Crafty Secrets Wine Ensemble

Thank you, Bevie & Beth for your great suggestions for the wine journal! Recording your wine tasting weekend adventures & your favorite wines/occasions are AWESOME ideas.

I was even thinking it would be a great travel journal, because you can add photos in between your notes. I wish I would have known about wine journals a long time ago, I would have taken photos with friends drinking wine on the various trips we've taken to France & Italy (wine central!). My sister and I went to Rome with 2 other friends a few years ago. The day we arrived, we ended up in this little restaurant that had their own brand of house red wine. We were jetlagged, tired, and grateful to be on the ground instead of an airplane, so one bottle of wine turned into another, and before we realized what we had done, we drank 2 bottles of wine between the 2 of us. Lets just say it was not pretty. We decided it was time to leave when I took a drink of wine and spilled it down the front of my shirt. That would have been a PERFECT photo for my wine journal! Thankfully, I had taken off the WHITE PASHMINA scarf that I had just purchased from one of the street vendors, so it was spared from the bright purple disaster. For some reason, neither of us had hangovers the next day! I'm told that it has something to do with the lack of preservatives? Anyone know? The worst part was, we ended up back there a week later, and I was sporting a cast and a sprained pinky finger.

Anyway, I'm off on a tangent here. The photos are of a gift ensemble I created around the wine journal (see yesterday's post). All in all, it would be a pretty cheap gift. The Crafty Secrets Wood File Folder Album sells for $6.95, the wine charms are the cost of 2 pieces of cardstock, and depending on what type of wine you choose, you can have a pretty cute gift for under $20.00. The paper for the wine charms is by Stampin Up, it's their new Pomegranite colored paper. Here I also used the Hero Arts Distress background to give it an aged look.

I decided to pair the ensemble with both an invitation and a birthday card, so if you were throwing a party for someone, everything could coordinate. I should have mentioned yesterday that paper was adhered to the wood file folder with mod podge, my favorite adhesive for working with wood. The purple paisley paper is from the Crafty Secrets "Radiant" paper pad. The grapes on the invitation were stamped on watercolor paper, and watercolored with SU old olive ink and baroque burgundy. (I don't have pomegranite ink yet!)