Wednesday, December 26, 2012

I hope you had a . . .

Merry Christmas!


I bought a few last minute Christmas gifts for family and needed some wrapping.  I did not want to go to the store on Christmas Eve!  So I rummaged through my leftover wrapping supplies and found some old Starbucks bags.  I covered the bag with printed paper, then I put my Cricut to work!  I cut the present from the Seasons of Joy cartridge using more printed paper and some maroon cardstock for the bow.  That was pasted on the bag, then I cut a tag with the present cut-out.  I added some glitter paper and more printed paper to the back of the tag, so it shows through the cut-out, then backed the entire tag with white card.  I added a stamped greeting and a fuschia ribbon and attached the tag to the package with foam tape.  I cut the recipient's name from kraft card and added a shadow of maroon with the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge.  I made 5 of these in about two hours!  Everything was from my stash and it was a great use for all those bags I had been stockpiling.  Plus, my family loved the bags!  My sister Linda was delighted that I didn't put her name on her bag (made some gluing errors) because she wants to re-gift it! My sister Melanie was delighted because I used some paper she had given me!  I wish I had got a picture of all five together with the variety of colors and papers I used.  Here's a helpful hint:  When you are cutting a number of names or words with your Cricut at one time, cut the longest name or word twice.  That way you have a "bone pile" of extra letters in case you might inadvertently make a "glueing error"!

And here's one of my latest deer pictures:


I took this one Christmas Eve.  They are hoping you had a Merry Christmas too!

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Wishing you . . .

Peppermints and Candycanes!


I always liked this woodcut Santa stamp from Hero Arts.  I think he looks best in red and white, and I jazzed him up with Diamond Stickles and Pearl Pen.  A little bit of candy cane paper and some more red and white accents and he is a perfect "candy cane" Christmas greeting.  I can taste the peppermint!

And here's one of my latest deer pictures:



Saturday, December 1, 2012

Look what's hiding in the forest!


One humid foggy morning last week on my morning walk I was enchanted to find all these small "ground webs" on the forest floor.  I assume they are spider webs, but they are different from so many I have seen.  They are just an inch or half inch off the ground, many have a "hole" in them, and they disappear during the day!  I think they are really there, but we just can't see them.  The sunlight playing off the fog really highlighted them--some were even on the path!  There were literally 50 or 60 of them along the path I traveled, each one only about three inches in diameter.  I had never seen these before, so it must have been a good year for these spiders, or the atmosphere conditions were just right to allow them to show up.  The amazing appearance of these small webs one foggy morning was indeed magical.  Finding these webs truly made more concrete for me the idea that the world we ordinarily inhabit  is truly a "world within worlds" and there is so much more that we cannot see much less understand.  A humbling experience!