Santa Baby... times two!

I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned how much I love Prima's "Santa Baby" collection, but it bears repeating. And not just because it has a vintage vibe and loads of pink. Though obviously both of those factors are 100% fine with me, lol. Here are a couple of gift bags I made with a selection of the papers... a few bits and bobs of my own and one or two patterns from this summer's "Havana" collection, mixed in:

My biggest problem was deciding which papers to use first, so I sort of just bypassed that whole question by using almost all of them! Since I was making bags for two friends I would be seeing together, I wanted to make two designs that were similar, but unique. So I leaned towards the pink on the first, and picked up the soft turquoise accent color (and some of the metallic gold) for the second bag.

I handcut some very loose, funky ruffles, distressed and curled the edges a bit, added a little machine stitching, then layered them onto the fronts of two plain white bags from the big box store. I worked from the middle of the bag, upwards. I used thin strips of foam tape towards the center of the bags for extra dimension, and Sookwang's extra strong Scor-Tape to anchor the edges firmly in the folds at the side of the bags.

I can never quite resist adding in a little vintage paper... especially sheet music... especially at the holidays! And yes, I have a hardcore love of paper doilies, what can I say? The burlap flowers and gorgeous pink holly leaves at the top are older Prima products, but honestly, it's like they were made especially to coordinate with the tiny flowers from the Santa Baby line. Of course, if you've got bags as fancy as this, they really ought to have matching cards, right?

More doilies, holding sentiments built from my own diecut letters. These are made from vintage sheet music mounted on thin chipboard, to make them extra sturdy. I like to use a mix of sheet music colors and styles to compliment the fun, funky font and add even more vintage charm.

A mix of trimmings, flowers and foliage also bumps up the texture factor. Because seeing as how these will be tucked into the gift bags, there is no need to think about mailability! ;)

Of course the very best place for presents of any kind is underneath the tree, right?! 

I hope this Saturday before the Saturday before Christmas will find you finishing up lots of "to do list" items, but also making time for some holiday fun --and treats-- for yourself! ♥♥♥

What's Red and Green and FUN All Over?

Holiday-themed Memorydex cards featuring Eyelet Outlet brads and washi tape of course! I used my rolodex die to cut out two cards made from ordinary white cardstock covered in a collage of vintage paper and sheet music. Then I added a band of festive tapes, topped with artist trading coins. Because who ever said you cannot *combine* swap formats to make them exponentially more fun!

On my first card, I layered a bunch of my favorite RED washi tapes: Ho Ho Ho, No Peeking, Merry Christmas, Skinny Merry Christmas and a few other skinny tapes with words on them. Then I made an artist trading coin from red patterned paper and added Santa and Mrs. Claus Brads.

My second card favors shades of green, running in the opposite direction because I started with my favorite vertical Tree Tape and added Green Dots as well as a few different strips of Skinny Green Stripes. This time the coin element features a pair of Pine Trees and a gallant Moose Brad for a fun wintery scene.

Of course there is no limit to the different combinations you could make with just a few fun holiday tapes and brads from Eyelet Outlet!!

'tis the season!

the winter holiday season, that is. so at shopping our stash this week, we'd like to see a card for any winter holiday you celebrate: christmas, solstice, yule, hanukkah, santa lucia, bodhi day, kwanzaa, new year, festivus or... whatever! i went with a very girlie, secular xmas sorta theme, lol!

papers and chipboard from prima's "santa baby" collection; flowers: prima, petaloo, recollections, we r memory keepers and some so old i'm not sure where they are from lol; doily: recollections; snowflake punch: ek success; foliage dies: tim holtz/sizzix; ancient sheer ribbon trim from my stash; ink: ranger; distress tool: tonic; plain white cardstock: staples; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, hot glue, sewing machine

i've already mentioned that i'm utterly smitten with prima's santa baby collection, so i couldn't resist one more extra-embellished, not-being-mailed sort of card. of course, that collection is brand new, and this is SOS, so i needed to work some older goodies into the mix. thus i raided my dimensional floral collection which stretches back nearly to the millenium, lol. not to mention some leftover diecuts, a scrap of ancient ribbon and the first snowflake punch i ever bought. i even got out that golden-oldie of tools: my tonic edge-distressing tool!

why not unearth some of your favorite older supplies, mix them up with your most coveted new things, and join us at SOS for this last challenge of 2018. just a note that after this, we'll be taking a little break --until january 8th-- to spend holiday time with our family and friends! happy happy holidays to you... whatever holidays you might be celebrating this year! ♥♥♥

Death Before Decaf!*

It's that wonderful time of year once again: by which I mean both the holiday season AND the winter Coffee Lovers' Blog Hop! Thus I decided to make some giftcard holders that combine my love of coffee, holiday cardmaking and Eyelet Outlet Coffee Brads and Coffee Stamps!

I made a very simple folder; it's just a piece of 3.5 x 8.5" kraft cardstock scored at the 2.5 and 6.5" point, to create a little pocket inside which can hold a giftcard OR a check, money, a little note, even some small photos. You could make these out of double sided patterned paper to save having to trim little panels to decorate the outside, but I always seem to have loads of little patterned paper off-cuts and this is a great way to use them up! 

Once I'd covered the pocket, top flap and back panel with cardstock, it was time for the fun part: decorating! I covered a small scrap of white cardstock with Eyelet Outlet Merry Christmas Tape and diecut it into a heart which is slightly narrower than the top flap, but hangs down a bit over the pocket area. This hides the place where I secured seambinding to the front, but still leaves room for the bow that literally ties the whole thing together. I used my Stephanie Barnard dies to create the coffee cup out of lighter kraft and the lid and front panel from this fun argyle-inspired Christmas Pattern Washi. I added a green Paper Flower, anchored with a Wreath Brad, decorated with some tiny red Pearl Bling berries.

