of my other holiday tasks!

I may end up keeping a few of my favorites...here's what I did with some of them:

More cards.

These are some more cards I made earlier this week. I was browsing through all my supplies and found some tags I decided to play with. The first card is my favorite--I may have to keep it for myself! All the sentiments are ancient rub-ons from a Deja Views set, and the little faux postage stickers are from Artchix Studio. Gotta use up those leftovers! I looooove the faux postage images, they are so sweet.




These are really so much prettier in real life...I guess I need to set up a good place to photograph stuff so you can see the details better, like all the pros at Two Peas do. (Yeah, I'll get right on that.) These are all Stickled up, so they're much more glittery than they look here. I am loving the Stickles--all the prettiness of glitter without the dreadful mess.

And this one is a total departure!

I had a little stack of lime green cards to use up, and this pretty sheet of old Chatterbox paper that went with them, plus some very old Bazzill Christmas stickers, so I did six cards in this style. Todd asked if I'd make cards for the engineers at work, so I figure I'll give 'em these. Engineers aren't very big on aesthetics. Not when it comes to paper crafts, anyway.

We had a really great weather day here today. It was cold and windy and the sun kept popping in and out of these huge grey clouds that whizzed across the sky. Well, I enjoyed it, anyway. It's unusually cold for this time of year here. It's actually cold enough that I could pull out my beloved brown wool jacket, and I could tell exactly the last time it was cold enough to wear it: the last weekend of January. Because there were two ticket stubs in the pocket--one for "Sweeney Todd," which I saw with Todd, and one for "27 Dresses," which I saw with my friend Beverly.

I get a kick out of finding things in jacket pockets when I get them out for a new season. Usually it's ticket stubs or fortune cookie slips, but one wonderful time I found a 20-dollar bill in the pocket of my pink spring jacket. That doesn't happen too often!

What I've been doing.

I went to a crop Friday night and got started making Christmas cards. When I came home, I just decided to spread everything out on the kitchen table and keep playing.


I haven't done any stamping to speak of for a long time, because I'm doing my paper crafting on the floor now, and stamping on the floor is not an easy thing to do.

I bought a few Christmas stamps at a stamp show last month, and combining them with some of the stamps I already had, plus some Christmas paper scraps and Tim Holtz distress ink, yielded some combinations I was really pleased with! Oh, and lots of Stickles glitter glue, but that didn't photograph very well. It looks great in real life, though, very sparkly.




I got thirty cards done. And had a really relaxing time doing it!

I still have tons of scraps and pre-folded cards left, so maybe I'll do another crazy stamping extravaganza before the holidays, but if I don't, I at least have a nice set of cards to send out to various people. That is if I can bear to part with them!

Catching up.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes on my Facebook and in my e-mail last week!!! I felt very loved.

I've had company here for the past week, so not a lot of time to get online and catch up with people. My in-laws came and we got so much accomplished--that is, my mother-in-law and I did! (Todd and his dad got a lot of fishing accomplished.) She helped me put up curtains in the living room, dining room and downstairs bath--talk about a difference. We've lived here almost three years without any downstairs curtains, so it really looks much more soft and finished. When the sun comes back out, I'll get some pictures of everything.

I do have a couple of pictures on my camera right now, though...here are the Halloween cards I made for my nephews and nieces:


I got the paper piecing patterns from the Better Homes and Gardens Scrapbooks Etc website. You're supposed to hand stitch the details, but who has time for that? And I don't think the originals had googly eyes, but I love googly eyes, so I used those. Most of the papers are from Imaginisce, with a few scraps from other Halloween lines.

There was a stamping/scrapbooking show in town this weekend, and I went on Saturday morning...took a few pictures of Tim Holtz projects at the Stampers Anonymous booth:


Stampers Anonymous also carries a line of stamps called Studio 490...here are a couple of things that caught my eye:


Here's Studio 490's blog...looks like lots of inspiration and ideas!

I would have taken more, but of course I always forget to check my camera battery before I go out, and then of course, it's always down to the last drop and I only get a handful of pictures. These were the most impressive project booths, though. There weren't a lot of vendors there this year, but I managed to get some Tim Holtz stamps and a bunch of Adirondack inks, plus a few other odds and ends. Spent my birthday money.

Hope everybody has a great week. I can't believe it's the end of October already!