Category Archives: Holidays

December Deluge 9: 8×8″ Signature Sheet Christmas Card

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This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous posts I showed you several December projects, the first of which was a quick Christmas Mini Album, so you can start there if you’d like to see them all. Today: Part 9 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

Today I’m sharing part 2 of my signature sheet ideas, so the sheets that feature the title of each Graphic 45 collection. In my case, just like in my previous post, from the 8×8″ Nutcracker Sweet Christmas collection.

Signature sheet

This time I hardly cut into it at all, using it in its entirety for an interactive 8×8″ Christmas card. Since this one was for my mother, I also added a present: a handmade voucher for the actual Nutcracker Suite classical ballet piece – for which I was totally inspired by this paper collection! 🙂

So there’s an idea to use your beautiful signature sheets, and you only need:

  • 1 double-sided signature sheet
  • 1 double-sided sheet of design paper from the same collection
  • some cutaparts
  • a piece of decorative chipboard

Have fun creating and enjoy your Christmas holiday season!

Using a chipboard piece as a closure: simple but very effective!

Next up: December Deluge 10: Decoupage Your Winter Home Decor + Happy New Year!

December Deluge 8: Christmas Treasure Chest – A Signature Sheet Idea

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This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous posts I showed you several December projects, the first of which was a quick Christmas Mini Album, so you can start there if you’d like to see them all. Today: Part 8 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

As you may know, Graphic 45 paper collections always have a so-called signature sheet, which features the title design of the collection. It’s always the first sheet in a 12×12″ or 8×8″ paper pad, and its design generally depicts a collage of elements that together make up the title of the collection.

In several of my previous December Deluge projects I used the Nutcracker Sweet collection, and used up all of my 8×8″ papers – that is, excepting one: the signature sheet! There’s two of them in each pad, and I saved them for something special. So in this blog post and my next I’m sharing two ideas to use these special signature or title sheets.

First: a Christmas Treasure Chest – enjoy the video and pictures below!

 

 

 

Next up: December Deluge pt. 9: an 8×8″ Signature Sheet Christmas Card!

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December Deluge 7: 6×4″ Nutcracker Sweet Christmas Cards

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This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous posts I showed you several December projects, the first of which was a quick Christmas Mini Album, so you can start there if you’d like to see them all. Today: Part 7 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

This year’s Christmas collection for me has been Nutcracker Sweet by Graphic 45. A couple of blog posts ago I already showed you a number of 4×4″ Christmas cards I created with this collection. ANd there’s more purple projects to follow, so stay tuned! 🙂

I always like to do double layout cards, by which I mean cards that have layouts both on the front and on the inside, which gives them a particularly finished look and adds a luxurious feel.

Today I continue my Purple Plethora of Christmas cards, with seven 4×6″ versions of Nutcracker Sweet!

Enjoy the video & pics!

 

Next up: December Deluge 8 – Nutcracker Sweet Treasure Chest!

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December Deluge 5: Decoupaged Candle & Box

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This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous posts I showed you a quick Christmas Mini Album, a 1-sheet Micro Wallet, a set of Nutcracker Sweet Christmas Cards and some Trishutter Christmas Cards. Today: Part 5 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

Decoupaging is a great technique for altering projects, especially when you’re out of paper crafting ideas and want to switch materials a bit to stir things up again 🙂

This decoupaged set of a Christmas candle and a matching box is quite easy to make and will make for a great Christmas holiday afternoon. Plus, they’re a great little emergency gift set for that one neighbour you forgot 😉

The only materials you need are:

  • one or two Christmas napkins (the regular, layered paper ones),
  • some mod podge (and a brush to apply it)
  • the objects you wish to alter

And: some patience while it’s drying 😉

Note: if you wish to alter a candle like I have, please use special candle podge.

You can watch my free video tutorial on how to decoupage a candle to see how it’s done, and how easy it is!

Here’s the little Christmas set I created!

 

Next: December Deluge 6 – Candy Cane Lane – Twice! 🙂

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December Deluge 4: Caramel Christmas Tri-shutter Cards

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This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous posts I showed you a quick Christmas Mini Album, a 1-sheet Micro Wallet and a set of Nutcracker Sweet Christmas Cards. Today: Part 4 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

You know how you often have reasonably large scraps of cardstock left over from a larger paper craft project? I always like to use them instead of throwing them out. For instance, I had some fairly broad strips of cardstock left over from my Caramel Christmas mini album, and I decided to turn them into some trishutter Christmas cards. Since their measurements weren’t the regular, like standard, size for this kind of card, they turned out somewhat smaller. Also, when folded closed, they weren’t square but a pretty small rectangle.

