Christmas Card Collage

I hope you had a great holiday weekend. Here are several designs of our photo Christmas card I created this year. All of the cards use the Holiday Photo Finishers from Papertrey Ink and the coordinating metal dies. The design is based on a design Dawn McVey created for the Holiday Card Boot Camp class I took last month.

The cards with the thicker embellishments were hand-delivered since mailing them would be harder and more expensive.

Christmas day was spent at my parent's house in Taos, New Mexico. It was fun and filled with lots of family, gifts, extremely delicious food, and fun.

One thing I noticed is my family is definitely an Apple family. Between us, my parents, some siblings, nieces, and cousin, here's a photo we took of the Apple devices at the festivities. Notice all the iPads, iPhones, iPods, and MacBooks. Almost every niece owns an Apple product. The photo doesn't include every Apple product there (AppleTV, and a Mac in the living room).

The only hitch in the day was I ruined the Pioneer Woman Cinnamon Rolls recipe. I started out scalding twice the amount of milk that the recipe called for. When I added the initial 8 cups of flour I realized my mistake. I still haven't made the cinnamon rolls, but I plan to go to the grocery store today to buy more yeast.

A 3D Christmas Tree Tag

Happy Christmas Eve! I'm drinking some eggnog and eating my favorite Danish butter cookies. I wish it was snowing outside, but it's sunny and cold here in Northern New Mexico.

Here's a tag I actually made over a year ago when I was visiting Ericka last year. She had this great Martha Stewart tree paper punch. I punched out 3 trees from Basic Grey paper and scored the trees in half before adhering them to each other. I wish I more time this fall to make more tags like this. I added some ribbon and some more Basic Grey paper to a die cut tag.

I gave this tag to our dentist and her staff with a large jar of mixed nuts and cranberries I bought at Target; easy and simple!

Thanks for stopping by! I'm still not done wrapping gifts, so I better get busy.

Turkish Lentil Soup and a Tag

Reminder: I have a giveway going on. See here.

Last year when I visited my friend, Ericka, in Seattle, she served me the most delicious Turkish lentil soup. I think I ate it at 3 different meals. I loved it!

I made a batch the night before the last day of school and I got the idea to give the principal a large Mason jar full of soup as a gift. He is a vegetarian, so this recipe was perfect since you can use water or broth.

I used Papertrey Ink stamps, paper, and a doily metal die to make a quick gift tag to make the packaging. This particular doily die looks like a snow flake to me, so I thought it was perfect.

Thanks for stopping by. If you make this soup, let me know what you think.

I'm Giving Away a $25 Kiva Gift Card

Hi everyone,

To celebrate the holidays and the fact that today my family and I made our 100th loan on Kiva.org, I'd like to give away a $25 gift card to Kiva to any of my readers (US or international).

What is Kiva? It's my favorite micro-lending website. You can choose to loan $25 to entrepreneur(s) anywhere in the world.

I first heard about Kiva on Oprah's show back in June of 2007. I've been making micro-loans through Kiva ever since. Kiva has an extremely high success rate of people paying back their loans. When the money is paid back, you can reloan the money or withdraw the money from Kiva. In the 100 loans my family and I have made, only 2 entrepreneurs have only partially paid back the $25 each; that's an amazing number.

What do you have to do? Just enter a comment below before Saturday, December 31th at 11:59 PM PST.

I'll use my version of Random.org (my son, Kalino) to pick a winner on Sunday. The gift card will be emailed to the winner. Good luck!

With Sympathy

I got the sad news earlier this week that my ex-boss, Fred, passed away right before Thanksgiving from a heart attack. He was the best manager I've ever had. He gave me a lot of independence, but was there for me if I needed his help. He was great!

He and his wife moved out of the Bay Area about 10 years ago and were living in Oklahoma. I made this card for his wife, Gail. 

The card was made with a background stamp from Hero Arts that I stamped using VersaMark ink. I love this background stamp! The large sentiment stamp is also from Hero Arts. I bought the gorgeous canvas butterfly at Michael's. I can't remember who makes it.


Thanks for stopping by!

A Sweet Treats Gift Tag

Here's a gift tag I made using a tag from the office supply store, some Stampin Up scraps of patterned paper, and a Papertrey Ink stamp. I also used the Papertrey Ink metal die for the leaves and some felt finished off with some red buttons.

Thanks for stopping by!

A Happy Birthday Tag

(Edited to Add: I already posted this tag in October; sorry!)
Long time no see! Sorry for the lack of blog posts. There were none in November; oh my...that's never happened before. Nadja, this blog post is for you! Thanks for reminding me that it was Halloween since my last post.

I find it hard to purge smaller pieces of paper, so I find a perfect way to use up scraps is to create gift tags. The kraft tag was cut with my Silhouette SD digital cutter. How many of you have purchased the new Silhouette Cameo? Lucky!

The papers, stamps, and button are all from Papertrey Ink. The baker's twine is from The Twinery.