Odds and Ends

I have a bunch of partially finished projects stashed here and there and my mission this weekend was to finish at least a few of them. So, I peeked in my embroidery box and found several embroidered and spirelli pieces that need to be put on cards.  All of them are at least a year old and some of them much older than that.  There are a few that are just ho-hum, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out (why? I don’t know!)

One of the spirelli pieces in particular caught my eye, so I decided to start with it.

I matted it on navy blue, then I used my die cutter and Spellbinders Pendants die to cut two pendants from textured silver foil gift wrap.  After mounting it all on a card, I decided the corners were too bare, so I put a piece of the foil gift wrap through my Xyron and cut it in thin strips and used that for the corners.  All in all, I think it turned out OK, although I could have been a little more consistent with the width of the strips of foil.

Next, was an ornament shape I embroidered who knows when with some interesting color challenges.  I wasn’t sure what to do with it until I saw the October Sketch Challenge on JustCards. That gave me just the right amount of inspiration and I pulled out my Christmas stack from DCWV looking for the appropriate papers.  The yellow stitching still looks a bit out of place, nevertheless this, I think is one of my all time favorites.

After that, the next one was easy.  Same idea, but all in blue.  I think I’ll call it “Blue Christmas.”

Wish I’d noticed how off-center that middle stripe was before I made it permanent, but hey, it’s handmade, it’s not supposed to be perfect, right?

You can find the embroidery patterns for the last two cards on my website at http://www.handcraftedgreetings.com/embrinst.php.

That’s it for tonight.  I have several more to make, but I probably won’t be able to do much tomorrow because my son’s family is coming over.  If I do any crafting at all I will be helping my four-year-old granddaughter run scraps through my Cuttlebug.  She loves doing that and we usually end up with a pile of pink teddy bears.

Tea Bag Christmas Cards

After figuring out and writing up the tea bag folding instructions for the Open Center Star, I ended up with three completed medallions that I needed to do something with. I wanted to mat them and put them on a shiny background, but didn’t have any paper I liked, so I started rummaging through my gift wrap collection and found several rolls of metallic paper in various colors. Perfect!

Next, I glued the gift wrap to some medium weight card stock, got out my Cuttlebug and embossed it.  I am very happy with the results and it cost a fraction of what it would have if I had run out and bought the “right” stuff.  Yes, I know, it’s not acid free, but I’m using it to make Christmas cards and I don’t think any of them will be saved for long.  I would not do this for photos.

I used silver for the next card…

… and red for the last one.

I have a few more colors to try, so you’ll probably be seeing them here sometime in the near future.

Tea Bag Folding

I’ve been working on updating my website and I came across a tea bag fold card I made quite some time ago but I never got around to writing the instructions.  I remember when I made the card that I wanted a fold that would show the picture on the tile, but I couldn’t find a fold I liked.  After playing around a bit, I came up with my own.  It’s fairly simple, so I’m sure someone else has probably done the same thing.  After all, there are only so many ways to fold a square piece of paper.  Here’s the result:

Of course, in order to write down the instructions, I had to figure out the fold all over again.  Fortunately it is an easy fold!  Here’s a link to the instructions:

http://www.handcraftedgreetings.com/ocstar.php

Here are a couple more medallions I made while figuring it out:

 

I thought the flip side of this one looked interesting as well.  It looks like it was made with completely different tiles: