January Reveal

Hello and Happy 2012!

For this month's reveal, I was given Jillibean Soup's Christmas Eve Chowder to play with as well as a plethora of MME baker's twine.  I do really love this collection, though it is a little outside my Christmas comfort zone, with the pinks and blues in the line.  I am more of a red and gold Christmas gal myself!  But seeing as it is so cute, I was looking forward to working with it.

My first layout documents a tradition of going for hot chocolate after we cut down our Christmas Tree.

Frothy Fun

 This layout is fairly simple, so I wanted to make sure my embellishments help to depict my theme.  I cut out  a little mug with my Cricut to highlight the hot chocolate theme, and added some Liquid Applique to represent the whipped cream.  Whipped cream always make hot chocolate more festive!  Glittery snowflakes and little handmade flags doll up the upper corner of the layout and a coating of Glossy Accents enhance the alpha stickers.  Some blanket stitching is also winter reminiscent.

Snow Day

 Why is it that a snow day makes the day extra special?  It seems to bring out the kid in all of us, we drop everything to shovel and play in the snow with our kids.  Definitely a day worth documenting!

 Using pop dots to layer die cut embellishments, lots of stitching and a variety of pattern paper layers, as well as some glittery snow hanging above my photo add lots of texture to my layout.

I also added glitter here and there to the snowflakes on my base / background paper by placing glue dots to the centre of the snowflakes and sprinkling them with glitter.  A fun and easy way to doll up the page.  Some of these snow flakes even got a little more attention as I stitched snowflakes over top of the snowflakes with MME baker's twine.

Santa Paws

 When I found out a couple of weeks ago that our local SPCA, was offering a photo session with Santa for pets (humans welcome too) with proceeds going to benefit the shelter, I knew we had to take our Mollie to have her photo done.  As it turns out it was a double bonus, since Timmy at 8.5 feels he is now too old to have his picture taken with Santa (boo)  although he does still believe so I am thankful for that. 

 For this layout I really wanted to focus on the Christmas tree, as that is one of my favourite things about the holidays.... I love Christmas Trees!  I stitched a tree with MME baker's twine and made the trunk out of Jillibean stickers.  Some punch circles with added glitter adorn my tree.  And some little hand cut trees embellish another area of the layout.

I also wanted to make a birthday card, showing first of all how versatile this paper collection is and secondly giving a bit of a nod to all of our friends and family members with wintery birthday.  Using the Jillibean stickers and a American Crafts rub-on to create my wintery birthday sentiment as well as the addition of a punched snowflake reinforce my theme.


It turns out that I really enjoyed this collection and couldn't stop playing with it!  So I kept on going!


Have you noticed the big "Subway Art" trend lately?  It's graphic and beautiful and goes with almost any decor theme.  You can buy real vintage pieces like this one, that hung in a NewYork subway in the mid 1900's.....

I would love to own one of these.  They come in all shapes and sizes and are offered as reproductions or originals.


You can also find this type of 'subway art', newer trendier types  that depict family rules or mantras, available in a multitude of themes.

Well I decided to create one of my own to hang up at our house for New Year's, have a look....

It is pretty simple to do.  Just list some words or phrases that reflect on your theme and stack them up in your Word program on your computer changing up the fonts and colours so that the phrases are all about the same width.

A simple banner and layered die cuts embellish my framed piece.


And that's it!  Thank you for stopping by my blog to see what I have been creating this past month!


Laura
xoxo