It's going to be a handmade shabby chic Christmas! I have been working today on our Christmas wrap and getting my gifts in order. Oh hush, it's NOT too early! LOL I shop and create all year long so I end up with baskets full of gifts at this time of year just waiting to be wrapped and tagged and tucked away until December. I need to clear the tables and get these off my docket so I can move on and get the next batch ready for Dec 2011. That means it's also time for GIFT WRAP! I saw some great concepts on Pinterest lately and I was inspired! My workplace tosses out literally garbage bags full of plain brown rumpled craft paper every week. We get it in packed product shipments but the store has no use for it---until I came along! I am adopting the brown paper to make my gift wrap for 2011! I challenged myself--like I do so often-- to make it COMPLETELY from stash if possible. It was important to me to stay "green" with this project and use up some of my already ex...

Two family oriented gifts: art calenders! Seen above--Besler Botanical prints --my new geneo-horticultural passion! One of the great benefits of doing our family genealogy work over the last 35 years is that we have some truly interesting connections to the past. I discovered one that lends itself to a few fun twists to our family gifting this season. My husband's family is related to the German Killians of colonial Lancaster county PA who are in turn descended from the Kilian engraving family of Augsburg, Germany. To make a long story short, my hubby's Kilian ancestor Wolfgang Kilian did the master engraving for one of the first botanical reference books ever done-published in 1613. The work was commissioned by Prince Bishop Johann Gemmingen who loved to garden and was wealthy enough to have rare types of things in his garden (for the 1600's anyway). The Bishop had a botanist and artist named Basil Besler draw them over 16 years, all 667 of them. Then he had Wolfgang and...

I have been crafting away in August and in Sept so far. Yep, working on Christmas gifts from our Scrapper's Challenge "Christmas in July" and "Christmas in August" postings. What fun ideas bounced around our SC Facebook site too! Join if you haven't yet! I have also been inspired by some great ideas from PINTEREST, my new go-to spot for tutorials and new concepts. Well perhaps a 25 year old crochet pattern might not be considered truly a NEW concept but if it's new to me, I love it! The Treasure the Moments 4x6 accordion album cost me all of about $1. I found the base album brand new at Goodwill for $1 tucked under some notebooks. Bam! It's mine. Boring black but I can decorate it in about 20 minutes. And I did --with the addition of one of my own extra ATC cards, the cardboard from the Cosmo Cricket packaging which held the lock charm. Ah yes upcycle when you can.... and I added some creamy delicious vintage cotton string off a crochet roll from ...

I have! And boy do I LOVE Pinterest now! It's all about organizing those randomly found wonder ideas out on the internet and bringing them home to a VISUAL bookmarking organizational method. It really is simple and it really does WORK! You do a simple download and add their toolbar to your top of your browsers regular basic toolbar. Once you have it there, you can travel the internet and whenever you find a wonderful idea, sketch, artwork, or whatever--you can then pin it and it will go to your own boards. The PIN IT button will make a bookmark style notation electronically so you can at any time after that go straight to your boards and find that idea BY PICTURE! No more trying to remember whose blog something was at. Its all visual. Sort ALL your crafts, sketches, scrapping or other tutorials, ideas, even your own work into boards on your Pinterest page. Anything you need to keep track of online, Pinterest will help you keep track of where it's at. After you have pinned a...