Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas

It's 4:30pm on Christmas Eve.  My husband and I have both finally finished running around like crazy people and are settled in for the holiday.  The Christmas tree lights shine bright, a 'fire' crackles on the tv (closest we want to get to a live fire without a fireplace), Christmas carols fill the room.  I'm curled up on the couch alternating typing on my laptop and playing with my snowflake pattern while day-dreaming about snow.  At this precise moment, life is very very good.


Here's wishing you a the happiest Hanukkah and a very Merry Christmas.  May the holiday bring you peace, joy and love, however you choose to spend it!

Adapting Traditions to Christmas Present

As a child, December was filled with holiday baking.  Come December 1st, we began baking cookies.  Mom directed the baking, but my siblings and I all played our part; mixing dough, 'spritzing' cookies onto the baking sheets from the cookie press, adding sprinkles (lots and lots of sprinkles), rolling and cutting out.  We made spritz and pfeffernusse, chocolate chip and oatmeal, macaroons and almond spice cookies, and more.  

My memory says we baked almost every evening leading up to Christmas - dozens and dozens of cookies, amid lots of laughter, great smells, snitched cookies and family camaraderie.  In those moments, everything seemed just as it ought.  And then, right before Christmas, we'd package up plate after plate of cookies and take them to our teachers and all of our neighbors.  That became another event; parading up and down our street delivering Christmas goodies. 

As a newly married adult, I tried to continue the tradition.  I baked loads of cookies and delivered them to friends and neighbors.  That continued for several years, but each year it got a little harder, until finally it became a sort of hit-or-miss thing, whether I'd make cookies that year.  It simply wasn't as fun, making the cookies by myself.  Too much alone time.  Through all these years, I continued to collect cookie cutters.  I've come to realize that they were tangible reminders of some of my very best childhood memories.   And so the cookie cutters piled up - each one a little promise of magical fun, just waiting for their chance.

And then a couple of years ago, I hit upon the perfect solution:  The Cookie Decorating Party!  Instead of the loneliness of solitary baking.  I invite my friends to come and share the adventure.  When they're done, they have a plate (or 2 or 3) of decorated cookies to take home with them.  At this point, it's become our own annual tradition. 

The week before the party is spent making sure the house is fully decorated, and the day before I make up lots and LOTS of sugar cookie and gingerbread cookie dough, then stick it in the freezer wrapped in waxed paper.  The day of, we put all of the extensions in our dining room table, and set up an extra card table in the living room by the Christmas tree, swathing both tables in vinyl table cloths.  Then pull out my entire collection.

We encourage everyone to bring a rolling pin and baking sheets, but we have everything else.  And for the day, my house is filled with laughter and cheer, amazing creativity and camraderie.  This year, many wonderful cookies were made, including if I remember correctly, a 'Sharkaroo' (what happens when you combine a shark and kangaroo cutout), several pairs of Christmas pliers (our youngest guest at 9 years old thought the pliers where 'the best'), and a tray of water molecules in the shape of mickey heads, along with the rest of the more 'traditional' Christmas gingerbread men and sundry.

On party day, I normally don't do any cookie making myself.  I'm far too busy visiting and making sure everyone else has what they need.  It's such fun to watch, I just want to drink it all in!  But afterwards, I continue baking and decorating, using the 'leftover' dough.  And it's fun, because I can relive memories from the party, steal some of my friends best ideas (yes, that whale cookie cutter makes a fine llama if you turn it on it's side), and it feels like Christmas. 

I never seem to remember to pull out my camera while the party's in full swing.  But here are a few pics I caught towards the end.

The aftermath of lots of cookie decorating fun

I swear I offered her a chair.  Such detailed designs!

A friends cookies - notice the plaid!  Drawn with food-safe markers

Carrie, my Ornament Swap partner from last year, sent me these as a surprise

My 'Aloha' cookies - playing with the cutters

Turns out the palm tree is one of those designs that just doesn't work as a cookie - every single trunk fell off it's palms.  So I turned the palms into a "wave".  I'm definitely better with beads - my decorating skills are best described as 'enthusiastic'.  But it's such fun (rather on par with finger painting)  :)

Decorating my 'after party' cookies

This year I bought really soft squirt bottles for the frosting, and that worked quite well.  Except I need to make the frosting a little thicker next time.  Some of the colors, the black in particular, were a bit too runny. 


It's funny.  Everyone kept thanking me for holding the party, but I really felt like I should keep thanking them.  Because they came and joined in on the spirit of fun.  And they make one of my favorite holiday traditions come back to life in an entirely new and wonderful way. 

So Merry Christmas everyone! 

