Valentines

Around here, we've been making valentines until our eyeballs fall out of their sockets. Even though most of the hard work was post-thumbprint, I still had to get a baby thumb to cooperate 54 times to complete all his valentines:

So silly! And a little time-consuming. Mine were much easier:

All it took was some swift white crayon action and some just-as-quick watercolor added. The longest part about making my valentines was setting them out to dry.

Do you give out valentines? What did you do this year?

Quick Thank-yous

Here's an idea for a quick and small thank-you card:

In two hours' time, make a thousand million 3" x 2" card bases, apply a watercolor wash to each base, and stamp the sentiment over the dry paint. (You can use any sentiment you like, but considering the season and all the things we have to be grateful for these days, I turned these into thank-you cards.)

I made a ton in every color of the rainbow and have already gone through most of them. They're easy to add to a plate of cookies or to tuck under a pillow or leave on someone's keyboard. I make sure to always have a substantial stash of thank-you cards on hand so that I can respond courteously and in a timely fashion.

Unless a gift comes from a very close friend or is super meaningful, I find it difficult to fill up an entire thank-you card. And call me crazy, but with larger card sizes I feel obligated to fill up all the space. Enter smaller card sizes. They can be just as genuine and kind but without all the extra fluff I find myself adding to larger cards.

Waddaya say? You wanna try these? Or do you have another thing that works well for you?

Kid Art- Monster Valentines

Because of the impending holiday, we spent an afternoon as a family constructing valentines for our daughter's classmates:

As with most of our mama-daughter art projects, this was a collaboration. I folded the card bases and wrote the inside phrase. She glued on the eyeballs, which she has a strange affinity for ("No, mom. We need three eyes on each valemtime, not two."), and left her John Hancock on the insides. Then she went through them all again and embellished her signatures just in case.

Each was laboriously glued and scribbled with love and attention to detail. They were personally assigned to individuals after much deliberation. P-dubs wanted to make sure that we included candy with each one mostly because that meant she had to taste test a few to make sure it passed her standards. Success!

Then, as if it weren't enough, we thought it would be funny to hold a huge extended family valentine exchange. So, we prolonged the art date beyond its natural limits and made a second set of valentines. Yet, we all survived, so it turned out to be worth it:

I recycled the idea but used a different set of scrap papers and silly monster embellishments instead of googly eyes. Pepper carefully placed the monster stickers on the card fronts, colored the heart in the sentiment, and wrote novels in every card. It was exhausting work for a tiny person, but she managed to power through and is so proud of her labors of love!

If you need a last-minute valentines idea and happen to have googly eyes laying around, the first set of cards could be a quick option (that is, if your child doesn't need to write a literary review on each card). Or, if you need a more grown-up version, you can see what I did here, for Feather & Fir.

Do you pass out valentines? If so, what were they this year?

Cloud Nine

I made some cards from CTMH's Cloud Nine card kit:

Fun and bright, right? And they come together so quickly, too! If you want to grab your own set to beef up your card stash, you have until the end of the day (Friday, Jan 31!) to check it out.

I love that these cards will work for gals and guys alike and I think the sentiments are super usable. Plus, the embellishments are dang awesome too. Gold is closing in on my top favorite colors!

Do you keep a card stash? What card sentiments do you find yourself using the most?

Christmas Cards

It seems that no matter how much I plan and prepare, we always seem to run a little short on our Christmas cards. Curses! Luckily, I had some card kits laying around and whipped up  the missing balance pretty quickly. Here's a little peek of what they looked like:

 

I know it's not the traditional holiday photo (it's from our awesome trip to the Grand Canyon in the fall) but the candidness is my favorite and I can't help but love Pepper's ridiculous cheeser.

Still. I swear on all that is holy that I will only make one kind of Christmas card next year. Ain't nobody got time for that!

Employee Crafting

As I've mentioned before, the company I work for hosts quarterly make-and-takes to keep the employees familiar with the products we carry...plus it's dang fun, and we rarely need an excuse to get together for some delightful times:

I have a tendency to disregard the instructions and do my own thing, so I changed up a few pieces from the original art. I also made sure all my cards were thank-you cards because we use those pretty regularly.

Huzzah for adding to the card stash!

Winner!

Thanks for playing along, everyone! The winner of the card giveaway is:

Congratulations, Elaine! Let me know what color you'd like and I'll be sure to get it to you.

Here's to a lovely weekend, everyone. I hope your holiday preparations are peaceful or productive...whichever one you need the most.

