Christmas Card Making Day

One of the cards I prepared and taught

This weekend was the annual Christmas Card Making Day. I prepared and taught two card designs. It was a lot of fun, and I hope everyone that attended left inspired to create handmade cards this holiday season.

The other card I prepared and taught

A card Liz taught

Liz's second card...love the foil trim

A card by Joyce...mine is without the sentiment

Swing card by Joyce

A card Stacey taught...think I need this stamp set

Love that Stacey did a New Year's card

Christmas 2015 Picture My Life Album

Joyful Stars Team from left: Krista, Stephanie, me, Joyce (our CTMH mom!), and Jean

Close To My Heart corporate office held a training event "Making Connections" in Lancaster, PA this past Friday. Any time I get to spend with my CTMH family is uplifting and inspiring. We received many goodies to create fabulous projects.

 One of the items was the White Pines Picture My Life Cards. We were given additional materials to create an introduction page and sample album pages. What I love about these cards is they act as a countdown for Christmas with cards for December 1 - 25. The day after the event as I was putting away my supplies I saw a Ruby Album I had and thought it would be perfect for this album. In about 3 hours I had this album put together. Now I'm looking forward to documenting my December activities this year, since all I need to do is add pictures!

Joyful Stars September 2015 Blog Hop

Welcome to the Joyful Stars September 2015 Blog Hop! This hop is a circle, so it doesn't matter if you are coming from Andrea's blog or if you start here on my blog. Just continue around until you're back to the blog that you started on to make sure you see all the fabulous projects.

My project is a card featuring the September Stamp of the Month: Paper Garden. The image was stamped in Whisper Ink on Watercolor Paper. Then I used the new Watercolors to paint! The colors of paint I choose work wonderful with Sangria Paper Pack. I kept the embellishments simple with Poppy Thick Twine and a flower from the Sangria Assortment.

Thanks for hopping along this month. Your next stop is Marie's blog. Just in case you get lost or experience a technical difficulty, you might want to keep Joyce's blog open in a separate tab, as she has a full list of participants.

First Day of School Teacher Gift

Tomorrow is the first day of school for the staff and students at our school. I thought a little treat for my coworkers would be a nice thing. I stumbled upon this printable tag from Thirty Handmade Days and loved the reference from the popular children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

I happened to have the Poppy Thick Twine handy while making these. I love this new color from Close To My Heart, and it worked perfectly to attach the tags.