Thursday, October 16, 2008

Magazine Gift Bows

I ran into this site a couple of months ago and have been itchin' to try it out. I finally had a chance to give it a whirl and I love making these things. :-) They're very easy to make, and a great re-use of old magazines. You start out with a magazine page and cut it into strips. I like using the full page ads as they don't have too much text in them. Also, once the Christmas season starts hitting the magazines, they'll help you get those Christmas colors for your bows on your Holiday gifts.

On these bows, I cut the page into 1/2" strips (I cut the strips above in half lengthwise). You'll also need a brad and something like a thumbnail (to be used for poking a hole). Take a strip, and shape it like a figure-8, as shown. Then use the thumbnail, to poke a starting hole for the brad in the middle of the figure-8. Poke the legs of the brad thru the hole. Make several more figure-8's and keep adding them onto the brad, behind the first. Once you've got a full bow, you can close up the brad (fold the legs down), and ta-da you'll never have to buy a bow again. The bows in the picture consist of about 6-8 strips of paper, but probably could have handled a couple more strips.

These are excellent reuses of magazines, but also a good basis if you want a particular design on a bow. You can print up that design and make the bows out of the printer paper. I tried to make one with one of those paper grocery bags, stamping on a design and then cutting them into strips. I had problems sticking them onto the brad, but aside from that it went pretty well, next time, thinner paper bags tho.

Monday, October 13, 2008

A Tribute to the Summer Gardening Season



Now that it's starting to get cold, the baseball post-season is underway, and all the halloween/christmas displays are up in the stores, the summer is truly over. This year's summer garden produced a decent yield of veggies. I'm not exactly sure what we did different, but we ate pretty well from the garden. Our veggies consisted of potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, carrots, cauliflowers, bell peppers, and onions. Here are some pictures that we took along the way.

I hope to try out a winter garden this year and will keep you posted of the outcomes.




Sunday, October 12, 2008

Pop-up Piggy Card

Today, Sunday, October 12th, my cousin's company is celebrating their 1st Anniversary. Her company, Chicharon Adventures, is a T-shirt company geared towards embracing and expressing diversity and culture. As their name may suggest, the company's logo happens to be a pig with an X on the forehead (Chicharon = pork rinds = pig).

To commemorate the event and the company's success as well as blessings of continued success, I decided to make her a card, and what more enjoyable than a pop-up card. I started with a design from this site: http://robertsabuda.com/popmakesimple.asp , one that I listed on my World Card Making Day post. The design was listed as their Happy Chinese New Year Pig Card... close enough. :-) After making the card as shown on their website, I decided to morph the Happy New Year Pig to the Chicharon Adventures pig. It worked out pretty well... above is the outcome. I also packaged it up with a nice ribbon as shown below. The pink card is where I held the message, as I was afraid I'd mess up the card by writing in it.



CONGRATULATIONS again cuz!