Festive Greetings!

Over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog today* I've shared a couple of sketches for scrapping some of the many photos we'll be snapping this festive season.  If mini-books are more your thing then perhaps you'd like to give a home-made word book a try ...

I made that one back in 2008 as a present for a friend's photos of her first grandson's first Christmas. I made another one a couple of years later to fill with quotes and festive photos as a family gift.  It had extra pages between the letters to allow for extra snapshots.

While I was making it I took step-by-step photos and put together a set of instructions - originally published in 2010 on UKScrappers, but you can download them directly here and see some more inside pages here.  The instructions are for the word "NOËL" but they are easy to adapt to "XMAS", "2013" or indeed any other word, long or short!  Let me know if you have a go!

Merry Christmas Everyone!!

* A slight scheduling faux pax on my part means that this post went live 2 days early - so that CKCB post isn't there until Christmas Eve! Sorry!

Tagxedo New Year

Today over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog I have a post about making VERY quick Tagxedo New Year's cards

If you like Tagxedo as much as I do you may want to play around with it to produce something a little more complicated.

I searched for multi-lingual versions of "Happy New Year" and plugged them into Tagxedo to produce this multi-lingual card:

Ring the changes with a different colour-way and layout:

Or change the shape:

 

I used the following words for all three cards:

Gelukkig~Nieuwjaar Bonne~Année Buon~Anno
Ein~Guten~Rutsch Feliz~Ano~Novo Gott~Nytt~År
Feliz~Año~Nuevo Blwyddyn~Newydd~Dda Onnellista~Uutta~Vuotta
Mutlu~Yıllar Godt~Nyttår
Sretna~Nova~Godina Boldog~Új~Évet

Gelukkig~Nieuwjaar Bonne~Année Buon~~~Anno
Ein~Guten~~Rutsch Gott~Nytt~År
Feliz~Año~~Nuevo

Happy~~~New~Year:20:@0:#ff0000

The tilde (~) characters keeps associated words together, twice (~~) will stop them from being on separate lines, thrice {~~~) will force a line break.  The text in red is the RGB code to make the words "Happy New Year" appear in red!  The 20 forces "Happy New Year" to be the biggest phrase and the @0 apparently forces it to be horizontal (though I'm still not convinced)!

The other settings are the defaults apart from:

Respins:
Shape = Oval / Star
Theme = Pi Palette / Quiet Morning / Citrus Wasabi
Font = Euphorogenic
Orientation = H/V

Word:
Remove Common Words = No
Combine Related Words = No
Combine Identical Words = No

Layout:
Max Word Count = 50
Normalize Frequency = Yes
Hard Boundary = Yes
Allow Replication = No

You do need to respin the layouts and colours a few time to find a design you're happy with - but it doesn't take long to save, crop and print once you've found it.  Have fun!

P.S. Use this link to see all my Tagxedo card ideas 

Just The Ticket

There is Daily December Inspiration over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog at the moment and today it's my turn with a post all about embellishment clusters with tickets.

I adore the way you can include tickets in almost any embellishment cluster, adding a sentiment, a symbol, some colour or a date in a subtle way.

I've included some great links to digi & printable tickets over at the CKCB but I also wanted to include a quick & easy tutorial for making your own tickets from scratch over here.

Cut a strip of cardstock 1" (2.5cm) wide and add faint pencil lines it at 2" (5cm intervals).  Using a sewing machine with a large needle (but no thread), sew across the strip along these lines.  A needle, pokey tool, paper percer or tracing wheel will do the job too, but a sewing machine is quick!

Use a longer stitch lenth if you want to keep the ticket strip intact.  Use a shorter stitch length to make it easy to rip the tickets apart.

Using a hole punch take a semi circle out of each edge of the perforated lines.Some tickets have large holes punched half-way up the perforations as well (like the Maya Road adore ticket above).

If you want your tickets to have an inner frame then make a ¾" x 1¾" (2cm x 4.5cm) template to draw around.

Finally, have some fun decorating your tickets!

A Dash Of Christmas Spirit

That's what I quite fancy having in my glass right now, but the diet won't allow it!  Instead here is a page I made earlier in the month from a sketch on the Papermaze shop blog (Scrap, Paper Scissors) for a challenge over on UKScrappers.  I've had fun with some ancient Basic Grey papers and office transfer letters from my February Counterfeit Kit, throwing in some star-shaped eyelets and tiny black brads from my stash.
This page records how difficult it is to get a decent photo of my three kids in the Christmas rush!

