My projects and the girls see Santa arrive

The following projects are the things I've been working on since returning home from Thanksgiving. I am so sick of typing in recipes for the cookbook I'm compiling that I decided to take a break, take some pictures, and FINALLY update my blog. Here ya go:

This card is one that I was asked to make 18 of for my church. My church is giving some families Christmas baskets and asked me to make some cards for them. I thought I'd try a new layout for the Texas Snowman that I've done before. If I had had some more time, I would have pierced every scallop with my piercing tool and then outlined each hole left behind with my white Signo gel pen. I love that look! No time though....

The first picture is the front of the card, the 2nd is the inside. As you'll notice, I used my large oval punch to punch a hole in the front of the card to reveal the words Texas Snowman which were mounted on the inside with dimensionals to make them "pop" even more. I got the "Barbed Wire" font (used on "Texas Snowman") and the "Susie's Hand" font (used to say "Happy Holidays") off of a really cool website that has free fonts that my friend Anne told me about. It's kind of hard to see in the picture. Here's the website: http://www.momscorner4kids.com/fonts/index.htm It has tons of fonts and it's very user friendly.

This next group of pictures are the ornaments that I made for my mom to give to some friends. I sent her one as part of a present for her birthday in November and she asked if I could make her 10 more. The ones with the snowman under the tree were easy enough. I stamped them with black StazOn and then colored them in (constantly dabbing the excess ink from my markers off of the domino so that it didn't bleed) with my SU! markers. After I let them dry, I sprayed them with a clear acrylic sealant and then used my two-way glue pen to apply the glitter at the bottom. Lastly, I used sticky tape to adhere the ribbon. The other two - the snowman ornament and the tree ornament needed lots of masking done to get the images to fit. I didn't want to cut off the snow - the glitter adds a nice glimmer to the ornaments - so I had to mask the bottoms in order to put it back in the picture. The same process was done coloring these dominos as I mentioned above.

The next set of pictures are some candles that I made that were supposed to be gifts, until each and every last one of them (there are four - 2 of the smaller hunter green ones) got dropped on the floor by a curious little 2-year old. I guess they'll be staying here!!! Candles are a fun and easy project. You simply stamp on tissue paper and then wrap it around the candle. Cover it with wax paper and then using your embossing heat tool, you gradually melt the tissue paper into the candle. You have to be VERY CAREFUL not to overheat in one spot or it will warp the candle. You can tell when it's melted properly because the tissue paper turns transparent - the color of the candle - instead of looking white. Instead of re-creating the wheel, here's a tutorial from SplitCoastStampers that I used over a year ago to teach myself how to do it: Stamping on Candles Tutorial

I am by no means a gifted scrapbooker. I still like to try it out every now and then, and here are the pages I made of the girls for Halloween. Sarah will need another page showing her whole costume, and Emma's I'm just not that fond of but I already cut up the pictures and will just leave it as it is instead of cutting up more :)

This last group of pictures is the girls and our whole family waiting for Santa to arrive at the base. We went to the Christmas Tree lighting and then had dinner at the Officer's Club afterwards. The girls were not interested in the camera at all, so the pics aren't that great. I also was not (as usual) in a photogenic mood, but it's not that awful of a picture of me, I guess :) The last picture is the worst picture with Santa in the history of the planet - okay maybe not THAT bad - Sarah was terrified of him, and you can see Peter's arm trying to hold her there for the picture. Even Santa took a bad picture - he didn't look at the camera!!! We'll probably try to go see Santa at our teeny tiny mall sometime this week or next. Maybe we'll have better luck there!