I hope that your days are filled with traditions new, old or adapted, that bring you joy and laughter this holiday season. 

Advent Calendars, a Favorite Holiday Tradition

my hand-painted advent calendar

December 1st marks the start of my Christmas season.  Time to pull out the Advent Calendar.  When we were children, Mom would buy the cardboard calendars with little doors, some had candy, the one I remember most simply had the Christmas story told over 24 days.  As a childless adult, I'd abandoned the tradition until I happened upon the tree-shaped calendar with little boxes I wrote about back in 2013.  I love trying to find fun, new ways to fill each day; ways to awaken my holiday spirit.

The boxes are small, a little over an inch square, so it's kind of tricky finding things that will fit.  I had a great time searching Pinterest for ideas. Some of my favorites:

 *  Krista's Christmas Countdown Activities
 *  Coffee Cups & Crayon's Random Acts of Kindness calendar. 
 *  Idealist Mom - lots of ideas for fun little activities and do it yourself advent calendars. 

All of these blogs have free printables, (and several have links to their Etsy stores).  But one of my favorite pins - a nicely written compilation of the nativity story - didn't link to a current site. So I decided to make my own version - a set of little "books", and while I was at it, I decided to make a separate set for Clement Clarke Moore's, The Night Before Christmas. 

And in the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would share.

I saved the designs in three separate PDF files:

Nativity Story, Page 1

Nativity Story, Page 2

Night Before Christmas

If you'd like the original Illustrator files so you can do your own editing, let me know and I'll send you a link.





I then trimmed the pages into separate strips

Trimming the pages into separate strips

Then folded the strips into thirds, making sure my first fold fell between the two text blocks, and my second between the text block and the little number (the numbers help me keep the finished books in their proper sequence).

Folding the strip into thirds

Check to make sure all three sections are the same width.  I'd forgotten to trim the left-most edge for several of strips.  So I had to do that next.  The simplest way to mark where to trim is to fold the two ends in towards the center and mark the overhanging edge.

Marking the left edge so I can trim it away.

Next I accordion-folded the left and center sections.

accordion folding the first two sections

I finished the book by wrapping the 'cover' backwards around the book, then gluing it in place.

Wrap the cover around the other 'pages' and glue in place

And that's all there is too it!   You can use this folding technique for all sorts of little projects.  The great part is you only need to print on one side of the page to create a little book and cover.

Finished 'books'.  I used a gold marker to cover any white showing on the covers

I also put together a couple of pages for my Cricut Cutter. 

Want to play with this design?  Here's the link

Here's a link for a full page of ornament-style tags. 

I try to fit as much onto each page as possible.  The chinese-lantern shaped ornaments should be free, whether or not you have a Cricut Access subscription.  The rest might cost something to cut if you don't already have a subscription.  (I renewed my subscription for the holidays, and will cancel in January, because it's really nice to be able to use the stock designs for faster holiday crafting.  I designed the page layouts for 8 1/2 x 11" cardstock (I used white index paper from Office Depot). 

Notice the text in the first file?  It's really fun watching the machine write.  In this case, I used Faber-Castell Pitt Fine Art pens in black and sepia.  They fit perfectly in the machine. 

Cricut 'drawing' Christmas designs on paper

Once I removed the cut designs from the mat, I decorated them with glitter paper, cut snowflakes, and twine.

Decorated ornament tags

And finally it was time to stuff the calendar boxes.  I start with any date-specific activities (picking out our Christmas tree, cookie decorating party, etc.) and then fill boxes from there.  Almost every box had at least two little things in it. 

Last night we opened the first box - it had the start of the Nativity story, and a question ornament "What is your favorite Holiday tradition?".  That started a fun conversation about Christmases past.

And I'll finish this post with two questions.   Do you do any crazy holiday crafting - what sort?  What's your favorite holiday tradition?

Happy Holidays!

Advent Calendars

As has happened so often of late, I'm way behind on my blogging.  My plan is to catch up this week with a blog post every day, just to see if I can do it.  Future posts will look at the additions to my Etsy store and the openning of a new, smaller store; I'll be announcing a give-away as a thank you to everyone who's helped support me this past year and this holiday season, and I'll be writing up a trip report on the Etsy Rain holiday show. 

But since today is December 1st, my thoughts are on Advent Calendars.   I love this time after Thanksgiving, leading up to Christmas and one of my favorite traditions for as long as I can remember have always been advent calendars.  A few years, I bought this fun, tree-shaped advent calendar from Starbucks.  It came with little chocolates in each of the drawers.


While it was cute enough, the next year I took it to my studio to give it a little make-over:

Each year, I keep an eye out for something new to put into the little drawers.  What has become a tradition is dividing Clement Clarke Moore's The Night Before Christmas into fourteen quatrains for inclusion in the drawers.   

