Shabby Christmas Gifts.

I get *SO* into wrapping my gifts & decorating the packages with sparkly tinsel, that sometimes the gift wrap eclipses the crappy gift inside! This weekend at a girls stamping get-together at my house, I was experimenting with making custom gift wrap with the new swirly Crafty Secrets "Mini Memories" stamp set. I started out with basic shimmery gold tissue paper & discovered quickly that when the surface is too shiny, nothing sticks to it except embossing powder. I stamped the red medallion on the shiny side of the paper with red cat-eye pigment ink thinking it would work, but when it dried, the color completely disappeared. But I turned the paper over, and the reverse side of the paper was actually sort of vintage-pretty! So I used it anyway! The 2 gifts on the left were wrapped using the dull side of the tissue paper. The gift on the right was done by heat embossing with red embossing powder and versamark on the shiny side. So you get 2 fun effects, shiny vivid, or a vintage shabby patina.

I took my cue from the gift wrap colors to make my shabby tags, and pulled paper from Crafty's Earthy Paper pad that had reds & golds in it. The music is actually vintage sheet music that I scored at a thrift shop! I stamped the red medallion partially over the music to add some interest. The angel & heart images are from Crafty's "Heavenly Christmas" sticker line which are a bargain $2.35 per sheet!

After I finished with the tags & the gift wrap I decided to do a calendar. Since I was already using the reds and golds, my eyes naturally gravitated to this brocade-looking paper from Crafty's "Classic" paper pad. The beautiful image is from their 'Seasonal" booklet. I added velvet rick-rack and more sheet music to complete this.

The back of the calendar was another boo-boo. The calendar was a bit larger than the paper I had, so I had to piece some sheet music onto the back because the paper didn't cover it completely. So the bottom of the back of the calendar got more music on it.