I have been hard at work this month making some Christmas gifts. I haven’t blogged about them because I don’t want people receiving said gifts to find out about them early. That being said, since I KNOW my mom doesn’t read my blog (for lack of internet access) I don’t mind posting what I just finished making her.
** WARNING** For those of you reading this and are going to be with my family for Christmas…your gifts are not in this blog posting…so you will still be surprised when you open your gift. J
So for my mom this year I decided to take the family photo we just took earlier this month at our family Thanksgiving/Christmas/ Birthday weekend get together, and make a nice wall hanging. So here is what it looks like finished.
Really all it took to make was a stretched canvas, scrapbook paper, and some foam core board. I covered the stretched canvas in scrapbook paper, cut my foam core board to the length I wanted and covered that in scrapbook paper, made a what I like to call a “frame pocket” to hold the photo (this way the photo can be changed out), and there you have it…a nice wall hanging with the latest family photo. There were a few stumbling points, like last night when I did the glued the red paper to the stretched canvas I had MANY doubts that this project would even turn out as nice as I was hoping because of all those stupid wrinkles in the paper after gluing. But after sitting all night paper side down I think some of the wrinkles worked their way out….or maybe it just looked better to me this morning since I hadn’t been staring at it for hours. Either way…it turned out pretty well I’s say. Oh, and I will have to say that hand cutting out the lettering was a pain...would have been much faster if I had a Cricuit cutting machine (maybe I will get one for Christmas :).
And since my side of the family has already done Christmas I can now post what I made my brother’s family for their “family gift”. I have been wanting to make an advent calendar for the last few months now and finally got around to doing it. I made this one completely from scratch.
I used chipboard to make the frame and the grid (note to self, next time don’t glue the grid, I’ll explain later), cereal boxes for all the cube inserts, and then scrapbook paper and accessories to decorate it all. Now, I say NOT to glue the grid down because I found that even though I made a template for the grid pieces so they would all be the same size and cut the same way, and even though I made another template so all the little boxes would be the same size, because I glued the grid down (not square mind you) not all the boxes fit in every spot (some of them were kind of a snug fit). Kind of annoying, at least to me. But I think they will be fine once they are pulled out and pushed in a few times. And one more note, I would say Hersey kisses would be the perfect candy for this because I used bigger pieces of candy and when you have to put 4 in a box….that advent calendar gets HEAVY. So I hope my brother and his family are enjoying their new, custom advent calendar….made with lots of love. J
More Christmas gifts will come later...after Christmas when everyone has gotten them.I hope everyone is having a wonderful Holiday season!!
