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Aloha and Melekalikimaka!
Finally it's Christmas, and I'm almost finished with my holiday greeting card projects (there are still Thank You cards and New Year's Cards to make!). Today, though, I'm just basking in the glow of the day and having some rest and relaxation. I've been having a lot of that lately, but I always enjoy more!
For my last group of Christmas cards, I went looking for my November My Paper Pumpkin kit. I'd seen some cute projects done on line with it. But at the time I was looking for the kit, I was looking in a suitcase at my hotel while on my week-before-Christmas vacation trip.
Ooops! While I'd carefully packed the clear mount blocks that I'd needed for the two stamps in the kit, I'd neglected to pack my Stamp-a-ma-jig stamp aligner. Believe me, the only reason my stamping is lined up at all (besides stamping something that can be punched or die-cut) is that my stamp-a-ma-jig is always at hand! But not this time.
OK, I told myself. You're a big girl, you can stamp a straight line! No. No, I can't. Draw or cut a straight line? Yes. Stamp straight? No. That's just the way it is. And so those beautiful die cut front layers for the cards turned into two separate elements on my cards.
I stamped the "Wishing You a Merry Christmas" just as straight as I could on the bottom of the layer. Then I cut the bottoms off, trimmed them to make the angles even, trimmed the pieces with NOEL on them so they were the same width as the bottom pieces, and off I went! Oh, I could get those little stars in the center of the "O" in Noel. I'm not totally useless with rubber in my hand! Just can't do straight.
This is one of my favorite Paper Pumpkin kits – probably because it helped me catch up with the last of my Christmas cards! For the most part, I've liked them. The only one I don't think I would have liked so much happened to come on a month when I'd skipped. Yes, you can skip 1 or several months and still stay enrolled and not have to get the introductory kit again, and I've done that a couple of times when I've been really busy.
But back to this project. The kit came with all those little stars punched out and sewn together in one large strang for each card. I cut 5 stars off for the bottom of my sentiment piece and just applied them to the bottom with some mini-glue dots (yes, I remembered them, but needed the glue dots for my other kit project. It was nice to have them on hand!)
For my final part of this project, I stamped several of the star images on the outside of the envelopes to make them a bit more festive as I was out of Christmas stamps by then, and was putting the Liberty Bell stamps on the envelopes. So the stars were a bonus!
Now we'll be looking forward to the new year, and I hope to be sharing some "Thank You" cards in the next few days. Oh, and maybe a New Year's card or two! But for the rest of the day, I'm taking it easy. I hope you are, too!