They turned out great nonetheless – and an extra bonus was that I could also use some leftover scraps of design paper of the aforementioned mini to decorate the cards!

Hence their name: Caramel Christmas Trishutter Cards 🙂

Oh and by the way, if you’d like to create some trishutter cards yourself, check out my free video tutorial!

Next up: December Deluge pt. 5 – Decoupaged Christmas Candle & Box

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December Deluge 3: Nutcracker Sweet Christmas Cards

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This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous post I showed you a quick Christmas Mini Album and a 1-sheet Micro Wallet. Today: Part 3 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

The Nutcracker Sweet papers are an older (2012) collection of Graphic 45, but once I discovered it, I really fell in love with its beautiful purple, pink and clear-winter-sky-blue hues. So I decided to use it – papers & chipboard tags – for my Christmas cards this year.

I’ve created cards of several different sizes and styles, and today I’m sharing the first: the 4×4″ Double Card.

 

 

 

Next up: December Deluge pt. 4 – Caramel Christmas Trishutter Cards

 

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December Deluge 1: Quick Mini Album “Caramel Christmas”

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Hi guys!

This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. This week, Part 1 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂

I’ve got a cute little Christmas mini album to share with you all: it’s kind of a mini mini album. For with its 4⅛ x 5⅛” (10,5 x 13 cm) it’s not quite micro yet, but smaller than average nonetheless. It’s fairly easy to make, for each page has the same design, and there’s only four pages.

I’m calling this one Caramel Christmas, mainly because of the color scheme of the paper pad I was using (some nameless Dutch brand) – it just reminded me of Christmas sweets like toffee, or coffee candy. Or caramel! 🙂

Both the album’s size and its small number of pages guarantee that you’ll only need one 6×6″ design paper pad btw – probably only about half at that.

All in all this is what you might call back to basics, or perhaps Mini Album 101 🙂 If you’ve never created a mini album before, I hope this one inspires you to try your hand at it after all! No time like the present right? 🙂 And if you’d like to know how to create this, you can check out the tutorial in my shop – which has 60 pages and 126 pictures.

Enjoy the video & pics below!

Btw, as stated above,  I’ll be posting a lot more Christmas projects this month, so stay tuned!
Next up: December Deluge pt. 2 – A 1-sheet Micro Wallet!

 

 

 

Christmas gift idea: A Paper Craft Skin for Your Gadget

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I don’t know about you but I love my gadgets. I’m always online and have various devices that I work with. I always love to personalize these devices, and no doubt you’ve seen or owned your share of cases, sleeves, bumpers and what not yourselves.

Today I’m sharing yet another way of personalizing a smart device: skin it, and use pictures of your own craft projects to make it really You!

Or, and here’s a Christmas gift idea, design a skin for someone else! You’ve probably made cards or mini albums with beautiful sentiments or very pretty design elements. Why not turn a picture of such a lovely detail into a skin for your best friend’s favorite smart phone to say Thank You, or Happy Birthday – or even I Love You 🙂

There are many companies out there that can create skins for any gadget you may have in mind, except perhaps the very ancient ones. You can think smart phone, tablet, ereader, but also laptop and game controller.

They are fairly easy to adhere to your gadget – and very removable too if you’re totally done looking at it – and that’s why I’m demonstrating how to apply a skin in this video. I’m working with my own iPad Mini, which I skinned with a detail of my Treasured Memories Keepsake Album Deluxe.

There’s a new paper craft skin for my phone in the making as well, and although it hasn’t arrived yet I’ll post the screenshots below, so you get a second version to hopefully inspire you. I’ll also post pictures of the original projects on which I based the skins.

And last but not least, if you want to see still more skinned devices, and even an extra video tutorial, check out an earlier blog post of mine, over at my – somewhat sleeping – other blog Comics and Gadgets.

Hope you enjoy it, and hope you’ll find it inspiring! See you next week!

 

Original project: Treasured Memories Keepsake Album:


iPad Mini – skinned with the Forever Memories project:

 

Original project: Step Card ‘Deeply Loved’:


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Time to Flourish – Three Graphic 45 Cards

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For these final months of the year (boy, how time flies!) I created some cards using the Time to Flourish collection by Graphic 45. This collection is the perfect seasonal collection, with a special focus on all things floral.

