The second half of Acts of Love

I had a very busy day! I spent it with my 2 year old grandson and he is a ball of energy.  I am very tired grandma as I write this for all of you tomorrow.  I had a ball with Chaz and am so grateful to have this little boy in my life.  I wouldn’t trade the day we had today for anything.  He is very special. 

So here are the last pages of my Acts of Love tag book.  First I want to back up and take a look at the cover.  After I finished it yesterday, I thought the ring looked awfully bare and added some ribbons and fibers. It did help. 

That’s it for this project, but I’ll be back tomorrow with something new and I hope inspiring! 

Need a Little Christmas

I happen to love December. From December 1st to the 31st, I love the hub-bub and celebration of the birth of Christ.  All the trappings and ceremony make me look forward with anticipation.  So last Saturday, I whipped up these tags just to tease my anticipation of Christmas. 

I know there are paper crafters out there who have created much more elaborate tags, but these are simple and easy to make.  I’ve got some more elaborate ones in mind and will share them over the next few weeks, but I’ll share these today.

I make all my tags for our Christmas gifts, and with our large family, it takes many tags, so the creation of tags makes it expedient that I be able to do so quickly.  So here are the tags I’m sharing today. 

See, simple.  I used cuts from Joys of the Season, the ornament and gifts, and from Winter Woodland for the poinsettia.  The tags came from Tags, Bags and Boxes, and the rectangle from George.  I embossed the rectangles with the Christmas Ornaments A2 embossing folder and gave them and the tags gold faux stitching.  I used my fanciest hand lettering to write the “to” and “From,” and popped the Circuit cuts off the tags. 

On this poinsettia I detailed the flower and leaves with metallic gel pen, used Stickles on the yellow center and then because I wanted more dimension, I used a yellow tri cornered bead in the center.  You can’t really see it in this photo. 

I used Stickles on the the swirly bits and tip of the ornament and cut the hanging thing on the ornament out some gold holographic paper I had in my stash.  Nice! 

For this tag, I welded the shadow of the gifts in the three different sizes together with my gypsy and then added the gifts with their Stickled ribbons.  The paper is from last year’s Christmas stack.  Fun! 

Now go! Create some thing today!

My progress so far

Brrrrr! It’s chilly here this morning. Fall is here and I love fall. The colors, the air, and all the perks that come with fall make me in love it all the more. When I let my dog out this morning, I was surprised by the crisp, chilled air that me shiver, and yet I walked out on the deck and took a deep breath of it. It was one of those rare moments when the beauty of God’s creations and the privilege of being it overwhelmed me. Love it!

I know you are not here to hear of how I feel about fall! You are here to check out what has happened with the Halloween Countdown Book, and so I won’t make you wait. This is where I am at.

I cut 31 pieces of card stock at 3 3/8 x 2 7/8.

Next I cut these numbers using the square frame option from Designer’s Calendar with my Gypsy set at 2.34 x2.25.

Then I cut these tags from Tags, Bags, Boxes and More at 2.69 x3.74 and its shadow cut. This paper is from a Provocraft 24” pad, and no paper cuts better than this paper. Why doesn’t Provocraft produce some 12” paper of the same quality?

From this point honestly it was just a lot of faux stitching and inking which took way too long. I inked the black shadow tag with white. I liked the it turned out.

I finished it up watching Dancing with the Stars! Love that show. It’s because I can’t dance and even after years of music instruction I still have no natural sense of the beat! I dream of gliding across a dance floor!

Next I pulled out my Cuttlebug and started embossing the tags and the mats for the numbers. I used the D’Vine Swirls embossing folder and the Spots and Dots on the mats for the numbers. I’ve got to go back and label those Cuttlebug folders so that I know which one I’ve used, so I don’t have to look it up.

Next I start assembling the envelope pockets and tags. I hand wrote the activities for each day and am still doing that. This where I ended the process when I went to bed last night. I plan on using several different ribbons for the tags.

Darn! I wish I had better handwriting!

Today I hope to start assembling the pages, so that I can share that with you tomorrow.

Please make a comment especially if you have ideas for activities for the tags. I am still collecting ideas for the tags. I would love to hear from you.