Late to the party!

My friends will tell you that I'm almost always late to every party, so why should my blog be an exception? I am HORRIBLY late in wishing congrats to the two newest members of the HannaStamps design team, Sherry Cheever & Jeanne Streiff! Both of these talented stampers need no introduction, as everyone is VERY familiar with their unbelievable work! A late congrats to you both, we anxiously await your Hanna eye candy! And congrats to Kristy from Hanna stamps also! She is rocking our worlds with a new release stamp set! AIR FIVES!

The newest Hanna set will be released on Friday, and is called "The Perfect Package"! It is the GIFTIEST Hanna set yet! And Hanna is already a very GIFTY girl! You will start seeing lots of sneak peeks on the Hanna design team blogs on the links to the right...we all just received the sets this week & are as busy as Santa's elves, trying to HANNIFY our cards!

This is my first attempt with the newest Hanna set...I bought this little wooden "gift bag" box at Michaels in the alterable wood section a while ago. I had it in my head that I would make a box for my Christmas receipts to go in. I'm not very organized, and every year, I end up with receipts everywhere in my house. Makes it sort of hard if I need to return gift items I've bought for people! So this year, I am ORGANIZED! I am promising myself that I will PUT THE RECEIPTS IN THE HANNA BOX! DOH!
I used polka dot paper from My Mind's Eye (Tres Jolie Ooh La La "Sunshine Polka Dot" and "Just Perfect") & then colored Hanna in with copic markers. The ribbon has been glitterfied with a sparkly light blue glitter. I have determined after scrapping about 5 Hanna images, that I just cannot use Stampin Up paper with my Copic markers. They just show up so much better on the cheapie Wal-Mart brand paper. Live and learn!

So I feel like being GIFTY this week in honor of the new Hanna release & Christmas! So check back here on Thursday, when I will have a Hanna "Tis the season" set to give away! TIS THE SEASON TO BE GIFTY! :)

Reach for the sky!

Just a reminder, the Crafty Secrets Design team will have a series of blog candy giveaways for the next few weeks! This week is sweet Linda Duke's turn to give away her favorite Crafty Secrets products! Head on over to Linda's blog HERE to get in on the drawing! We will post notices in the Crafty Secrets forum at Splitcoast so you'll know which team member is having the give-away each week!

I ordered a Lizzie Ann stamp set from Eclectic Paperie called "High Hellos" because I loved that this set has such different themes to it, like cheer up, reach for the sky, etc. I am always in search of sets that are a little 'different' from the rest...I've found that the more stamps I have, the less I go for the 'same old, same old'. I started playing with these little rockets & blue glitter. These would be great for 4th of July cards, too, now that I see them up on the screen. I paired them with my Daisy D's red polka dot paper & Deja Views striped "Candy Cane" paper. The little metal anchor turn is from Oriental Trading.

The tree is up, the house is decorated!

YAY! I spent yesterday decorating my house for Christmas finally! It's absolutely the best when you can have the warm glow of Christmas lights throughout your house. Here is my tree all lit up at night. Remember those little round boxes? I found them junking this summer at my neighbor's house. I've been waiting patiently to put them under my tree! YIPPIE! If you follow my blog, you've seen me post photos of my junkin finds. Sometimes I don't know what I'm going to do with stuff I've bought until the inspiration hits me. Here's a smattering of photos showing you what I've done with some of my finds.

This cupboard was given to me by my parents for Christmas a few months ago. We were junking in Buffalo MN and I fell in love with this skinny little cupboard. It's made from weathered barnwood. It didn't need much to make it festive...some fake greenery & a few pepperberries dress it up. Sweet blogger friend Chelemom sent me the cute little decorated vintage postcard. THANKS CHELE!

I loved these shiny bright Christmas ornament boxes that I got from my Grammie. I decided this year they should be part of my decor. This is the top of my built-in buffet cupboard in my dining room.

This little swedish doll was .10 cents at a garage sale by my cabin. She's coppin' a squat on some round faux gifts (hatboxes) that I found at my neighbor's garage sale. My neighbor is a photographer, and they used to be photography props in her studio.

Every year I put bowls of shiny ornaments around my house. They catch the light and shimmer so prettily!

I'm not sure what these little star/snowflake metal things are...I'm assuming they must have gone over vintage christmas lights. They are very tin-like. I scored a bag of them for .50 at a garage sale.

Remember all of these .25 cent muffin tins? Since I have no use for them in the kitchen, I'm displaying ornaments in them. These were gifted to me from my Grammie.

Here is what my tree looks like in the daylight. Just a hint, if you're photographing your Christmas tree, set your digital camera on the "night" setting. It will give a warm glow to your photos and captures the soft glow of the Christmas lights. This photo and the top photo were taken at the same time...this photo is taken without the "night" setting on, and the one at the top has it on.

16 days left until Christmas!

OOOH I wish they'd fix the banner issues!

