Adding A Little Handmade Holiday Cheer

Hi All! Welcome to the Rose Blossom Blog Hop featuring some last minute handmade holiday ideas. If you just hopped over from the fabulous Shelly Nemitz's blog, Just One Pretty Piece, you're in the right place. If you're just starting here or you get lost along the way, I have a list of blog participants at the end of the post. Also, make sure you hop by Brenda Rose at Rose Blossom Legacies--she's giving away some lovely goodies! 

I love the idea of handmade holidays, and if you follow my blog, you know I do a lot of home decor projects. But, when all is said and done, I find myself giving a lot of store-bought gifts during the holidays, especially bottles of wine. So I have to content myself with adding little handmade elements to things, and that's what inspired today's project: handmade tags!

Handmade tags are one of the easiest ways to add a handmade feel to any gift and you get a whole lot of bang for you buck. For this set, I used Kraft cardstock, Close To My Heart's White Pine complements pack, Glacier extra thick twine, stamps and ink. Let's take a closer look.

I cut 8 tags to 2 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches and used my scallop corner rounder to to give them a decorative edge. For the two tags above, I inked around the edges with my sponge dauber using White Daisy Exclusive ink and added a variety of stickers and kraft pieces from the complements pack. The "Be Merry" greeting is a combination of stamps from the Miracle of Christmas and Say It All (Hostess Reward) stamp sets. "Be" is masked off from "Believe" and stamped in Fern ink and "Merry" is masked off from "Merry Christmas" and stamped in New England Ivy ink.  The "merry" sentiment on the ornament is masked off from the Doubly Merry stamp and is stamped in Cranberry ink.

For the above tags, I randomly stamped the snowflake from Miracle of Christmas and inked around the edges of the tags with White Daisy ink. I also added Diamond Stickles to these and the other tags for a little extra sparkle. Finally, I used a Pentel Silver Signo pen to draw the string on the ornaments.

For these tags, I stamped some more snowflakes in and added thick plastic and kraft White Pines complements. The little animals on the second tag are stickers from the complements. They would normally have a Glacier blue border around them, but I trimmed it off. You can see the border on the tree below.

Finally, for the last two tags, I used a mixture of elements from the complements. I popped the sentiments up with foam tape. Since they are on clear plastic, I strategically placed Blue Enamel Dots and some kraft complements to hide the foam tape. 

And there you have it. A quick and easy way to add a handmade element to any holiday gift. Now hop on over and see what the super-creative Cathy Arbuckle has for your inspiration at These Eager Hands. And here's a list of participants as promised:

Brenda

Lynn

Marg

Shelly

Kim {that's me}

Cathy

Kim

Have a wonderfully creative day!

12 Days of Christmas: Day 7

Happy Friday! It's Day 7 of the 12 Days Kraft-y Hearts Blog Share. (It's also Pearl Harbor Day, so please don't forget your veterans.)

Today I'm sharing a little tag project that is similar to one I did earlier. You can see it here. This time, however, I thought I would live up to the Kraft in Kraft-y Hearts!

For all of the cutting and scoring dimensions, click here. For this set I used the Dakota collection. I wanted to be able to use some of the tags for non-Christmas holiday gifts, so I kept the theme neutral. The wallet is made with Barn Red cardstock. I layered the top with pattern paper that I stamped using snowflakes and sentiments from the "Snow Flurries" stamp set [retired] by Close To My Heart. The snowflakes are stamped in Sky Exclusive pigment ink and the sentiment is stamped over those using Black Exclusive dye ink. The snowflake is cut from Kraft cardstock at 2 1/2 inches using the Artiste Cricut cartridge. I used Whisper Exclusive pigment ink to stamp a few snowflakes on the snowflake and inked the edges with the same ink. I added some Opaque Pearl adhesive gems and popped the snowflake up using dimensional adhesive. I tied it all together with some bakers twine.

