Christmas Ornaments

My sister came to visit for Thanksgiving and decided to stay the rest of the week (she lives over 200 miles away).  We spent Friday and Saturday together playing with craft stuff.  Our original plan was to make gifts for the rest of our siblings, but we ended up making Christmas ornaments (which may still end up being gifts for our siblings). 

I had a carton of 48 Easter eggs in assorted sizes in my closet and was wondering if we could use them for anything.  I thought we might be able to paint them, but the paint wouldn't stick to the eggs.  I tried sanding one and painting it, but it still didn't work well, then Kathy got the idea to cover them with masking tape.  The problem was, I didn't have any masking tape.  A quick trip to the medicine cabinet revealed some medical cloth tape, so we decided to try that and it worked very well (Kathy made the green ornament above and I made the bronze one below). 

We liked it so well that we took a trip to the store to buy more tape.  While we were at it, we picked up some masking tape too.  We soon discovered that the advantage of using the cloth tape is that it stretches and conforms to the shape of the eggs.  Masking tape does not so it has a bumpier texture.

For my second ornament, I decided to go for a quilted look. After putting on the layer of cloth tape, I painted each piece of tape a different color and added a design.  The colors aren't exactly Christmas colors, but I was pleased with the overall effect.

Next, I started playing with egg halves and discovered that if I stacked a smaller half on top of a larger half, I could make a bell. I stayed with the quilted look, but skipped the stitching this time.

 

 

 

 

 

While I was doing all that detailed painting, my sister was busy cranking out ornaments.  In all, she made ten to my four.  Oh well, they didn't call me 'Pokey' for nothing when I was a little kid.

Here's my fourth ornament...

Here are some more of Kathy's ornaments...

  

 

Wordle It!

For those of you who scrapbook, Wordle ( http://www.wordle.com ) is a very cool site for creating word clouds you can use on album pages.  Write a paragraph or two about the pictures on your page, paste what you've written into wordle and see what comes out.  I pasted in my entire final reflective essay from my college writing class.  Here's what it generated:

 

The more often a word is used, the larger it prints.

Here's one I made for my youngest son:

Wordle provides a variety of fonts, layouts and colors.  You can even create a custom color palette to match your page.

Textured Vellum

Today I had a rare afternoon all to myself, so of course I sat down to make cards.   I stared at my empty craft table for quite a while trying to figure out what to do.  Tea bag folding? Embroidery? Iris Folding?  I just couldn't make up my mind, so I decided to rummage through a stack of paper I hadn't looked at for quite a while and discovered a few sheets of vellum with a weave texture.

I have had the vellum for quite some time. It was given to me several years ago and I never seemed to come up with an appropriate use for it because it is not nearly as transparent as most vellum used for scrapbooking.  Today, I decided to try stamping on it. 

I have a very pretty butterfly stamp from Stampin' Up.  I stamped it on the vellum using dark blue ink and then embossed it with holographic embossing powder.  you can't tell from the scan, but the effect is really pretty.

I punched a one and one half inch strip of vellum with my Fiskar's border punch for the left side border.  The flowers were punched with a mini-flower punch from Provo craft.  The "Thinking of you," stamp is from a Create A Card set I bought at Michael's.  I embossed the letters with silver embossing powder.

After finishing that card, I decided to try printing on the vellum.  My first couple of tries were not very successful and I was about to give up when I happened to set my printout down on a piece of bright orange paper.  The difference in background paper really brightened the image and enhanced the colors.

Here is the card I made using an image from PCCrafter.  I adjusted the brightness of the image as the colors in images printed on vellum tend to be fairly muted.

The border on this card was done with another Fiskar's border punch.  After punching the paper, I glued red paper to the back of it to make the leaves stand out.  The vellum is matted on a square of red scrapbooking paper, which in turn is matted on the same orange I used for the border.  I used the same "Thinking of you," stamp as before, but stamped and embossed it with red this time.

Punch Bouquet with Embroidered Border

It's been way too long since I sat down to make cards.  I have been designing some embroidered frames the past few days and this afternoon, I decided to test one of them. 

I stitched the pattern using some variegated metallic blending filament I picked up at JoAnn's several months ago (Kreinik Metallics #95). If you'd like to try it, you can download the pattern here.

After stitching the frame, I used my Coluzzle to cut around it, then mounted it on some patterned paper.  To get ideas for the flower arrangement, I searched the Internet florist sites for bouquets with the colors I wanted. 

Here's the finished product.

Make Your Own Tea Bag Tiles

I saw a very cool kaleidoscope creator on Craft TV Weekly and just had to get it.  It is perfect for making tea bag tiles and you can even print them right from the program.

The program is very quick and easy to use and has over 50 different templates for a variety of effects and shapes.

Here are a few of the tiles I made this evening using free graphics I downloaded through Dover's weekly newsletter:

 

 

 

Here is one I made from an Iris Fold card:

You can download an evaluation copy of kaleidoscope creator at:

http://www.kaleidoscopecollections.com/

Pink ATCs

Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) are something new for me.  One of the groups I participate in has an ATC swap every month or so and I have resisted until now.

This months theme is Pink. Pink makes me think of Valentine's which makes me think of hearts, so I decided to go with that.  Here are the two ATCs I made:

I think they turned out OK for a first attempt. I've been looking for an excuse to use those heart buttons.  The lacy-looking square mat is from the Cuttlebug Victorian collection.  The rest is leftovers.  ATCs are a great way to use up scraps.

If you've never made an ATC or would like to learn more about them, here is a site with some pretty good information:

http://www.cedarseed.com/air/atc.html

Of course there are lots more, just Google "Artist Trading Cards."