the craftiest of surprises

My sister sent me a text asking, “What are the ‘pads of paper’ that you have on the customs page of this package you sent me?” I hadn’t wanted to ruin the surprise, but when customs get involved, customs go out the window, you know what I mean? Maybe not. I babble.

After finishing a fun joint crafts venture over the holidays, my sister had lamented to me that they just didn’t have good craft-supply stores in Berlin. Shortly after she left SoCal to head back to Europe, I started stockpiling some goodies for her.

While I am tooting my own horn a bit here, I’m also mentioning this as a suggestion for anyone who needs a gift for the crafter in his or her life. It is, after all, National Craft Month.

There was a crazy sticker sale at Michael’s, as well as cheap cute ones from Target, not to mention great deals on pads of paper. Since there are usually 2/3 sheets of each pattern, I delicately ripped out a page or two of each to send her, and kept the remainder for myself. And there was a handy container on sale to keep it all, well, contained… since my sis is short on space in her apartment. (Photos courtesy of my well-traveled sister.)

Final tally included tons of scrap-booking paper in varying shades, patterns, and weights, stickers and embellishments – like different glittery alphabet sets, flowers, animals, self-adhering rhinestones and pearls – and a set of glitter glue pens (can’t live without them!). Now she can make all the cards and picture frames and collages she wants!

 

Point is, if anyone is looking for something to get me this National Craft Month, or looking for some project starters of their own, see above!

 

Scrapbook Paper Flowers

I was totally inspired by Cally at Cally’s Creations for this next project. When I saw her post about the 3D flowers, I knew I wanted to create some of my own. Following her basic guidelines, I put my own spin on these, and it resulted in some fabulous decorations for both my walls and curtains!

You’ll need:

• Paper – scrapbooking, tissue, card stock, construction, printer, etc
• rhinestones
• glue
• scissors
• small or medium safety pins (if you want to hang them on curtains)

Basically, you want to cut out concentric circles of differing sizes and glue them together in the middle. Callie used adorable brass fasteners (split pins) with flowers to join hers together, but I used some glue and a plastic rhinestone to finish mine. I also found I didn’t have the patience to cut out more than three layers for each flower, so I didn’t!

The only rules I had for these flowers were that they be comprised of purple and teal layers to match my living room. I actually didn’t even pay attention to the hues and whether they went with each other, and the colors still look fantastic together. I used both plain and patterned scrap-booking paper, as well as some patterned tissue paper I had leftover from my garlands.

If you’re going to do more than 3 petal layers, I’d recommend making your outside circle larger to start with. I think mine averaged around 3″ in circumference, but I didn’t measure. To more precisely cut out circles you can fold paper in half and then cut out a half-circle, but I liked the organic, imperfect shapes I managed to freehand with the scissors. I then crinkled some of the paper, per Cally’s instruction, to give it more texture.

As you can already see, I added my own flare to some of the flowers by cutting out triangles to form separate “petals.” This is easily done by folding your flower in half, and snipping two small lines to make a triangle. Remove the cut paper.

While I wanted some wall decorations for my walls (I used painter’s tape to apply it), I also wanted to put some up on my curtains, so I got the idea to glue a safety pin to the backs of some flowers. This was really easy to do – just make sure that you don’t glue down the side of the pin that opens! I took about a one inch strip of scrap-booking paper, placed the pin in the middle, then added 2 dabs of glue – one on either side. (As my kindergarten teacher taught me, a little dab’ll do ya.) Then I placed the strip onto the back of one of the flowers. Let it dry, and voila!

These came out awesome, and I’m already planning to repurpose them by combining them into some bigger art project. I’ll post the updates whenever that happens. For now, check out some of my gorgeous results!

And here, you can see the safety pin idea totally worked! (They’re still hanging on my curtains because they compliment the dining room so well.)

Have you done a project like this one? How did it turn out?