Card Swap and Giveaway

Earlier this month, I got together with some of my favorite artists in the world for a good ole'-fashioned card swap. We each made a card then brought enough supplies for everyone else to make that card too, and I couldn't be happier with the results:

So, one of the best things about being in a card swap with professional scrapbooking artists (I kid you not, it's a real thing!) is that you're guaranteed to come away with gorgeous artwork sporting all the newest embellishments. Nicely played, ladies!

The question for you now, is: can you guess which card out of the bunch I designed?

If you said the "hip-hip-hooray" one, you're right! The design was so simple, that I wanted to make it available in multiple colors, and they all look great, although the teal is my favorite. (Don't cry, purple, one day you will also get a turn being my favorite color.) Meanwhile, check out what they look like in different colors:

It would tickle me pink to spread the card love! Leave a comment by midnight, December 10th, for your chance to win a hip-hip-hooray card of your own, in one of the three colors pictured above.

Hooray! And good luck!

One Million Cards

My sister and I stayed up until the ridiculous hour of 2:30 (it sounded like a good idea at the time) creating pretty much one million cards:

Okay, so it was only 48, but in the wee hours of the morning, it seems like much more. It ended up working well, though, because we were able to slap these suckers together in a matter of a few hours thanks to a card building kit from Imaginisce. Nothing fancy here, just simple and well-coordinated. We wanted to re-stock our mama's card stash because she runs through her cards so quickly, and re-stock we did. Mission accomplished. (I'm pretty sure my sis and I could be the gold-medal Olympic cardmakers.) Hoo-wah!

A Small Token

Our bright and happy Pepsqueak colored a bright and happy thank you card for each person who spoiled her on her birthday:

These tiny 3" x 3" cards were so easy to put together that I didn't even need any glue. I used glitter tape from American Crafts and a gold metallic marker from Close To My Heart. Done and done. As Pepper put her excellent penmanship to work, we talked about each person and the fun presents they gave her. I wish you could all watch her jabber on about the people she knows and loves--too funny!

Sharing a Little Love

We organized a valentine's exchange with the familia and had a grand old time making ridiculous and beautiful boxes and valentines for one another. Behold our boxes:

And these are the one-of-a-kind love notes the wee one and I spent vast amounts of time on:

We totally loved handing out our valentines to people and stuffing them in boxes (and even balloon-attacking people we love who we didn't get to see on V-Day...you know who you are :) with your crazy work hours).

This was a lighthearted and effective way to show our families how much we care about them. My favorite was the valentine I received from my 2-year-old nephew, who calls me "Walla." His mom wrote down what he was saying while he was making a valentine for each person. The dialog during my valentine creation was:

To Walla. Pepper. Pepper. Pepper. Pepper. Be nice and share to Walla. Kirk. Kirk. Kirk. Kirk. This is a boat.

I sincerely want to do this every year, especially with kids around now. So, to celebrate the day of love, we consumed too much fructose, exchanged love notes, appreciated one another's creativity and efforts, and had a feast in honor of all things romantic. It was such a good day.

How did you celebrate?

Standing as a Witness

The 12- and 13-year-old girls that I work with were assigned to organize and carry out one of the largest programs for the year, New Beginnings. This event is designed to introduce the Young Women's program to incoming girls as well as the new theme for the year. The theme they selected for the program was "Hollywood," and we all worked our little hineys off for a good month and a half to pull it off.

So much preparation went into each detail and the evening was a success because of the many hands fervently involved in making the night a spectacular one. We made some interactive invitations, and the leaders gave each girl a star votive to remind her of her star quality and to stand as a witness (the new theme for the year):

(The invites are all Close To My Heart Materials except the microbeads, which are from American Crafts. The stars were from Pier 1 with tag materials from CTMH and Stampin' Up.) We had a fun evening with our favorite girls. Gosh, how I love those giggly friends of mine! I'm grateful for their dependability and joyful attitudes in planning and carrying out such a huge project.

P.S. Also, don't forget to leave a comment on this post for a chance to win two cards of choice!

Pretty Colors for a Dreary Day

I had some pretty embellishments I've been itching to use on the perfect project. I've been dreaming about how to use them and they have been quite a source of inspiration. Then, I realized the time had come for me to stop dreaming and get cracking:

I love these colors together and I'd like to share the love! Leave a comment by Friday at midnight MST, and I'll randomly select a winner to pick two of these cards to keep.

Good luck!

Update: The winner of the two cards is Lynley! Hooray! Let me know which two cards you'd like and I'll make sure you get them.