oof! forgot to show these!

not that anyone really *needs* to see how i dressed up my christmas gifts... especially in JANUARY... but i looooooooooooooove wrapping and it's just not something you can discuss in depth with "civilians" lol.  so bear with me.  who knows, maybe you'll get an idea for next year?

i posted the digi-collages i made for the kids' gift bags earlier, but here they are actually ON the bags:

you can see i didn't do much beyond adding their names in thickers, (with a line of stitching on the chipboard ones for extra security) a wired ribbon bow, and some coordinating tissue paper.

one of the little "extra" gifts i picked up in hawaii were these pretty (plastic) plumeria hair clips for the girls; they made the perfect finishing touch!

in the laurniverse, the BEST projects almost always have the WORST photos! this oversized (approx 13x36") gift for nephew matthew was probably my favorite. i used the same mindy terasawa digi stickers as on the gift bag (just A LOT bigger) and some seriously elderly basic grey monogram letters.  the green "grass" panel and the dinos are both heavyweight cardstock and attached using only a couple of squares of foam tape b/c i *KNEW* matthew would want to hang them on the door to his room... which he did!  :) :) :)

this year, many of my gifts had a hawaiian theme, which i enjoyed hinting at on the outside of the gifts as well. i bought A LOT of these adorable xmas ornaments at hilo hattie, and they were a big hit.

my fallback "guy gift" is candy and money in a cute container. i scored some fun "chinese takeaway" containers (& the best dark-chocolate-covered pretzel balls in the world!!!) at our local "bulk" candy store; the fun luggage tags were like $1 at long's drugs in honolulu!

what do you do with a gift that's too big for a box but too oddly shaped to wrap in the traditional way? for this one (the holiday recipe box i made using my CHRISTMAS IN PARIS pixie kit) i just grabbed nice wiiiiiiide gift wrap and made a "bundle"!

here's the exact same set of products: gold wrap, green glittery wired ribbon and part of a stem of orchids, all of which came from michaels. when i have a bunch of little gifts for the same person, i like to make a "tower" just so i will remember to bestow them all... plus it LOOKS a lot cooler than five tiny boxes. by the way, the best use ever for leftover alphabet stickers is to put the initials of your recipients RIGHT ON the package. unfamiliar with the range of styles made by various craft companies, civilians are completely baffled when, as in this case, there's a gold glitter monogram on their gift. g'head and tell them you did something REALLY difficult and clever... my lips are sealed!!!  ;)

finally, given that i so often make giant and/or oddly shaped cards, people wonder what i do about envelopes. well, sometimes i just skip 'em entirely. oddly enough, no one seems to mind!

thus concludes our giant bumper holiday edition of "giftwrapalooza"! do feel free to bookmark this page in case you suffer from insomnia in future!!!  :) ciao, darlings! ♥

JB12-01... card two! :)

as i mentioned last week, we've decided this year to post new prompts at JINGLE BELLES every other friday. which means that there will be a total of 24 different themes this year, rather than the 48 we amassed last year by posting each week. we hope that having a longer time in which to link up will encourage more folks to join us and play along-- because the gift of a non-frantic december is one we think every paper crafter deserves! ♥

but what does it mean to those of us who actually need to hit the ground running at holiday time with 50+ cards?? well, clearly we need to be creating more than one card for each prompt! we can accomplish this by planning from the get-go to make two of each design we create; or by taking two totally different approaches to each theme. i suspect-- being, as i am, possessed of a short attention span-- that i will tend to mostly do the latter... but it's nice to have both options for times when life gets a bit hectic, right? remember that however you do it, this is still going to equal out to having made ONE UNIQUE CARD PER WEEK, just exactly like we did last year!

here's my second take on "NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT(S)". on this occasion i've used gift wrap (the holly leaf paper) as a background; AND fussy cut a bit of the same gift wrap (the holly accent) AND also popped in a chipboard image of some pretty parcels. oh yes, and do you see the AWESOME "jingle bells" diecut?!  wouldja believe our lovely belle miss lorraine of paper vernissage sent me that for christmas along with one of her own gorgeous cards from last year?  how cool is that??! thank you, missus, i love it--and i know i'll use it all year long!!! this time i've cut it from holographic silver paper backed with cardstock, and i think it looks festive as anything!

