2009 Calendar Crafts – Happy New Year!

Wow, it’s really 2009 already!  How the years fly by…hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since Y2K.  This time of year is when I make a renewed attempt to get organized and one of my favorite crafts to help me get started is the Circle Calendar.

Circle Calendar 2009

It can be easily decorated any way you want and the wheel turns so you can view any month of the year…
Circle Calendar 2009 Turns

The finished size is about 6″ in diameter so it can fit just about anywhere you need it.

This template and other 2009 Calendar templates are available for purchase in my Paper Templates Webstore – Calendar Templates.

Simply Beautiful Flat Storage Gift Box

They say there is beauty in simplicity and I think this gift box is a perfect example.  It is modern and upscale looking, yet still provides a creative touch that is sure to be noticed.  I have found this flat storage gift box especially useful when giving gifts to co-workers, relatives and friendly neighbors.

Flat Storage Gift Box

This is a project you will use many times and is easily adapted to the right occasion by having fun with the paper color and outside patterns. This template is available for purchase in my Paper Templates Webstore.

Halloween Treat Boxes

So sorry for the lack of updates over the past couple of weeks, guys. I just haven’t been feeling very well (my doctors are still trying to find out whats wrong with me) and taking care of daily family duties has zapped me of most of my energy. Hopefully my latest round of blood work will show something.

Anyhoo, I do have another template for you. This one is a little treat box and, although it can be used for any occasion at all, I decorated mine (very simply) in a Halloween theme. This box is very easy to assemble and requires absolutely NO adhesive! Bonus!

Halloween Treat Boxes

This template can be purchased in my Paper Templates Webstore.

Next up, Christmas themed templates!!

Gift Card Holder – Design Team

Nicole, one of the PaperShapez design team members, is certainly on a roll! She has created this very girly gift card holder using our pop up gift card holder template. Thank you for another wonderful project, Nicole!

 Gift Card Holder

Front View of the gift card holder.

 

Gift Card Holder Open

When the gift card holder is opened, the gift card pops up.

This template is available for purchase in my Paper Templates Webstore.

My Challenge

For the past few years, my friend Lisa and I have been meeting for coffee every Sunday morning at exactly 10am. Part of our meeting involves a challenge in which each of us has to bring a hand made card or other hand crafted item to exchange. This challenge was initiated way back when to keep us both motivated as, heaven knows, I’ve lost my mojo more than a few times and even went so far as to sell every stamping item I owned (big, big mistake!). Anyway, Lisa and I just signed up to be SU demos and, in her kit, Lisa received the set called ‘Big Flowers’. She immediately passed it on to me and challenged me to make something with it. Now, I have to be completely honest here; I looked at the stamps sitting on my kitchen counter for five days before I even opened the lid. I was at a loss as to what to do with them. I knew in my mind that I wanted to make a bouquet of some sort but I only had two ink colors to work with – Tangerine Tango and Kiwi Kiss – so how on earth was I going to make something look good with only two colors? In my personal opinion, a minimum of three colors are needed in order to make something really pop.

So, last night as I was gorging on a feed of homemade chicken wings (hey, I was starving myself on a sulfite free diet all week and was HUNGRY) I had an epiphany. I could use versamark and clear embossing powder on Baja Blue cardstock to obtain my third color! I wiped the grease from my fingers (and my chin) and tore to my craft room to create my bouquet.

Once I began embossing, I was unstoppable! I embossed every flower in the set on to Blue Baja, Kiwi Kiss, and Tangerine Tango cardstock. And, then I had another epiphany! Throw in a little white to make the colors pop even more! Whoohoo, I was on a roll. After all was said and done, I was extremely pleased with the way my flowers turned out. But still, something was missing. It needed a vase. So, off to my computer I went to draw one up. Once I had it cut out, I embossed flowers onto that too, haha.

Oh yes, I also forgot to mention that I only had one circle punch in my possession – a 1 3/8 inch. So, I drew up a series of 1.5 inch circles and 1.75 inch scallop circles and cut them out using my silhouette machine. You’d never ever know that they weren’t punched.