I only managed a single page for Christmas last year too ... the photo opportunities just aren't there now that they are late teens/adults :o(  I'm hoping that they might feel guilty when they see this page and be a bit more cooperative next year!

Merry Christmas

Wishing all my readers a very merry & restful Christmas.  Thank you to my lovely (better organised) blog friends who sent me Christmas cards.  I promise to {try to} be better prepared next year!

to all my readers

We'll be enjoying our Christmas dinner this evening, waking up with stockings in the morning (assuming Santa reckons we've all been good enough) and hopefully spending some real quality time with members of the family.  See you in a few days :o)

Frosting Optional!

Welcome to my little corner of Jennifer's Frosty Festivities Blog Hop.  If you've come to me from Jacky then you'll already know all about the great prize on offer, but if not, there are details at the bottom of this post.

It's getting colder and colder here in the UK and with the nights drawing in it's harder to get out for a healthy and invigorating weekend walk with the family.  But we do our best and if there's something yummy to come home to, like a steaming cup of hot chocolate or a tasty treat, there are fewer complaints as we set out!  With Christmas approaching, the next baking session is likely to include some mincemeat (the sweet kind full of raisins, sultanas, cherries and maybe a little brandy) but rather than traditional mince pies, my family is very keen on mincemeat muffins.

I discovered the recipe in January 2011 when I was looking for ways to use up left-over mincemeat after Christmas.  This festive treat is from Debbie Nicholas at Country Heart & Home and provides a welcome change from more traditional mince pies and Christmas cake.

We're not great lovers of cupcake frosting here, so our version harks back to Debbie's original from 2009: topping the muffin mixture with cinammon and chopped glace cherries and omitting the frosting.  In an effort to further cut down the calories, we make them in mini-muffin cases.  These photos were from a massive baking session for a family buffet ... 60 mouthfuls of festive heaven.

Yum!

Debbie has just produced a book full of clever recipes (including "Christmas Muffins") with lots of gift-wrapping ideas to make wonderful presents ... "Gifts From Your Kitchen" ... perfect for a crafty friend on your Xmas list, or great inspiration for yourself if you like the idea of a home-made Christmas.  It's currently half-price on Amazon too!

Click on the pic for a closer view

Do you make bake gifts at Christmas?
What's your favourite treat after a chilly winter walk?

Don't forget, if you comment on all the blogs listed in the Frosty Festivities Blog Hop, ending up with a comment to let Jennifer know you've been all the way around, then you'll be in with a chance to win a spectacular seasonal prize of Basic Grey Aspen Frost and Carta Bella Winter Fun items, worth over £25!  Comments must be made by 10.59pm GMT on Monday November 19th.

Your next hop stop is  Jenny - have fun :o)

Real Life Confessions of a Christmas Misspent

This is where I come clean ... remember the post on December 10th where I admitted to being 5 days behind with journalling my Christmas ... well that was it ... I didn't manage another page!  Not a single one.
My JYC album just didn't suit - neither the time available, the photos I had, nor the things that happened!  I barely had time to read the prompts, let alone mull over what to scrap for the day.  At a certain point I realised it would be too draining to have the project hanging over me all through January, so I chose to let go, move on, call it a day!

Instead I decided to take inspiration from Siân's December month in numbers & Alexa's Christmas numbers journalling and capture some of our festive memories in a single page. 

The page is based on the monthly challenge sketch from UKScrappers and uses my January Counterfeit Kit, an X-cut border punch, some of the packaging from Susanne's Christmas packages as well as the most perfect embellishment from inside the packaging!
This is indeed REAL life - not everything works out the way you plan it:

• sometimes you can't find the power lead for the tree lights and have to buy new ones (only to have the missing lead magically reappear)
• sometimes teenagers simply will not cooperate for a photo (or even get out of bed on Christmas morning to open their presents)
• sometimes you get so carried away with the food shopping that you don't need to return to the shops for nearly a week, even though they are only closed for one day!

But there's still a whole load to be thankful for including:

• a son who wants to help with the cooking (if not the washing up)
• a daughter who loves to help decorate the tree (and would be happy for it to be up all year round)

Oh and for the record, a 14lb turkey is about 3 days too big for our family of six (plus the dog)!!

Ding Dong Merrily

Sorry, sorry, sorry - I had promised to draw a winner for my festive give-away on New Year's Eve - and totally forgot!!!!  So my huge, heartfelt apologies to anyone who was in the draw with a better memory than me!

Congratulations to: DAWN

Drop me an e-mail please with your address and I'll package it up to you!