(holly leaf gift wrap & ribbon from an xmas present; patterned paper: sei, october afternoon; tags: american crafts & sei; bingo card: jenni bowlin; chipboard stickers: k&co; letter stickers & pins: making memories; "dec25" sticker: creative imaginations; epoxy sticker: around the block; bards: oriental trading co; die: memory box; ink: colorbox; adhesives: xyron, tombow monotrunner, 3m foam tape)

two cards for the first prompt of the year--mission accomplished! have you started your cards yet? if not, why not hop over to JINGLE BELLES and join us.  because it's time to get crackin'... christmas is only 353 days away, you know!!!  ;)

my furniture smells like a locker-room full of freshly showered 5th grade girls... circa 1974*...

before we get rolling, i should mention that enjoyment of this post most likely depends on your being around my age, (late 40's) female and american. or at least... you need to remember "love's baby soft" perfume.  which probably puts you into at least one of the categories i mentioned. if you can't (or, quite understandably, would prefer not to) recall that half powdery, half musky, utterly cloying scent without which no self-respecting, teen-magazine-reading, granny-square-vest-wearing ten year old would have considered herself well groomed in the mid 1970's, you should probably just chuckle at the lol directly below this paragraph and get on with your day. ciao, darlings! ♥

ok, so to those of you still here, who DO remember love's baby soft, i pose this question: do ALL febreze products smell like that? and if so, how in the world can they be soooooo flippin' popular??! here's why i ask: i recently purchased a packet of swiffer duster refills, failing to notice the small purple "febreze" logo on the front. the second i opened them, i knew i had not bought the correct product. the box says they are imbued with... and i quote... "lavender vanilla comfort". now, i *like* lavender. i have no quibble with vanilla, either. but these do not smell like either of those worthy scents. they smell like a david cassidy fan club reunion!!! don't get me wrong, i realize there are certainly FAR WORSE aromas in the world. for that matter, it's quite possible that absolutely everyone apart from me loves these things; in which case they are welcome to my share. i, for one, shall be scrutinizing duster-packets much more thoroughly in future. in the meantime, on the plus-side, it makes me want to dust my house a lot more often, just to get rid of them!!!  :) :) :)

*one of my favorite things about my darling gina's blog is that she often uses just a random thought or observation as her blog post title.  sometimes it will, in fact, lead into the topic of her post, but often there is no further reference to it whatever.  i love that.  not only does it completely draw me *IN*, but it solves--very creatively-- what is often my biggest challenge in blogging: thinking up a cool title. of course, this is only one of the many, many, reasons you should be reading tyggereye art love on a regular basis... i'm just sayin'... it's a perk!  :)

whole lotta "LOVE NOTES"

the january pixie dust paperie kit, ♥LOVE NOTES♥ is certainly not JUST for making valentines. on the other hand, if vaentines happen to be what you'd like to make... you absolutely cannot put a foot wrong using these gorgeous goodies! see?!

there are more detailed photos of these six fun mini-cards on the pixie blog today.  with a few more details as to products and method.  and lots more about the kit, too; which, as i mentioned is completely awesome!!! ♥♥♥

SOS33: challenge rewind!

hello & welcome to the first shopping our stash challenge of 2012! i am especially excited because this one has a sort of "DIY" component to it, in that YOU get to choose your own theme! can't get much easier that that, eh?  here is the exact wording, from the lovely miss carla:

Challenge 33: Challenge Rewind or Meljens Image  

pick any SOS challenge from last year and do it again 

or 

feature an image by our fabulous sponsor Meljens

i went with Challenge 25- Stickers or Rubons or Chipboard because not only do i have plenty of all of those, i didn't get to play along with this one in november since we were in hawaii!

i was also pretty thrilled to be able to use the last sketchy thursday of the year as my "road map" since it is sooooooo very awesome:

being that this was the very last card i made in 2011, i'm rather pleased that it looks forward and backward at the same time:

(patterned paper: cosmo cricket, k&co + vintage ledger; "adventure" card & plane image: october afternoon vintage elements packet; stickers: k&co; chipboard cloud: sassafras; fabric tape: studio calico; rub-ons: 7 gypsies; adhesives: tombow monorunner, 3m foam tape)

i'm proud to say that my card has all three of the challenge elements, and is also composed entirely of stash that's at least couple of years old! believe it or not, only the ledger paper is a genuine vintage item; the postage stamps & mini postcard are stickers, every bit of black printing except "adventure" is a rub-on, and the cloud is sass chipboard!

by the way, that is a bona-fido, cookie-derived fortune which lovely husband jeff received in the (excellent) chinese takeaway we ordered last week!  it says, "no one every grew old by living, only by losing interest in living" which,  it has to be said, does violate one of my strongest precepts regarding fortune cookies:  that they should either contain A PROPER FORTUNE... (something about which i wrote a post a very long time ago) ...or be called "aphorism cookies"; however, in this case i am willing to overlook the issue, since it turned out to be the perfect finishing touch for my brother-in-law's birthday card.

do c'mon over to SOS this week and join us! not only can i promise you'll be inspired by the fabulous DT cards, it'll be a big help if--like me-- one of your resolutions this year is to USE UP some of your stash in cool & creative ways!!! :)

first card of 2012!

truthfully, i didn't think this was going to *BE* a card, i thought i was making a free-form collage. here's what happened: my darling stef sent me a link to this awesome blog, called green paper, on which ms. mary green hosts a collage challenge at the first of every month. she posts three vintage images, and participants must use at least a portion of each in their creations; but other than that, anything goes!  this time, the images were a photo of that sweet--if quite serious looking--young lady; the stationer's label (tucked under, to the left on my card) and a little greeting with a poem and some pansies. i had almost everything together and it was just a collage, honest... until i spied that super-fun ippity "hey girlfriend" stamp which was sitting on my table with the rest of the delicious and inspiring goodies my very lovely--and UBER-talented--friend mari sent me for xmas (thanks, missus!!!) and then i just thought how cool and funny it would be with the rest of the collage and the next thing i know i was attaching the whole thing to folder cardstock and planning to whom i'd send it in january.  :) 

(vintage images: green paper; patterned paper: glitz, tim holtz; vintage-inspired stickers: k&co, tim holtz; tissue tape: tim holtz; stamp: ippity; inks: ranger, colorbox; print media: kodak ultra photo paper, staple cardstock, 3m inkjet transparency; adhesives: tombow monorunner, 3m foam tape)

my favorite thing about scanned/digital vintage images is that, in making "real life" compositions one can play with scale, and also, use a variety of materials on which to print, in order to get a lot of different looks from the same images. so i made my label about the same size as the original... but printed it on a transparency; i made the cabinet card a little bit smaller and printed on photo paper; and i made the pansies HUGE (& also tiny) and printed those on matte cardstock. then i did a bit of cutting, a bit of layering, and added in some stash... et voila!

but next time: i'm making A COLLAGE that isn't a card!!! just to make sure i STILL CAN!!!!!  :) :) :)

Мы долго смеялись!

no, you have not had a small stroke, and no, i have not become fluent in russian. recently one of my lovely blogging friends left that phrase as a comment for me on a "loldog" post, and using the awesome "google translate" app on my iphone i was able to instantly discover that it means "we laughed for a long time!" without even leaving my bed! :)

all of which-- plus the fact that we're starting another brand new year-- made me think, for about the gazillionth time, not only how happy i am to be living now, with all of this wonderful technology; (yes, i'm overly dependent on it; and yes, i whine as loudly as anyone when it's not working!) but also... i'm glad to be in what i cannot help but feel is the most privileged age group of all: those of us currently in our forties are young enough to feel pretty comfortable keeping up with the new stuff, but are simultaneously old enough to have experienced childhood and teenage years without it. because i'm just not sure it's humanly possible for anyone who did not grow up with five television channels, expensive "birthdays & holidays only" long-distance phone service (on a rotary dial telephone!), or having to *TYPE* their term papers, to be excited in the same way about cable, cellphones, and computers.

then, add to all that, the fact that it's possible to use this technology to meet people from all over the world who share our hobbies, interests, and sense of humor??!?! geez, we're LUCKY! and now, let's celebrate with a few computery lolcats, k?! :)

Мы долго смеялись
and 
HAPPY NEW YEAR
darlings!

♥♥♥