Wow Christmas came early for me!

Well, I was pleasantly surprised one day recently when I got home from work and looked at the mail. I had received a wonderful gift for Christmas! I got stamps from Starving Artistamps! They are awesome! And such a wonderful and thoughtful gift from such a good friend! Jody you are so thoughtful and I truly appreciate it!

I love these stamps they are awesome. Since I live so close to the ocean, beach scenes and such are some of my favorite stamps and these fall right in line with that. I have been really busy with Christmas things but had to give a few of them a whirl! This was my creation.

I used the Buckaroo Blue, Chocolate Chip and Very Vanilla cardstock and Buckaroo Blue ink all from Stampin' Up. The ribbon is some of the fabulous ribbon I got from Jody in her recent ribbon swap that I participated in. Thanks for looking and I hope you enjoy it!

By the way here is a link to Starving Artistamps if you are interested in checking out the stamps they offer! They have some really cool ones! http://starvingartistamps.com/index.html

Chinese Auction Gift

Tonight was the annual Christmas party for my local stamping group. We always have a very nice time each year and this year was no exception!

We have a wonderful potluck meal, the hostesses pass out some door prizes and then we have our auction.

The auction always proves to be the highlight of the evening. It is called a Chinese auction here. I am sure it is known by many different names but that is what we call it. You get a chance to steal someone else's gift or pick a new one. I am very pleased with my gift it is a lovely box with coasters and the lid has glass with a pretty stamped picture in it. There were so many cool and beautiful things there. The gifts are suppose to include hand stamping and be of a value around 15-20 dollars. (Like if you were to sell it at a craft show or somewhere.)

Well, a while back I found this frame and knew that it would make a wonderful altered gift. So, this is the gift I made and took for the auction. I used Wild Rose and some various saying stamps that I have. The colors are Perfect Plum, Pale Plum, Certainly Celery and Always Artichoke. The card stock is Very Vanilla and Always Artichoke. The ribbon is some of my lovely Jody ribbon! The like frames are double sided so the pictures are on both sides. I think they are all stamped the same on the reverse.

Orgami Shadow box Christmas Tree

As promised my Christmas Shadow box is finished and here it is!

I am very pleased with the way it turned out. The picture really does not do it justice, it is much prettier in real life.

I used the deisgner paper from the holiday mini to form this. I have seen these on Splitcoast but really had no idea how to do them or what they really looked like. My local stamping group met last Monday and one of the girls demonstrated it, and I fell in love with it.

At first I thought 'heck no, there is no way I am going to do that'. Then I thought about these shadowbox picture frames that I have and the idea hit me. I figured it was perfect for inside of it! Anyway, I am very happy with my creation. And I hope that the person that is receiving this will like it too. Yes believe it or not I am not keeping it, but I will be making one of my own real soon!

Shadowbox frame

This is a shadowbox picture frame that I found at the dollar store. It is really cool for doing altered pictures/frames. The depth of the shadowbox part allows you to embellish and such with out smashing everything in the frame. I have an idea for a Christmas one that I hope to work on here real soon.

I made this as part of the matching gift box that I sent to Jody. The only real problem I had doing this was stamping the main mat frame piece. It was too big for my background stamp so it had to be pieced in places. Hence the primas! They came in quite handy for covering the little goofs where the stamp didn't line up very well. There are still a few spots but I figured they weren't too bad to just leave be.

I will post back here when I get the Christmas one done!

Personalized Box

Well, Jody and I usually do a swap each month. This is a small box, actually a hallmark box, that I found at a discount store here locally. I decided to personalize it for her. I can't seem to get away from using the Wild Rose set. I really love it! And it seemed appropriate to use on this box.

The letters are chipboard letters that I used the Alcohol inks on to try to match my colors a little better. They turned out to be sort of marbelized. They originally were black. The ribbon is some of the fabulous ribbon from Jody's ribbon swap. It matches very nice and I am in love with all my new ribbon!