And while I'm catching up on things: massive THANKS to my Counterfeit Kit Swap Sister Suzanne for the lovely gifts and embellishments that were so beautifully packaged in our Christmas Embellishment Swap:

I've kept all the usable bits of the packaging and used some of it up on a page already ... watch this space!

Made It !!!!

It wasn't like I was really having doubts.  I mean, how bad do you have to be to get struck off the "Nice" list?

I'd done my bit and sent off my side of my Counterfeit-Kit-Master-Forger-12-Days-Of-Christmas-Swap.  My swapee, Susanne, received the parcel just seven days later and was (secretly) opening her goodies across the pond.  Meanwhile I was waiting ... and hoping ... and waiting ... and hoping ... but wait and hope as I might, the postman simply refused to deliver Susanne's reciprocal parcel to me!

Seven days passed ... then seven more ... and three times seven days ... what had I done to deserve being put on the "Naughty" list?

But then - on the the very last day before Christmas, while I lay sleeping soundly, the postman knocked loudly on the door, getting poor Hubby out of bed at 6:45am on his first day of holiday rest (ho ho ho poor thing) and delivered a package that had flown the 22 day scenic route from America ... HOORAY!!

Well it was worth the wait I can tell you ... take a look at what was securely and beautifully packed inside:

Thank you so very much Susanne - I'm extending my Christmas gift experience by opening one (or more) of these beauties each day!

Jingle Bells

Just one more sleep to go ... are you ready for the big day?

I'm nearly there with my preparations (although I'm woefully behind with Journalling my Christmas) and have just enough time to share a little something I made for a colleague at work.  She had been admiring the anti-pickpocket dangly bells on purses (apparently handed out by the local police to victims of theft) but had been unable to find where you could buy them.  She was understandably reluctant to go down the getting-your-purse-stolen-so-that-the-police-will-give-you-a-free-one route and I thought "I could make one of those" ... so I did.  A few bells and some beads attached by wire to a clasp ... and hey-presto:

Naturally, having bought a whole bag of bells and clasps, I had to make a few more!  Turns out they are the perfect size to go inside my Mum's Christmas cracker too!  My colleague was chuffed to bits (she was too curious to wait until Christmas day to open her gift)!

I'd like to offer one as a seasonal give-away to one of you lovely (anywhere in the world) readers - just leave me a comment below and I'll pick a random winner on New Year's Eve.

Merry Christmas!!!

Satnav Strikes Again!

Seems like it's not just me who struggles with a satnav!



P.S. Mine is now back on GMT - hooray for Google - what's the betting I'll now be an hour late for something next summer!

Seasons' Greetings

At last they're done.
Presents and Christmas cards that is.
And delivered (or at least posted ... we shall see how well the Royal Mail does now that there's been half a dozen flakes of snow ...).
So now I can feel less guilty whenever I hear the clunk of the letterbox and the thud of mail hitting our doormat ... but some of my crafty friends are not making it any easier for me by sending gorgeous, clever, crafty hand-made cards ... as I have only sent out shop bought ones!


Take a look at these lovelies from Tracie, K, Mel, Alexa and Claire:

A special thank you to K for the yummy extra in my card
(possibly slightly tempting to someone en route
as both the card and the envelope were ripped!)

Thank you so much for finding the time my friends ... if I had known you in 2005 you'd have definitely received a hand-made card, but having overdosed by making over 100 that year, I only ever make a handful these days!

Regular readers will know that I love to play with Tagxedo - and have whiled away several hours with it to help me make scrapbook pages (here & here) and blog posts this year (here & here).  Lately, I've been playing around with it for card-making and this is the most recent result:

If you want to know exactly how to selectively colour your text you can check out the Tagxedo blog ... or, alternately, pop back here between Christmas and New Year for my next Counterfeit Kit Challenge post!

Recycle, Recycle, Recycle

Today it's my turn to do the post at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and it's all about recycling magazines to make gift toppers.  I've shared 3 tutorials that I found on the Winter-Wonder-Web - check out my post here - and I also linked from there back to here because I've adapted the Paper Pom Pom tutorial from Nice Package that I shared, as I didn't have the necessary ribbon punch.  I experimented with the same 1½" circles to see if it would work and made my prototypes:

And here's one topping off a gift!

Then I tried it out with a heart shaped punch - using the title panel of old "Which?" magazines that I was clearing out.  I've used 7 punched shapes for each pom-pom plus an extra, slightly thicker one punched from a glossy magazine cover (or scrap card would do too).

Fold each of the seven shapes in half vertically, score the fold line and glue them together to form a stack.

