Recycle Holiday Cards

I thought you might enjoy 2 recycling ideas for all of your beautiful holiday cards that might be hard to just throw away.

St. Jude's Ranch has a program where they take used Christmas and other occasion cards and recycle them into new cards to help raise funds for their children's ranch. Click HERE if you wish to learn more....and Operation Write Home takes your new handmade cards or cards that you recycle yourself to make new cards and sends them to our brave men and women serving in the military. The shipping addresses and postmark deadlines can be found on the far left side of their home page HERE. They also give basic guidelines for sending cards to them. (I was surprised to find out that embellishments on the card fronts are perfectly fine AND they prefer no clear envelopes to hold the card and envelope together.)

It always gives me a great feeling when my handmade cards actually help others in such a big way. Cheers and Happy New Year!

Happy Little Opportunity

I forgot to mention that when my husband added the cupcake brad below, he put the hole for the brad right in the center of the white circle of cardstock --- as per my instructions...but I didn't notice that the brad flaps were actually at the bottom of the cupcake brad, so that made the cupcake sit up higher on the white circle...."No problem!" I said...."This is not a mistake but a happy little opportunity to put a few extra gems below the cupcake!" I love it when those "opportunities" actually enhance the look of the project!

Zutter Fun!

After my very crafty friend, Katie, showed me how to use her Zutter machine, I had to put that little toy on my Wish List...and here are my first creations with my very own pink bundle of sheer joy! These are Post-It note holders and they are so easy to make that my husband made the one on the right for his assistant's January birthday! She enjoys paper crafting and will really appreciate his handmade efforts!....and not to take anything away from my dear husband, but it's so easy to make items with the Zutter that even a husband can use it --- hehe! (Some of you who took classes with me at MLO will recognize the papers used for these little books.) BTW - I used the extra large Stampin' Up oval for the sayings done on my computer.

Paper Crafters' Christmas Poem

Here's my last Christmas Cricut card that I made with the Winter Woodland cartridge...I haven't had this much fun with a new crafting toy since I got my Cuttlebug!

My good friend and fellow paper crafter, Michele, just sent me the poem below. It gave me an extra big smile, and I hope it does the same for you ;-)

Twas the night before Christmas, I’m glued to the tree.
I’m wondering what Santa will bring just for me.
Could it be cardstock or inkpads or lace?
Or stamp sets, I said, with a smile on my face.
And that’s when I heard him...Hi Santa, I said.
To which he replied, You should be in bed!
Oh, dear! I said, I’ve just been caught...
But I was excited to see what you brought.
Well, let’s take a look in this room where you work.
Then he shook his head quickly, and left with a jerk.
And I heard him exclaim, as he put it in gear,
You’ve got enough crap, I’ll see you next year!

Now I ask you...can one ever have too many paper crafting supplies?!

Happy holidays and here's wishing you a plethora of creativity in 2010!

Cards from My November Class

Here's a pic of all 7 card projects from my November class....and I've just posted a sample of the sheet you will receive when you're a member in my card & craft club. Each month I mail out a sheet of project photos and a supply list about 2 weeks before the written instructions and YouTube video tutorial links are sent to CLUB members. You can check it out by clicking HERE.

Christmas Card Idea

Are your Christmas cards ready yet? Here's one that you can whip out in a hurry: I used 3 shades of blue for this one. The background card base is navy blue, then I added a baby blue layer cut 1/4" smaller than the width and length of the card base, then came a white layer with a lighter blue strip of cardstock across the white layer. I added a circle of white below a metal snowflake embellishment and stamped the snowflakes and sentiment using white pigment ink and SU's Ballet Blue ink. Note: All stamping was done prior to assembly. If you are impatient like me and don't want to wait awhile to assemble the card after stamping with white pigment ink (since it needs extra drying time), use an embossing gun to set the ink or add white embossing powder to the white ink and hit it with the embossing gun for a nice raised image on the snowflakes. The SU set used for this card is called "Warm Winter Wishes" and it's one of my favorite sets!

It's been too long since my last post, but I'm getting ready for the big launch of my card club on January 1st, 2010 and Christmas is coming too fast for me on top of that! Will somebody help me slow time down a bit?! Happy holidays and enjoy these next two weeks before Santa arrives.

The Cricut Addiction Continues!

Oh, I am having the time of my life with my new Cricut Expressions machine! I finally made some Christmas cards with it - complete with a red gem on Rudolph's nose (using the Winter Wonderland cartridge), then I made more cards with the new Pagoda cartridge --- and refined my previous attempts to make a panda card. Using coordinating Cricut images, I can customize the inside of the cards as well. Those bamboo stalks were the perfect thing for the inside of my panda cards! I keep telling myself that I'm building all sorts of new brain cells because I'm learning something new every day when I use my Cricut - oh, dear!...Aren't rationalizations a sure sign of an addiction - hehe!

BTW - I made the reindeer cards using a brayer loaded with blue ink (SU Ballet Blue) over a circle and a hill I cut out of cardstock and temporarily adhered them to white photo paper. Once you brayer over those two pieces of cardstock, simply remove them revealing the white photo paper underneath. The white glossy photo paper lets you brayer back and forth very quickly with a lot of pressure to blur all ink lines initially created by the brayer. It's a nice technique when using multiple colors of ink on the brayer as well. Give it a try!