Every once in a while, I go on a little card-making spree. I mass produce about a dozen cards that I store away to use for whatever occasion arises. These ones were super easy because it was only stamping – no extra papers or layers or bling.
This Stampin’ Up flower set is called Paint Prints, and the word set is called Sincere Salutations. I’ve used these two stamp sets way more than anything else I have.
So it just required some quick stamping (because I was going to a wedding reception soon) and a punched tag that I attached with a brad fastener. I stamped a few Best Wishes cards because I seem to need more wedding cards than anything else. But the rest are blank so I can easily stamp them with whatever message I need.
And just for variety, I did two different colour combinations!
It always feels good to know that I have a little stash of cards tucked away in a drawer . . . just waiting for the next occasion!
My daughter Min is serving as an LDS missionary in Mexico City for 18 months. I wanted to send her an advent calendar to help her enjoy the Christmas season. Shipping to Mexico isn’t the easiest thing, so I wanted an advent calendar that would fit nicely into a large envelope, rather than a package. Another brilliant missionary momma (Teri) had this great idea to make one out of baseball card holders. So I borrowed her idea of the card holder to make my version of an advent calendar.
Mac holding the finished product.
These are the three separate page protectors for baseball cards. Each page has nine slots. I just cut Christmas scrapbook paper into the right sizes and copied a scripture advent calendar on each one. This advent calendar is based on one that was printed in the New Era magazine in December 1989 called Come, Let us Adore Him: A Live Advent Calendar. I just copied the scripture reference and the hymn. If you click on the picture, it should enlarge it enough to be easily read.
This is the advent calendar we do at home every Christmas, so I thought it would be nice if our missionary was reading the same thing as us each day.
The back side isn’t looking to fancy to start with . . .
Also in each little pocket I included a gospel picture. Where possible, they correlated to the scripture of the day. So the idea is that she puts the gospel picture in the front of the pocket of each day once she’s read the scripture.
By the time Christmas arrives, she’ll have a page of lovely pictures of the Savior and other gospel items that she can have up in her apartment all year (or at least until June when she comes home!)
I tied jute string at the top. But the knots were a little bulky and made my package bigger. If I was doing it again, I’d use a smaller string, or ribbon or yarn that wouldn’t make the postal workers need to measure my envelope!
To attach the three pages to each other, I simply used clear packing tape and taped across the back side of the pages. Worked great – holds it tight and is still easy to fold up to pack into that envelope, and later, into her suitcase!!!
I also tucked a little Christmas quote or story for her to read in each day too. I was planning to put a balloon in some of them too, with Christmas messages for her to blow up and get, but forgot to do it when the family was all together. We’ll save that for another package.
And there it is. I mailed it on September 22 in hopes that she will have it by December 1st.
Simple, inexpensive, but fun for my missionary!
(Edited to add: She finally received it on January 19 – too late for Christmas this year, but it can be used forever!)
I made these wonderful Dinner Menu and Message Boards a while ago – you can read all about that here! Anyway, the boards are working exactly as I hoped they would – meaning that we use them all the time and are all getting trained to check them for messages. And there are no more annoying little pieces of paper floating around with messages on them, or no messages scribbled on that important paper I needed.
However, the colours weren’t quite working for me yet – probably because I got a huge book of lovely new scrapbook papers. I figured out that it was the pale yellow I didn’t like – so it was time to rip it apart!!!
After much deliberating, I chose this pretty light teal colour and simply glued it on over the yellow. (Yes, that is my bed I’m working on, mostly because my baby hasn’t figured out how to climb up on it so I can work in peace, not like at the kitchen table!)
Yes, I’m loving these colours much more – not that I have anything against yellow (unless I’m supposed to wear it – then I look jaundice!).
That “I Love You Message” has been on there for months. I can’t bring myself to erase it!!!
Notice the little strip of new paper right below the green – that’s over yellow too, and just ties the boards in nicely to each other.
And there are the two boards side-by-side.
And here they sit in my temporary kitchen – very convenient right by the phone.
And to wrap it up, I really recommend these boards!!! The Dinner board makes me plan ahead somewhat! (I can do better – notice the empty, unplanned spaces! I just find that my days go so much smoother when the dinner menu is already planned.) And the Message Board . . . let me compare it to Pinterest – how did I ever live without it???
Paint chips! Yeah, I have a few lying around, but that’s okay because we’re building and I need to choose from these myriads of colours the few colours that will be perfect for my house. Any tips?