I already created some cards earlier in the year, there was May, including Mother’s Day, and fairly recently I showed you two versions of August birthday cards.
This time it’s the fall, and even one Christmas card.

So enjoy the video and pictures, and please like & subscribe!

 

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Twice Upon A Springtime: Two Cute Little Minis

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Continuing from last week’s one-sheet-challenge, I came up with another challenge for myself – again, in the spirit of Spring and everything New 🙂

This time it was: How to Create Two Ring-bound Mini Albums out of Four Sheets of Design Paper (and some cardstock)

I don’t know about you but there are some paper collections I only ever bought a couple of sheets of. Like in my case, the Once Upon a Springtime collection by Graphic 45. (At the time I was so happy when I had managed to scavenge a few sheets of this wondrously lovely collection from the hidden corners of our local scrap shop. If only I had known they would reboot this entire collection all over again in 2015! 🙂 )

Another example of owning only a few sheets of a particular paper collection: sometimes I’ve got some sheets leftover from some large project.

Well, what to do with these if you’re not in the mood for cards? Here’s what: create two adorable little minis, and create them in two versions: a photo version and a notebook version.

You’ll need only four 12×12″ sheets of double-sided design paper and eight sheets of A4 cardstock. Plus some embellishments, and of course some tools and crafting supplies.

These little albums are relatively easy and fairly quickly to make, and they make great gifts! For instance, I filled one with photos and gifted it to my mother for Easter. The other I turned into a birthday gift for a colleague, who would now have a great little notebook to keep in her purse, with still room for a few treasured pictures if she wishes.

Like this idea? Great, check out my video below! And if you’d like to create some yourself – admit it, you have several four-sheet-sets left in your stash!! – hop on over to my Etsy shop to get the tutorial! It will be available from April 8th, it has 37 pages and 99 pictures and guides you through the process of creating the mini albums step-by-step.

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Happy Easter – With a Pocket-style Card Constructed from One Sheet of Cardstock!

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It’s springtime! 🙂 Although it’s still pretty cold where I live here in the Netherlands, you can already feel a certain ‘softness’ in the air as days are lengthening and nature is preparing to wake up. I don’t know about you, but I’m totally game for spring!

And this year we’ll have a fairly early Easter. Normally I don’t send out any Easter cards (it’s simply not a Dutch tradition) but this year I felt like letting at least a couple of people know that I’m thinking about them and wish them some great times with the upcoming holiday.

I found this lovely sheet of paper by We R Memory Keepers, from their Cotton Tail collection, and it immediately took my thoughts to all the wonderful things that make up springtime and Easter.

So in the spirit of spring, I decided to design something new. I challenged myself to use only one piece of 12×12 inch cardstock for the construction of this card! Of course you will need some extra materials, but not a lot and the main items on that list are 1 extra sheet of cardstock for tags (A4 will suffice), and 1 sheet of 12×12 inch design paper. That’s about it! This design will enable you to create an elaborate and interactive card that is still quite affordable in terms of the supplies you need – awesome right?! 🙂

Also, this card is perfect for more than one sentiment and personalized message, it can function as a gift card holder and it will come in very handy as a vehicle for a group gift, when a group of people are giving one gift together.
And last but not least, you could also use it as a mini album page insert!

Good news: I’m making this design available to you all in my Etsy shop – and like the card itself this tutorial is also very affordable, so check it out!

And here’s the show & tell video, enjoy and let me know what you think!

 

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Last-minute Christmas Card #2 (tutorial)

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In my previous post I talked about the sometimes urgent need for some extra Christmas cards – preferably handmade, but having very little time to actually create them. I showed you a way to make a quick & easy Christmas card, which will take you less than an hour to create – not counting the drying time for any Stickled areas you might add.

And I promised you a second very quick Christmas card which will need even less supplies, namely just one double-sided sheet of 12×12″ design paper!
I’ve used a sheet of Kaisercraft’s wonderful Turtle Dove collection for this card.

So check it out, there’s some how to instructions in the video as well.

By the way, if you’re in the mood for some serious card making – though maybe not for Christmas anymore 😉 – check out my Christmas cards of this and last year. There’s 2014 and 2013 – maybe not as quick to make as this one, but they may still inspire…