get yer souvenirs, here!

so you bring home little presents from vacation: silly things like bookmarks...and those little souvenir cloisonne pins...and then what? just hand them unceremoniously over to the recipients? bit of a let down, especially if you are a devotee of cool giftwrapping such as myself.

usually i save the little bags from shops and pretty them up a bit, but this time there weren't any. i thought about making teeeeeeeeny tiiiiiiiiiiiny shopping bags. then it hit me: i had a brand new set of fancy pillow box patterns from the cutting cafe which i had never even used--time to break those babies out!

the most brilliant thing about these is the fact that they aren't templates, they're print-n-cut patterns. what's the difference? instead of having one example which you have to trace and measure and follow a number of times, you just print out as many full-sized patterns as you need, glue them to the back of your desired paper or cardstock, and cut & score on the right lines. i knocked out three of those babies in about 20 minutes.

i used pages from a south carolina travel brochure book which came free from the tourist bureau (reinforced with index stock) for the boxes and scraps of patterned paper for the fancy frames. i printed "greetings from south carolina" over & over on an inkjet transparency and cut it to fit the windows.

i also had some slightly bigger gifts (pralines, as a matter of fact) for other folk. i used the leftover bits of transparencies and a k&co chipboard label to make larger frames to decorate small plain giftbags from michaels.

...but somehow...they just needed one more thing. i was going to make my usual grunge flowers, when the lovely and quite prescient stephanie sent me a link to these fabulous flowers made from catalog pages! i made a rather less complicated version than the gorgeous blooms in the example (for example i used a lot fewer layers...and there was NO modge podge involved!) but i think they came out really well and i'm so pleased to have a truly unique way of presenting gifts from our trip!

(materials used: pillowbox pattern from the cutting cafe; 5 or 6 pages from a south carolina travel book; scraps of junkitz & imagination project patterned paper, plus a bit of blue suede paper packaging from...somewhere... inkjet transparency formatted in roughstone font using broderbund printshop; epoxy circles from michaels $ spot; prima glass pebbles; making memories brads; ek success circle punches; colorbox inks; zig pen; adhesives: uhu gluestick, gluedots & tombow monoadhesive runner)