Anyway, when we’re finished painting and I have all these leftover paint chip samples, now I know what I’ll be doing with them. I saw an adorable paint chip flower wreath at Ali.Lilly and decided to sort of copy her flowers. I didn’t need a wreath, but I did need a wedding card asap!
I dug out my heart punch and started punching hearts out of the paint chips. My punch keeps getting stuck though – any hints on how to fix that (like punching tin foil or something?).
If you don’t have a heart punch, just trace and cut out hearts by hand like Ali.Lilly did. I’m not using the most exciting colours here – I’m using paint chips that I had duplicates of. Imagine what some pretty coloured hearts would look like!
Then it was just a matter of arranging the hearts into a flower shape, and gluing them onto the card that I had previously distressed and stamped a greeting on. This was my first attempt at making a flower. Next time I’ll make another smaller layer on the inside like Ali.Lilly did, but I literally ran out of time.
Stamped a heart onto a circle for my flower center. Not too bad – the idea has possibilities. I’m always shocked when I happen to look at the prices of cards these days – crazy!!! So I like to mass produce cards once I find an idea I like. But . . . I leave the stamped greeting off until I know what I need a card for (birthday, wedding, get well, congrats, thanks, etc.). Then I’ll grab the card, stamp on the appropriate greeting, and we are good to go! The stamps used on this card are all from Stampin’ Up.
And by the way, I’m not suggesting you run off to the local paint store and clean out all their paint chips. Nothing bugs me more when I need paint chips and there are some empty slots in probably the exact colour I was looking for! This is strictly for recycling those paint chips you legitimately needed!!!
My guy came home and found my stuff and he got creative too. First he made . . .
. . . the phases of the moon, and then . . .
. . . a lovely new wedding ring! Isn’t he the cutest thing evah?
I love making something cute and useful from garbage!!! I got these from the Primary cupboard at church. I had to empty out the cupboard a little to make some more space and so I lugged these to the garbage can that I had just watched the Young Men empty a few hours before. So rather than fill up the garbage can, I decided to carry them home and put them with my recycling.
So on my trek all the way across the parking lot to my house, I realized that they were pretty sturdy little boxes that could be turned into something very useful for some of my girlies.
The first and only task for my girls was to choose the paper they liked best – this was probably the most time consuming part of the whole process!!!
Eventually they chose these – two for each. And they also chose what pieces they wanted on the front and edges – again, very time consuming!!!
Then it was my turn to get to work – me and the mod podge. Have I mentioned before how much I love mod podge?
Anyway, I had no real plan, I just started. It seemed like the sensible thing to start with the edges, and it was.
I just applied the mod podge with a small foam brush and put the paper on, smoothing it down and around the edges.
I didn’t bother to cover the back any more than this.
After I had all the paper in place, I let it dry overnight and mod podged over the whole thing the next day. I didn’t need to wait overnight, but I had to clear off the table and get supper ready (can’t wait for a craft room in my new house!!!)
How cute is that? My practice one is covered, so I tackled the other two together.
I just laid the box on my paper to figure out the approximate size of the angled pieces, then trimmed to fit.
Cute paper eh? I’m really loving shades of teal these days.
This project used exactly two 12 x 12 pieces of paper. I used contrasting papers, but you don’t need to.
Love lime too!
Boxes are all covered – time to get on with other things and let everything dry.
The next day I attached some names and mod podged over everything.
Now for the decorating . . .
Lee’s name was attached with pop dots to make it, well, pop!
Jen’s was antiqued with ribbon and flowers added.
And Kat’s is more cutesy – she was thrilled with the bow and flowers!
Aren’t they adorable???
The light through the blinds makes them look wrinkly, but I promise you they dried beautiful and smooth!
Still can’t decide which one I like best.
Lee loves hers and . . .
Jen loves hers and . . .
Kat loves hers!!!
Want to see what they’ve done with them?Lee filled hers with this sort of girly stuff.
For now Jen has animals living in her caddy.
And Kat’s holds her library books!
My Jo wistfully said to me “Mom, you know there’s another one of those in the Primary cupboard and you could make me one.” I replied, “I know, but it’s holding Primary things.” What she doesn’t know is that I’ve been thinking that I could easily find another container for the Primary things, and use it to make one for ME!!!