Here are the inside pockets:

And here's a picture with the tags.  I used some of the images from the Very Merry stamp set (October Stamp Of The Month), and used a combination of dye- and pigment-based inks. "Peace" is from the Snow Flurries stamp set and "Joy" is from a set that is part of the Art Philosophy Cricut collection. I inked around the edges of the tags using Barn Red Exclusive dye ink.

So what do you think? Leave me a comment to be entered in my give away that I'll be conducting on 12/12/12. (The winner will receive a Capture the Date stamp set and a Chocolate Exclusive Ink dye ink pad!)

Hop on over to From My Bungalow and grab a little inspiration for the weekend from my oh-so-talented friend, Lynn Darda.

Kraft-y Hearts' October Blog Share (Day 3)

Celebrating the October Stamp Of The Month by Close To My Heart

Hi Friends! It's Day 3 of our Kraft-y Hearts' Blog Share. I hope you have been inspired to go out and create beautiful things!

Today's project is my favorite of the 3, I think. Again, it would make a nice gift for a hostess or a teacher, or just a friend who could use some extra Christmas tags. (And really, who couldn't? I'm forever running out of tags this time of year!)

This little tag wallet measures 4x3 inches when it's closed and 4x12 inches opened. The base is Colonial White cardstock topped with patterned paper from the Pear & Partridge paper pack. But my favorite thing about this little wallet is the belly band. The band itself is a 1x8-inch strip of Cocoa cardstock. I then added this cute little flower I created using the CTMH Art Philosophy Cartridge. (Don't worry, Artiste gets used in this project, too!) To make the flower, I cut "flower 7" (p. 39) 5 times  in graduating sizes at 1/4-inch increments (from 1 to 2 inches) using Cranberry cardstock. I inked the edges of each layer with Ruby pigment ink to hide the white core. I also used my bone folder to add score lines to the back of each layer and then inked the raised edges in Ruby pigment ink to give the flower more dimension. I curled the petals under  before stacking them together, rotating each layer so that it was slightly off-centered from the one beneath it. I then cut 3 leaves (2 at 1 3/4-inches and 1 at 1 1/4-inches) using the "petal 2" cut (p. 59). The leaves are cut from Olive cardstock and inked with Olive pigment ink. (The mini pigment pads are perfect for inking around the edges of small motifs!) I layered the leaves and attached them to the back of the flower. I then attached the whole thing to the belly band. (When you do this, make sure there is no adhesive on the flower that will attach it to the wallet. As you can see in the photo below, it will tear the paper!) I then used Opaques Pearl Adhesive Gems to add a center to the flower and attached a Colonial White cardstock tag that was cut at 1 3/4-inches using the Artiste cartridge (p. 37). I stamped A Very Merry Christmas on the tag using Cranberry Exclusive ink and edged it in Cocoa pigment ink. 

Here's what the wallet looks like when you open it up:

The library pockets are from the Artiste cartridge (p. 47), and are cut at 3 inches from Pear & Partridge paper. They are perfect for holding the little tags. The tags are cut from Colonial White cardstock using the measurements given on the Very Merry Christmas stamp set. To save time, I used the auto fill feature on my Cricut and had it cut as many of each tag as it could on one sheet of paper. This gives you a lot of tags to work with! The Christmas tree tag to the far right is stamped in Olive and Cranberry Exclusive inks. The other three shapes are stamped with those two and Chocolate Exclusive inks. (For some reason, I didn't like the Christmas tree stamped in Chocolate. You might though!) The two tags on the right are cut with holes in the top. For the two on the left, I added holes with my Crop-a-dile. I was planning to add gold thread, but am out of it. (ugh!) So that will have to wait. I'll be making another one of these using Kraft cardstock and bakers twine. Can't wait to see how it turns out! 

Here is a picture of the tags in their pockets:

I hope you enjoyed the blog share this month. Don't forget to stop by the Bungalow for beautiful inspiration from Lynn!