Here’s a quick Christmas gift craft idea: mat and decorate a little box, create some dividers, and fill it up with small goodies, neatly divided! 😃 (short video embedded below)
A Little Christmas Gift Box – With Your Own Dividers
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Tag Archives: Christmas crafting
Two Christmas Card Tips
In my last blog post I showed you my first ten Christmas cards, created with two so-called card art stencils.
This week I have two extra tips for all of you who are preparing to get your craft on and make your own Christmas cards for this year:
- Combine leftover die-cuts & cutaparts from one collection, with papers from a fairly neutral collection. Like in my case, the 6×12″ Wood Texture paper block by Joy Crafts;
- Create a large card, e.g. A5-sized, and create elaborate layouts without it getting to ‘busy’ to look at.
There’s actually a third tip hidden inside the video, namely to use what I have dubbed scrap mats, in other words: meticulously paper-pieced background mats. Check out my free video tutorial on how to make them – you’ll get a lot more paper real estate from your leftover papers!
Stitches: stamp by Crealies
Ten Scandinavian-styled Christmas Cards (with French Christmas wishes)
Recently I decided to experiment with Dutch Doobadoo’s card art stencils, which you use by simply tracing around their various edges to two nested shapes. So I bought two of the stencils and created ten (early) Christmas cards, using a cherry red cardstock as a base.
I decorated with the Warm Winter Wishes paper collection by Marianne Design and die-cuts from the wonderfully cosy-looking Scandinavian Winter collection by Studiolight. In the video below I show you all ten cards, all of them sporting “Joyeux Noël” (by Crealies, among others) as a die-cut sentiment – a.k.a. Merry Christmas in French.
I really enjoyed working with these stencils, their ‘fun factor’ definitely exceeded my expectations. Plus I found them a very useful alternative for a die-cutting machine, so they are perfect to take with you to places where you know you won’t have access to any die-cutting tools (like when I go to my mom’s 😉 ).
So enjoy the end result and let me know if you have any experience with these or other card art stencils! 🙋🏻
My first Christmas mini album
This past year has been my first “full” year of paper crafting: it all started with the calendar I created for my mother back in November 2012, which seriously infected me with the “paper crafting virus” 🙂 . It has been a year of wonderful creativity and I’m very grateful for the many new techniques (new to me, at least…) I’ve been able to learn. Looking forward to 2014, I’m hoping to plan my craft projects more around the different seasons: not just taking into account the uniquely different feel of winter-spring-summer-autumn, but also bringing some of the holiday seasons into the mix. Not with every single project of course, I mean, sometimes you just want to use a certain design paper because it’s simply too gorgeous not to 🙂 – but generally speaking I feel it should be doable.
So, starting right now, at the end of 2013, I’m very happy to present you all with my very first Christmas mini album!
I used the Tis the Season paper collection by Kaisercraft and inked around all the edges with Vintage Photo distress ink by Tim Holtz. I’ve also incorporated some so-called scrap mats again, a technique I actually came up with (and named) myself. If you want to know how to make them, feel free to check out my tutorial!
If you’d like to know how such an album would look with pictures in it, check out the pictures underneath the video PLUS the 2017 update here! 🙂
Right, ’nuff said, on to the video!
Inside front cover – decorated this time, plus a picture (of little me 🙂 ) added to the photo mat:
Die-cutting the picture and finishing its edges with glitter glue adds interest to your photo mat! I also stamped the year in the lower right corner, in copper-colored ink:
Liked this mini? Then check out its little baby sister, my Christmas Micro album! 🙂
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL, AND THE HAPPIEST OF NEW YEARS!