At this point (unless you are a whole lot more careful than me) it might be worth inking the edges of your stack of shapes, as well as the spare base piece, so that the edges are uniformly coloured and no annoying white bits are showing.

Finally sandwich the centre of a length of ribbon between the opened pom-pom and the base shape - you are now ready to gift wrap.

Alternatively, if you are making toppers in advance of your gift-wrapping, adhere the opened pom-pom to the base shape and attach to your parcel with a glue dot or strip of double-sided tape when you are ready.

If you don't have a heart or circle punch I'm sure it would work for any symmetrical shape - even a hand-cut one.  If you give it a go please let me know what shapes work for you.

In With The New

I resolve ... to get the final pages of my Christmas Journal uploaded and out of the way!  Don't get me wrong, I've loved doing this, but 37 pages ... I want to move onto something new and exciting - the decorations are down, the snow has long gone and I am not feeling at all Christmassy anymore!  So here goes - thank you for sticking with me this far:

Today's prompt, naturally, was all about resolutions ... I'm keeping them so far :D  Searching out the Christmas waistcoat photos from my Sunday Storytelling gave me the ideal picture for "Innocence" for Day 2.

I found a half-used (?) Thank You note left around after a trip to the post box today - perfect for today's page. Day 35 in the Christmas House was about Reminders: mine for next year from this Christmas are basically to get organised in November so that December is less fraught!

 

Depending on your point of view the 5th, or possibly the 6th is the final day for taking down the Christmas decorations ... neither would do for us as we were celebrating our eldest's forthcoming birthday before he returned to university and a) we did't have time to pack them away and b) I didn't want the house to look bare!  This last page also earned me some team points for the last week's challenge over on UKS, not the full set, because I couldn't use any new stash on the page - this whole project has been so cheap to make with zero embellishments and it has made a dent in my Christmas papers too.

I have to admit that I did start de-decorating once everyone had gone home and we'd tidied away the buffet and bottles; I managed quite a lot before midnight ... superstitious .. me?

Out With The Old

Here are the last few pages from the 2010 part of my Christmas Journal. 

I used an earlier prompt for this one - the most perfect and popular gift got a good airing today ... tasted good, but looked ... not as beautiful as the subject of the next day's page: I should have been quicker with the camera though as there were only a few chocs left to photograph ... and one of them disappeared while I was fetching the camera! 

I wanted to do today's prompt (TheYear In Review) as a tag at the end of the year, so I took the opportunity to give my Christmas Word Book pride of place in my album as it now has pride of place in my Mum's living room.

I used the same template as last year's double-sided tag to document a few highlights from each month of 2010.  This was made a whole lot easier this year thanks to my Project 12 album and I spent a happy half hour looking over the double pages for each month while choosing what to write on the tag.

This last page was also used to fit in with a weekly challenge over on UKScrappers - I love multi-tasking!
Check back soon for the final few pages ... just got the cover to do now!

Christmas Waistcoats

In my first effort at joining in creatively with a blogosphere activity I wrote a Christmas story for Siân's Storytelling Sundays.  This in turn, sent me off to root through our old photos to find evidence of the Christmas waistcoats that had featured in the tale.

Taken in the days before digital film, when I used flash all the time and it didn't occur to me to think about what was behind my subject, the photos are not that great technically, but they are wonderful for bringing me back more memories.  Not only were my boys wearing their Christmas waistcoats in 1996, but they each had a Christmas tie on as well.

Bow ties really are cool aren't they!

Onwards and Upwords

Here is the latest batch of pages for my JYC album. They are really fast to make once the journalling is typed up and the photos are printed. I haven't been making time to scrap each day like I intended - more like time for journalling a few days worth followed by time another day for the actual scrapping.

The JYC prompt for Day 20 was Unexpected Surprises which suited Day 22 very well for me - I had been told that one of the Chester rhinos was now somewhere along this route, but somehow when I am driving this particular stretch I only have eyes for the road!  So it was lucky (!) that we had a family check-up at the dentist today and the kids spotted it as we were driving back.  It was even luckier that I had my camera with me and could ignore the withering glances from the back seat as I made a U-turn in order to use it!  But then it's a mother's job to embarrass her kids, even if there's nobody watching.
Back on prompt for Day 23 with Stockings:

Finally the festive break begins, the shops close, the lists are completed and we can hunker down for some serious family time :D

All spent up before Christmas I certainly don't venture out to the Sales if I can help it.  After all there's a whole fridge full of food to be eaten and plenty of things to do at home!