In the second version, I decided to get a bit more coffee-centric, so I stamped the coffee bean from our Coffee Stamp Set in an all-over pattern and used a brown Tombow with a water brush to add color. This time my diecut heart has vertical-oriented Red Tree Washi and the cup is adorned with Santa Tape flanked by Skinny Stripes. And to hold on the flowers, one those awesome beans from the Coffee Brad Set which also contains both red and white coffee cups!

Be sure to hop over and see all the amazing cards at the Coffee Lovers' Blog Hop, and leave a little love for Amy Tsuruta and the other Coffee Elves who are working so hard behind the scenes at these events! ♥♥♥

*ok, not *literally*... :)

happy birthday, dude!

you may already have guessed this week's challenge at shopping our stash, from my title. but just in case there is some doubt, YES, we want you to make that most challenging of birthday greetings, the GUY CARD! i have a couple of standardized formulas, my favorite of which is, "best fishes" which can be made using stamps, stickers, patterned paper or an adorable bass trimmed from an old falling apart book! like this one:

vintage bits: fish image, slide mount, green map and scrap of sheet music; other collage bits are stickers and diecuts by dcwv, karen foster, k and co and october afternoon; ledger paper is also OA; blue patterned paper: elizabeth craft designs; woodgrain: american crafts; tiny letter stickers: fancy pants; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

even if you don't especially like vintage goodies, if you ever see one of those little nature guides at a garage sale, and it happens to have fish illustrations in it... BUY the book!!! because seriously, you'll get probably 100+ different fish images that are the perfect size for cards. and typically you will pay under $1 for such bounty! ok, yes, you have to fussy cut them, but really it's not all that much to ask, right? i usually back mine with a little piece of scrap cardstock before i cut them, so they are nice and sturdy and can be popped up on foam tape. maybe inside a vintage slide mount, lol! as for the rest of the "bits" i've got a nice mix of real and faux vintage... can you guess which is which? ok, i'll tell you: apart from the aforementioned fish and slide, the only REAL vintage items here are the green scrap of map (which is fun to say!) and the little strip of sheet music. all the rest are "vintage style" papers, stickers and diecuts. though admittedly a couple of them have been in my collection long enough to at least be "retro" by now, lol! some of them came with a slightly distressed look, others i helped along with a bit of ink and an edge distressing tool.

there's lots more guy card inspiration awaiting you from my design team darlings over at SOS! ♥

Holly, Poinsettia and Pinecones

There is no possible combination of holiday foliage that I do not love; especially if we're talking about Eyelet Outlet Holly, Poinsettia and Pinecone Brads! See?

Here's a shocking true confession for you: I own probably 15 sets of foliage dies and at least 7 or 8 of them are holiday foliage! But I use *all* of them --separately or together-- pretty much every year. In this case I've pulled out some medium sized pine branches and some smaller holly clusters, but really this idea would work with any foliage you like... you could even stamp rather than diecut, for that matter. I've used the same basic sketch for all three cards, just changed up the specific shapes and products. This is a great way to make a bunch of cards quickly, without having to mass-produce in the traditional way. For my first card I added the foliage to a matted star diecut, anchored the fronds with a trio of Poinsettia Brads and grounded the whole thing with some argyle-inspired Christmas Pattern Washi.

My second card is landscape rather than portrait, and I've used a nice big label shape, so that I could scatter a bunch of the gorgeous new Pinecone Brads around a Bling-bedecked Paper Flower stack. A double strip of Pine Tree Washi frames the whole thing quite nicely.

My third card features an ancient 3-layer heart die and a cluster of Holly Brads with red Jewel centers against a background of sheet music adorned with Holly Tape. This illustrates one of my *favorite* things about washi tapes that have a lot of "white" in them... they are almost always translucent, so that you can apply them over different colors of cardstock or patterned paper and get different effects!

Of course, there is a nearly unlimited amount of beautiful combinations you could make with just a few EO Holiday Brads and tapes, so let your imagination go wild! ♥

walkin' inna washi wonderland!

we're celebrating "washi, washi, washi" this week at shopping our stash. you don't have to use sixteen strips in eight different styles of tape on the same card... but you can... and i have, lol! :)

patterned paper: doodlebug design; pink cardstock: sei; flowers: prima; badge: of unknown origin, but it's ancient, so you'd never find it anyway, lol; tapes: prima, october afternoon, little b, target, freckled fawn, eyelet outlet, heidi swapp and... ok, i think that's it; again... they're all really old except the wide flower tape from prima's havana collection and the skinny gold stripe tape that's still available at eyelet outlet; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sookwang scor-tape and sewing machine

yes, i like pink. i may have mentioned that a time or two. i also like flowers, flair and tape. so this seemed like a good time to break out all of the above... in quantity! something i don't like much is measuring, so whenever possible i like to apply washi tape onto a background with a line- or graph-pattern. so obviously i was pretty psyched this summer when doodlebug design released a whole rainbow collection of "floral-graph" petite prints, which have (as the name implies) a tiny floral pattern on one side and graph paper on the other. they come in a couple of dozen colors, many of which are available at paper anthology, where i stocked up on quite a few; and they are every bit as amazingly useful as i thought they'd be! 

everything else on this card is considerably older than this summer: the flowers are particularly ancient; most of the tapes are four or five years old and i have no idea where the strawberry badge even came from, but it's the perfect finishing touch!

of course you don't have to use eight different tapes OR make the tape the center of your design to play along with the "washi, washi, washi" challenge at SOS... which i hope you will! ♥