In searching for ideas for our RS Super Saturday about two years ago, I found a menu board idea at Melanie’s Musings that I just had to copy. It seemed like such a great idea – and it is!!! And let me tell you, on days that I menu plan and write the meals on the board, life is so much easier!
We colour photocopied the inside page that I made, for ladies at the Super Saturday. Then they just had to take care of the framing. On the right is a list of possible menu ideas. I usually have that in a pocket glued on the back of the frame, and the clothes peg holds my shopping list.
Anyway, I love the Menu Board so much and it’s working so well, I decided to make something similar to become our family message board. I thought it would be very handy to have all the messages in one spot and not be losing little papers with phone messages written on them! And it is!!!
First item was to find a matching frame – thanks Walmart! I like the document size frame as it is slightly larger than an 8 x 10.
Then I centered the stickers saying Message Board. To do this, I marked the center of the glass (see my little black dot) and then worked from the center out to the edges. And I wrote out the words I was spelling so I wouldn’t mess it up!!!
Now, I used to have a burgundy and maple kitchen and this Menu Board matched it wonderfully. But, in the new house we’re building, I’m not going to have any burgundy on the main floor, so I needed to redo the colours of my board.
Pretty cute eh? By the oven mitt it says Quality Time. I really feel that supper is an important family bonding time. I believe that what our children really want for supper is us!
The next task was to design the Message Board to match the Menu Board because they will be side by side in my new house.
This is what I came up with . . .It says “Family” there on the green paper.
I made five of these little message slots, and the long one across the bottom says “Notes”. The only rule we have is that the message can only be erased by the person who it’s for. And it’s so easy to erase – just a swipe of your finger across the glass (or you could use a kleenex!).
And there’s my two boards! I only attached a dry-erase marker to one of them because they are so close they can share. But I’ll probably add a clothes peg to the Message Board to hold things like birthday party invitations.
It’s working great – the family have all learned to look to that one spot for their messages!!! Wish I’d done this years ago!
My guy doesn’t ask for much in the way of crafts (yeah, a shocker I know!) so when he suggests something, I listen. He requested that somewhere in the house we have a birthday list so he can see when family members’ birthdays are. I thought that was a fabulous idea!!!
My friend did a craft class last week and she was doing magnetic boards as calendars. I knew that would be the perfect thing to change a little and make into our Family Birthday Board. I just printed up four pages with three months on each page, to cover the family birthdays for the year. My guy and I both come from large families and we’re adding five more babies to the family in the next few months – the families are growing at alarming rates!!! And very hard to keep track of (facebook certainly helps though!!!).
Start with a piece of metal – it’s about 9 x 14.
Its edges are nicely turned under so it’s not sharp.
Then you mod podge the paper onto the metal – both under and over the paper. And don’t worry – the air bubbles disappeared when it was completely dry. I like to do a cross-hatch pattern in my mod podge – kinda gives it a look of canvas when it dries.
Two little mini clothes pegs are holding on my sign and picture. And I love that strip of lace going through the middle – adds a nice texture to the board.
Stamped this with a dollar store alphabet set and then mod podged over it all for protection (it is in the kitchen after all – water fights have happened before!!!).
This picture was the right size so it’s doing the job right now, even though it’s missing the baby. In the future, I think a sepia photo would look lovely!
My cute as a button magnets!!!
I glued magnets on the back of mine too so it sticks to the fridge, but you could also hang it with a ribbon.
Lovin it!!! Lovin it!!!
And when new members join the family through birth or marriage, I’ll just write their names in the appropriate spot in black ink and then update the charts on the computer when needed. And I suppose I could even add anniversaries if I wanted to.
So do you want to know what my guy thought about the craft he inspired?
Made this quiet book for Kat when she was almost two, and now it’s being enjoyed by another child. We personalized it for Kat, but Mac doesn’t seem to mind that at all – she just enjoys looking at sisters book.
It’s the easiest thing ever and you can get your other kids involved in helping too.
First you have to buy an album – dollar stores are great for this!
This album is the size that fits one standard size photograph per page. My album is pretty thick (80 pages) because I wanted lots of original pages for her to look at. Hopefully we’d be half-way through church before she was finished it!
And now for the fun part – get creative and make pages! Dig out photographs, chop up old books, magazines, calendars, use the computer to prints pictures, phrases or quotes. Add coloured papers, stickers, stamps, die cuts. Tons of fun!!! I’ll share some of our pages to get your creative juices flowing . . .