This year through much roundaboutation, I came across Melissa's Etsy store, Loo de Loop.  She make gorgeous hand-sewn Advent calendars (I'm afraid it's too late to order those this year), but perfect for me, she also sells these fun activity pages for your calendar as a PDF download.  So I bought a set, but then I got to thinking that they didn't really match the color scheme of my current calendar.

I have Illustrator, I said to myself, wondering just how hard it could be to make my own pages.  A quick web search for Illustrator tutorials and found pay dirt:

*  A fantastic video tutorial by Alma Loveland on how to create decorative border frames.  (More free tutorials at nicolesclasses.comhttp://nicolesclasses.com).
*  A slightly less-clear, but still useful tutorial on how to make Snowflakes using Dynamic Shapes by Astute Graphics
*  Another Snowflake tutorial on Calobee Doodles that I haven't used yet, but looks much easier.  Their focus is design, the blog is beautiful and they have an Etsy site where they sell digital download Advent Calendars!  I love the circularity of all of this. 

My design based on the tutorials

At the right is my new design.  Like my pretty green borders?  I drew them myself with my pen tool.  I love all my little snowflakes - every single one is based off of a single six-pointed star.

Curious how they'd look in person, or would you like to download them for your own calendar?  The poem is long enough, that I've placed it in two files and uploaded both as PDFs to my dropbox.  Feel free to download them for your personal use:

     Page 1
     Page 2

It's kind of fun to watch them download, because the snowflakes appear first, a sprinkle at a time scattered about the page, with the frames coming last.  So it looks like it's snowing!

This morning I cut all the little slips of paper, both from my sheets and the ones I purchased from LoodeLoop, rolled them up, tied them with yarn and stuffed them into the appropriate drawers.

Since I don't have kids to open the drawers and it feels a little odd to open them myself, I make Joe open them and hover over his shoulder.  He's such a good sport!  Today he opened the first drawer, which contained the first quadrain of the poem and today's activity "Pick Out a Christmas Tree". 

His response?  "Ah, it's our to-do list!"

Last Minute Book Ideas and Earring Challenge

While searching for a last minute gift idea for a couple of friends, I found myself thinking about some of my personal favorite books. I thought I'd share two of them here just for fun. Who knows, maybe one will be perfect for someone on your list.

The Deep, by Claire Nouvian

The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss is without a doubt one of my absolute favorite books for inspiration. If you've followed my blog at all, you'll know that the ocean is one of my major sources for inspiration.

The Deep is filled with images of some of the most beautiful and bizarre living forms from the ocean's twilight depths. It's one of those coffee table books that keeps you turning the page. Everyone I've ever shown the book to - male or female, adult or child, has found something to interest them. I just wish Amazon included a look inside feature so you could see how large and lovely the pictures truly are!

by Valerie Peterson & Janice Fryer

Growing up, every Christmas my siblings and I helped our mother make enough cookies to give away to the neighbors on our block. She'd start right after Thanksgiving, and we'd store the cookies in large tins (originally they were empty 10lb coffee cans) until we'd baked enough to give to everyone. A few years ago Mom confided that we made cookies because we couldn't afford to do anything else. But homemade cookies spells Christmas and community to me and I still follow the tradition she began (on a much smaller scale).

A couple of years ago I purchased  Cookie Craft: From Baking to Luster Dust, by Valerie Peterson & Janice Fryer, just before hosting a cookie cutout party.  Just in case my guests needed inspiration, of course! Cooke Craft covers the art of creating beautifully themed sugar cookie cut-outs year round, not just for Christmas, with a huge range of decorating techniques and beautiful gallery pages that tempt me to experiment every time I flip through their pages. And their sugar cookie recipes taste great, too!

I just noticed that they have a newer book out, Cookie Craft Christmas.  If I'd found this earlier in the season, it would definitely have been on my wish list! 

by Denise Peck

Which brings me to the last book on my list and the challenge I mentioned in the title of this post. Jennifer over at Beading Daily suggested taking a New Year's Challenge, instead of making a resolution, with the idea of making a pair of earrings a day, each and every day, for a month.

I'm thinking I just may have to try this in January.  Many of the pairs would be beaded, because that's what I do, but Jennifer also suggested 101 Wire Earrings for inspiration. Reviews mention that it includes instructions on how to make a variety of ear wires and hooks and it occurred to me that I could capture two birds with one net (I'm a catch and release sort of girl) by using the challenge to expand my wire working skills as well. But I wondered if there's an even better book out there.  Any suggestions? 


Anyone interested in joining me in this challenge?