It is CHRISTMAS TREE day here today! I'm digging out the year's worth of Christmas junking finds & gathering it all to go onto my Christmas tree. Which has been sitting here NEKKID for almost a week. Today I will decorate!

Every year I end up with a new assortment of ornaments from my junking adventures. I also have some junker buddies looking out for me, so many of these items have been given to me by sweet friends or family, who know of my love for everything vintage-xmas!

These pink shabby ornaments were in these original boxes and I paid less than $2.00 for all of them! There are 5 sleeves of them!

The sweet little green box with silver ornaments was gifted to me by Pam Hooten. I have a tiny silver tree that they can go on, but actually, I may just display them in the cute green box! I LOVE the box they came in!

Check out these little glitterfied birdies! These are from Heather Nichols (Pinefeather). They were in her husband Chad's family, and she thought that I'd be able to do something fun with them. OMG I was so excited to see these guys! I'm ALL about the glitter! Now that she's got her own Etsy store with vintage finds, I told her "NO BACKS", I'm keeping these birds for my tree!

This box is from my Mom...she got it for .50 at a garage sale. She said "some of them look pretty shabby, but you can pick the cute ones out". I said HELLO! I'm *ALL ABOUT* the shabby ones!

I have to admit I'm a bit of a slacker. This "Winter Dreams" banner has been up since last Christmas. I love that it's so glittery and couldn't bear to take it down after Christmas last year. So I kept it up, and pretended even into the summer months that I was dreaming of winter. (SO NOT TRUE).

So I'm off to decorate. I'll post a pic of my tree later so you can see all this stuff on the tree!

Happy Saturday! L.

Lunch Blogging

I know I've been missing in action lately but the holiday season is upon us! I'm doing lunch blogging today so that I can head to another get-together tonite. I can HARDLY wait for the weekend as it's been so long since I've been able to putz around in my stamp room and get creative!

In the meantime, here's more baby cards that I made a few weeks ago for my card stash. Every once in a while I'll go through my patterned paper file & purge papers that have been in there too long. For these, I searched through and pulled out pinks, yellows and blues for some traditional baby cards. Pretty plain and simple but they were quick to do and they get the job done! One thing I liked about the front blue card was that I was experimenting with using my Hero Arts aged background block on only half of the image. I liked the effect that only stamping the carriage gives...you can really see the sentiment pop out.



Papers used: Daisy D's. Snowflakes & Holly "Snowflakes Paisley" Melissa frances "Lindsay", Anna Griffin "Evelyn Dotted Vines".
Stamps: Crafty Secrets Baby Boy
Stampin Up "Something to Celebrate" and "Thats Nice"



P.S. I apologize for the wonky banner...blogger is having some issues across the board with loading new banners on....don't load a new banner on your blog until it's fixed! LOL

L.

Baby it's Christmastime!

I know these aren't really traditional baby colors, but I have to admit, I'm have a hard time using soft pastel colors. I needed to stock up on baby cards, so I thought, why can't baby cards be in Christmassy- red gingham? No harm in that, right? I did pair the red gingham (Daisy D's Paisley Sugarplum) up with some pastel-polka dot paper (Butterfly Dot Multi paper) to throw some soft baby colors into the mix. I've used a variety of stamps here, the little car, "God's Grace" sentiment & the safety pin are all from the Crafty Secrets "Baby Boy" stamp set.

The cute little carriage is a Stampin Up stamp, from the "Something to Celebrate" set. Miracle of all creation sentiment is from SU's "That's Nice" stamp set. The pins are colored in with a Sakura gelly roll clear glitter pen, to make them look shiny and pin-like. Sorry, not much else to say tonite. Hope everyone is having a good week and getting some stamping time in!

L.

Reindeer Games

YIPPIE! I'm done with the ginormous Christmas cards! I finally put the finishing touches on the cards I've been making for our HR department, and delivered the stack of 50 cards this morning! A weight has been lifted! Now to tackle the other 50 things on my to-do list!

Here is another one of the projects I was working on this weekend. I was in Michael's on black Friday, & wandered past the dollar section. I am SUCH a sucker for little dollar gifties, it's not even funny. Michaels had these little pocket sudoku pads for $1.00 each, plus I had a coupon for 20 percent off my entire purchase. So these little guys were .80 each! What a steal! I scored about 10 of them and decided to give them out at our family Christmas gathering to all of my rellies. I took heavy cardstock (Stampin Up Night of Navy) and made little covers for the sudoku pads. They are like a little note pad, only each page is a sudoku puzzle. I used my favorite Penny Black Christmas critters & Snowbound Pixel to decorate the fronts of the pads.

The paper is from My Minds Eye, Signature Frost Collection. I used my Copics to color all of these little images in, and then embellished the fronts of the pads with buttons & ribbon. I wanted to try to make a magnetic buckle closure on them but have been digging through my stamp area for an hour looking for my package of Basic Grey Magnetic snaps, to no avail. So I gave up. No closures. DANG!