You can see that she decided some artwork was needed inside the covers!A page autographed by Daddy!
I love the four cousins a few months apart!!!
Warning: Animal pages can be noisy if your child starts barking in the middle of church!!!
Or meowing!!!
Sisters in the various seasons.
Pages for all the colours. I chopped up a kids sticker book after they had finished it – had great clear, coloured pictures.
A page for each letter of Kat’s name.
I hope that gives you some ideas. We made this book and gave it to Kat for Christmas.
And if you want the truth, this Quiet Book keeps more than just the baby occupied in church!!!
Craziest sight ever!!! I walked out of my office to find these characters had taken up residence in the family room!
For some reason, some of my girls decided to dress up rather like gangsters from the 20’s, complete with fat bellies and moustaches.
(Hope you put all dad’s clothes back girls!)
One of our gangsters looks rather like a hippie!
The reason for all this? My eighth grader was learning about the Stock Market and wasn’t quite getting how it worked. So my older girls decided to help her out by playing a Stock Market game called “Win-A-Lot”. It’s similar to “Stock Ticker” but I like it better.
My mom had her old NZ edition of this game which was very ancient. I don’t even know if this game even exists anymore, but one Christmas my talented sister made us our very own version.
The game is pretty simple. There are four commodities – Silver, Cotton, Pearls and Zinc – which you buy and sell each round, hopefully at a profit!
At the start of each round, you are each dealt one of these cards:
So the card you are dealt will determine your actions, and by watching what others players do, you can follow their leads too. Obviously if I have a Zinc Up 4 card, I’m going to buy Zinc now and sell it later (and hope someone else doesn’t have the Zinc Down 4 card).
Notice in the top left corner there is a Bear card and a Bull card, which either make everything go up or down.
After everyone has done their transactions each turn, the cards are turned over and the little tokens on the board are moved up and down. Then on to the next round.
The homemade money.
Here are the rules:
So at the end of the game, our gangsters have dressed down a little!
They’re holding up their fingers indicating which place they finished in.
So the eighth grader finished last, but at least she understands a little better how the stock market works!!! Oh, and this is a good math game too – lots of buying and selling at different prices!
I made these LOVE blocks a few years ago, but I only unpacked them last week – just in time for Valentine’s Day! They’d been boxed up for almost two years as we lived in transition while building our new home. I was serving in Relief Society at the time and we actually ended up making these at our RS Super Saturday.
They’re very easy – the hardest part was choosing the paper (it always is!). My blocks are 3 1/2″ squares, but you can make them any size you want. Once you have your blocks, paint or stain them if you desire. Then it’s simply mod podging the paper on, and then the letters and words, and adding any embellishments. I don’t have any fancy machines to cut out letters for me, so I simply printed letters from the computer and cut them out – yup, by hand, with an exacto knife!
“Where love is, there God is also.”
Because they’re blocks, they stack nicely lots of different ways, depending on what works best in your space.
On the other side of my LOVE blocks are . . .. . . my HOME blocks.
It’s so nice to be able to easily reverse something when it’s time for a new look!
“Where they love you most.”
Okay – I look at these now and cringe! I’ve gotten so much better at mod podging now – I never get bumps and bulges like that any more. Just might need to redo these (although they look worse here than in real life – must be the flash!). I used way too much mod podge for thin paper, and probably didn’t wait for it to dry completely between layers. And now I love the finished look you get when you press a piece of fabric over your top layer of wet mod podge and immediately pull if off again. Makes it look rather like canvas!
I also made a set of JOY blocks.“Find Joy in the journey.”
I have Joy decorations for Christmas, but I wanted something that could be out year round to remind me about JOY. I painted these blocks black before adding the paper – matches the letters nicely.
The paper was fancy enough that I didn’t think it needed any other embellishments.
And I know you’re wondering about that fabulous background – it’s the black paper and wire mesh that will someday be hidden inside our beautiful stone fireplace!
This Stampin’ Up flower set is called Paint Prints, and the word set is called Sincere Salutations. I’ve used these two stamp sets way more than anything else I have.
So it just required some quick stamping (because I was going to a wedding reception soon) and a punched tag that I attached with a brad fastener. I stamped a few Best Wishes cards because I seem to need more wedding cards than anything else. But the rest are blank so I can easily stamp them with whatever message I need.
And just for variety, I did two different colour combinations!
