Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing you and your loved ones a happy, safe and peaceful Thanksgiving and lives filled with gratitude.

Thanks for stopping by!

'Beary' favorite Christmas stamps

Do you have an all-time favorite Christmas stamp set? I think mine is Polar Bears, which I've had for ages. I just love those bears. I can't say that I use it to make Christmas cards every year, but I do pull it out pretty regularly, and I don't think I'll ever part with it. Last weekend I created two polar bear cards:

Supplies (all Stampin' Up!):
Stamps: Polar Bears
Cardstock: Crumb Cake, Bermuda Bay, Whisper White
Ink: Jet Black StazOn, Bermuda Bay, Coastal Cabana, Crushed Curry, Crisp Cantaloupe
Accessories: 2-1/2" circle punch, Coastal Cabana ruffle stretch trim, burlap ribbon, rhinestones, Dimensionals

Supplies (all Stampin' Up!):
Stamps: Polar Bears
Cardstock: Gumball Green, Pool Party, Whisper White, silver glimmer paper
Ink: Gumball Green, Pool Party, Smoky Slate, Baked Brown Sugar, Crisp Cantaloupe
Accessories: Ovals Collection Framelits, Perfect Polka Dots embossing folder, Merry Minis punch pack, Envelope Punch Board (to round the corners), Dimensionals

For both cards I stamped the bear image on Whisper White cardstock, colored it with markers, cut it out and adhered it with Dimensionals to a focal layer. I kept the rest of the cards simple so the polar bears stand out. I'm planning to use these as Christmas cards, but they would both make cute winter cards to say hello or thinking of you.

So what's your favorite Christmas stamp set? Thanks for stopping by!

Let it snow, man!

Supplies (all Stampin' Up! unless otherwise noted):
Stamps: Cold Play
Paper: Crumb Cake, Soft Sky, Pumpkin Pie, Whisper White cardstock; Designer Series Paper (DSP) Prints - Soft Sky
Ink: Crumb Cake, Soft Sky
Accessories: Burlap ribbon; punches: 1-1/4" circle, 1-3/4" circle, 1-1/4" scalloped circle, snowflake, corner rounder; Black Diamond Stickles glitter glue (Ranger); sponge; Mono Multi liquid glue; Dimensionals

No, I don't really want it to snow right now. We've had a few flurries that have melted, and that's fine by me. But this little guy sure looks like he's ready. (And did you catch the pun in my title? Snow, man? Hee.) I've been having fun experimenting with -- and finding online -- different ways to make punch-art snowmen. This one is made with two circle punches -- 1-1/4" and 1-3/4" -- sponged around the edges with Soft Sky ink. To make his nose, I punched a 1-1/4" scalloped circle out of Pumpkin Pie cardstock and then trimmed from the sides of one of the scallops to the center of the circle. His arms are two trimmed segments of a punched snowflake, and I used small dots of black Stickles glitter glue for his eyes, mouth and buttons.

Have you seen any snow yet this season? Thanks for stopping by!

Mini Thanksgiving boxes

This has been a rough crafting week for me. Not a lot of time to stamp, and when I did have some time, nothing seemed to come out right. Frustrating. Yesterday I finally decided I needed to work on something simple and straightforward: mini treat boxes for Thanksgiving.

Supplies (all Stampin' Up! unless otherwise noted):
Stamps: Tags 4 You
Card stock: Really Rust, Naturals Ivory
Ink: Really Rust
Accessories: Gift box punch board (We R Memory Keepers), hemp twine, leaf brads (Creative Impressions), 1/8" hole punch

I used the gift box punch board to make the boxes; each one used a 6" x 6" piece of Really Rust card stock. To create the tags I stamped the "Happy Thanksgiving" image from the Tags 4 You set on Naturals Ivory card stock with Really Rust ink and cut them out. (Stampin' Up! makes a coordinating punch, but I don't have it yet. These images are actually pretty easy to cut out by hand.) I added two leaf brads to each tag and used hemp twine to attach them to the boxes.

Inside each box is five foil-wrapped chocolate leaves. I thought these would be cute little holiday treats for a few of the bus drivers I have when I go to work -- one of the drivers I see in the morning drops me off right in front of school so I don't have to walk from the corner, which is really nice on cold, snowy, dark mornings. It's always nice to thank the people who probably don't hear that enough.

I'm pretty happy with how these boxes turned out. And now that I have one project successfully finished, maybe I'll have a more productive weekend. Thanks for stopping by!

MDS lesson plan calendar

One of the things on my to-do list this weekend was to finish my December lesson plan for work. (Yes, we do have lesson plans for toddlers. They're filled with things like books to read, songs to sing and various art activities. Fun stuff.) I usually start with a blank calendar on white paper, fill in the activities and then decorate it with stickers, stamps or computer clip art. Well, yesterday morning I sat down at the computer to check my e-mail and was struck with the idea that maybe I could use My Digital Studio (MDS), Stampin' Up!'s digital scrapbooking software, to make my lesson plan calendar. Here is what I created:

Actually, this picture isn't completely accurate; everything to the left of Monday, to the right of Friday and below the bottom row is not printed on my hard copy. Those parts of the project are in the page bleed area, so while they are technically part of the file, they don't show up in the printed version.

Now, I haven't created much in MDS, so this is pretty basic. I started with a blank 8-1/2" x 11" page. I'm doing a winter theme in December, so I searched MDS for snowflake stamps and found a few images I liked. I inserted each image several times, moving, resizing and rotating them as needed until I was happy with the result. Then I changed the colors of the snowflakes to various shades of blue, grouped them together and changed the opacity to 50% so the images were light enough to write over.

I was debating how I wanted to add the calendar -- Draw each line of the grid in MDS? Run the page through the printer twice to print the background and grid separately? -- when I noticed that there was a way to add either a month or year calendar in MDS. Woohoo! I added a calendar for December 2013 and re-sized it to fit the whole page. Since I didn't need Saturday or Sunday on the calendar, I stretched the sides so those days were outside the printable area. Then I used the last three squares in the bottom row, which would have been empty, for the name of our theme.

Now I just need to go through and write our activities on each day, and I'll be able to check this task off my list. Thanks for stopping by!