Design team member of Alpha Stamps, lover of ephemera and junk.

Welcome! Grab a cold one, kick off your shoes, and have a look around.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Christmas already? Time for some kitchy ornaments!

If you're a crafter, you know you have to get ahead of the holiday rush. Therefore, it's time for Christmas crafting in October/November! Here are a couple of kitchy ornaments I made with this month's Alpha Stamps kit.

First, a holly jolly snowman on sweet pastels. This fellow is the perfect size for the opening in the chipboard ornament, even if his hat does stick out a bit. I adorned him with a glittery sprig of holly, surrounded him with an assortment of snowflakes, and embellished the side with more holly and pine cones.

Metallic Dresden trim makes such a nice frame around our jolly snowman friend. It was easy to curve the trim to fit: just snip between each half circle, leaving the bottom part of the trim intact. Curve as you go! It just so happened that the trim fit this inner circle perfectly, but just in case, I started gluing at the upper right, so that if there did happen to be an awkward place where the ends met, it would be under the snowman's hat where it wouldn't show.

Check out Santa! He's looking mighty fine on this star shaped ornament. This ornament features gold tinsel, a holly wreath with bead "berries", faux Christmas lights, ribbons and a pair of jingle bells. Nothing's too festive when it comes to Santa!

Here's a little hint for making this ornament: when you're applying tinsel, it's best to cut the tinsel in smaller pieces that meet at the outer points of the star. This will give you nice sharp points. If you use one long piece of tinsel, the points will appear rounded. Tacky glue works well to adhere the tinsel.

Each of these ornaments is backed with coordinating paper. The back of Santa's ornament has a cute collage of children's wishlists.

Ho ho ho, stay tuned for more Christmas coming up. Meanwhile, for a complete list of supplies for these two ornaments, click here. Happy Christmas crafting!

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Random Act of Kindness: Inspirational Bookmarks

We just celebrated my mom's 80th birthday. In lieu of gifts, she requested that each of us do a Random Act of Kindness in her honor and then send her a card telling her what we did. We sent out letters to all her friends, and she got more than 200 cards back with all sorts of wonderful RAKs! It was a very happy birthday for her.

I decided for my RAK that I would make some inspirational bookmarks and leave them in library books for people to find. I took a piece of thin cardboard, and using paints, stamps, tissue paper, glaze, and pages from old books, created one big sheet, which was then cut down to bookmark size. The inspiration came from my ever-growing collection of fortune cookies. I placed the bookmarks in books where I felt the inspiration fit. For example, the bookmark that said, "When one door closes, another one will open" went into a book for women defining their dreams at the prime of their life. "You are loved" went into a book for Caregivers, and "This is your day to call the shots" was placed in a book about dealing with bullies. I included a note on the back of each bookmark telling why I made the bookmarks, and encouraged the recipient to go do a RAK of their own. Hopefully, Mom's idea will continue to generate kindness for quite some time.

Some of the bookmarks:

This one, which says, "You will bring sunshine into someone's life", I included in with the birthday card I sent to Mom.  I think she deserved it.
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