Christmas Goodies!

I'm so glad that it's time for Christmas goodies! I love to make my own Christmas cards and gifts for friends, neighbors and teachers. Here are a few goodies that my crafty buddy and I made yesterday... and a few little news tidbits too.

Here is a gift that is fun for neighbors or friends - it's a Jiffy-Pop popcorn tin,decorated! I admit that I have gently scraplifted this from a sweet lady at the craft fair last year and made a slightly different version. . . here are some helpful measurements for making your own.

  

I used my Cricut to cut the following pieces using George and Basic shapes:

• One 6.5” white circle
• Two black 1” circles
• Five black 3/4” circles

I used the Paper Doll Dress Up cartridge to cut a 4” true-to-size hat (from the groom doll).
I used the Close To My Heart Art Philosophy cartridge to cut two 2” holly leaves and a 4” holly tag. I cut a 3x2” orange rectangle and cut it in half for the nose.

Put the white circle on the Jiffy Pop by lifting the tin around the edges and placing it over (but not replacing) the instructions. Glue the other parts down leaving the handle at the top. Add a tag and your little gift is ready to hang on your neighbor’s door … what a fun little surprise!

We also made some pretty cards yesterday (again, I am shamelessly scraplifting from a beautiful card that I found on Pinterest). . . It’s fun to find a design that you like and then try to make your own with what tools you have on hand. My snowflakes and embossing and papers are different from the original that I found… but here are some more measurements for you if you want to try this layout. I love it!

• The card base is A-2 or a piece of red cardstock measuring 5.5 x 8.5” folded in half.
• The white paper is 4 x 5” and one edge is punched with a snowflake border.
• The red embossed mat is 2.75 x 4.75 – we embossed with a beautiful Spellbinders snowflake die.
• The music paper was cut with a 2” circle and the red ring is a 2” ring cut using the Art Philosophy cartridge, and a 2.5” scalloped circle was cut on white paper.
• The holly leaves and bird stickers came from a sticker set from JoAnn’s
• Finally, we used some of the punched snowflakes from the border punch and added them randomly with some gems (We used the iRock tool)
• Inside is another white paper liner with the snowflake border punch along the right side edge.

I want to try this card using some other colors, as I think that it will look really beautiful in blue, purple and green too. . . and we are in search of some other bird stickers like cardinals and such.

Here is one more project that I have been wanting to do for quite a while. I won a cute Cricut cartridge as blog candy a while ago from Kerri over at Big Smiles From KBear. It’s a darling cartridge called Gingerbread that cuts out lots of cute gingerbread shapes. The hardest part, was finding paper that is Gingerbread colored – I finally found some cardstock by Worldwin Papers called “Spice.”  Perfect! We also used some patterned papers from the new DCWV Christmas Stack and created these little goodies:

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• The card bases are A-2size with corners rounded.
• The bottom layer is “Spice” paper measuring 4 x 5.25”
• The next mat is white cardstock measuring 3.75 x 5”
• The next mat is patterned paper measuring 3.5 x x4.75”
• Round all of the corners of your mats.
• The white strip is 3.75 x 2” with one edge punched with a cute border punch.
• The cookies were cut using the Gingerbread cartridge at a 4” size.
• After gluing the white “icing” down to the cookies – we glued random baubles (red and black scrap crystals) and used lots of stickles to decorate the cookies… you have to zoom in on  the pic to see just how sparkly and cute they turned out! I love them! I used the *Holiday Cheer* stamp as a sentiment on two of mine – I’m pretty sure that is a Daisy Bucket stamp, but I don’t remember for sure. Sorry. :(

Now then, I did mention Pinterest earlier, and I have to admit that I finally jumped on the Pinning bandwagon and I love it – I’m still a newbie though, so I haven’t figured all of it out quite yet. When I do, I am going to try to figure out how to add pins to my posts so that you can share if you like. I’ll be giving this a try later, to see if I can get a pin to work for this post.

Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for returning to my blog this year. I know that things have been a little slow this year and I haven’t had time this year to do near as many tutorials, videos or posts. . . I’m working on a few plans for 2012 to improve this, so thank you again and see you soon!
-Nancy