Gift Bow Wreath!!

I found a very easy gift bow tutorial and decided to make wreaths!

One for the office door

One for the door to my apartment

Friday's Thank You Notes #25 (12/21/12)

l make a list of serious and silly thank you's (a la Late Night) and post a picture of one of my handmade thank you cards on Fridays. Yay, four weeks in a row! High five!

THANK YOU...

• store coupons that come on the receipt. Thirty percent off my entire purchase?! You know how much cheaper my purchase would have been!? Oh well, maybe I’ll get come back and get those things I put back on the rack. Endless cycle.

• store surveys that boast incredible prizes. I just spent time thinking about whether the lighting in the store was good enough on a scale from 1 to 5. I hope you don’t mind that I don’t really remember. I just want that $300 gift card.

Source: Here

• Adventure Time, for being an animated series that both children and adults can enjoy. I also like the theme song!! Jake the dog and Finn the human...

• for finally talking about certain important issues. 

•  North Pole postmarks! People who still believe in Santa (whoops, sorry for giving it away) can get letters postmarked with a North Pole stamp. I had no idea the USPS offers this kind of service. Too bad it expired December 10th :(

•  doppleganger. I still haven’t found you yet. Wah. 

• for reading this! Have a great weekend (and a great Christmas holiday if you celebrate it!)

Friday's Thank You Notes #24 (12/14/12)

l make a list of serious and silly thank you's (a la Late Night) and post a picture of one of my handmade thank you cards on Fridays. Yay, three weeks in a row! High five!

THANK YOU...

• the saying, ‘a leopard can’t change its spots’. Um, okay...so a cheetah can?

• Autocorrect, for always correcting Hiiiiii to GUI. If I continue to type out i's it thinks I'm trying to write, Nooooo. 

Credit: Here

• lemon meringue pie, for sounding like a dance party for lemons...in a pie.

• Groupon, Living Social, Google Offers, and the like, for sending me so many emails. Useful, but way too many. I know I'll regret unsubscribing from you though.

• Gmail, for allowing me to skip the inbox for the above senders and apply labels. Ingenious idea.

• good books, for making me miss my train stop. Now I have to cross over to the opposite platform and go back downtown like a fool. 

• rain boot purchases. A part of me says what, do you think you live in Seattle?Why would you need them? while another part of me says I told you so when it's raining cats and dogs and hamsters. 

•  for reading this! Have a great weekend :)

Winter is here! part 2

Polar bears are lovable and loving creatures. Sometimes they like a certain carbonated drink, and other times they want to prevent diabetes.

Friday's Thank You Notes #23 (12/07/12)

l make a list of serious and silly thank you's (a la Late Night) and post a picture of one of my handmade thank you cards on Fridays. Yay, two weeks in a row! High five!

THANK YOU...

• growling stomach, for turning attention away from a meeting and bringing attention to my stomach's pleas.

• Boy Meets World creators for...creating a sequel titled Girl Meets World...?

Credit: Here

• three-seater tandem bicycles. Wait, if tandem already means two of something, does that mean there are six seats in a three-seater tandem bicycle?

• baking desserts. Or as I like to call it, realizing how much butter and sugar it takes, giving it to other people to eat, and finding it’s the best way to diet ever.

• movie previews for horror movies. That was not appropriate for all audiences! I covered my eyes for most of it and I still screamed!

• moods, for swinging.

• curtness, for...yeah.

• for reading this. Have a great weekend!!

Other Works of Art: wreaths

Now that the holiday season is upon us, I have an urge to put a wreath on my apartment door. I'd also like to make a paper project out of it, so I decided to Google 'DIY Paper Wreaths' and found these. I'll use one of these as inspiration for my own!!

1.Rolled Paper Wreath
These are just bits of rolled magazine paper and wrapping paper stapled onto a cylindrical wreath base. How easy! By varying the colors I use, I could spin this idea for any holiday - I could use green paper for St. Patrick's Day and oranges and blacks for Halloween!

Credit: Here

2. Star Wreath:

These are paper stars formed into a wreath shape. I love the papers used here! I could also cut paper into the shapes of presents or candy canes, for example, and do the same thing. Hmm. So many possibilities...

Credit: Here

3. Paper Book Wreath:

This is a lovely idea. I'm hesitant to ruin a book by tearing out its pages, but I suppose I could use decorative paper designed to look like book pages. Sheet music may also be a nice idea :)

Credit: Here

Friday's Thank You Notes #22 (11/30/12)

l make a list of serious and silly thank you's (a la Late Night) and post a picture of one of my handmade thank you cards every Friday. I just realized that the last time I did this segment was last November! It's been a whole year! Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up.

Celebratory

THANK YOU...

• mashed potatoes. I'm very conscious of how much I'm eating if a potato is baked, but I'll mindlessly eat pounds and pounds of mashed potatoes. So, thanks.

Credit: here

• brussels sprouts. After eating you last Thursday and the days following Thanksgiving, I've gotten much more used to you. Sorry for misjudging you earlier.

• the Twilight movies, for finally ending. I mean...uh...all good things come to an end! And...oh...wait...bad things come to an end too. Yeah.

• Gangnam Style, for gracing us with your catchy tune, happy dance, and hidden message, but please please please tone it down. Really. I'm starting to get sick of you. You know I call that other song Call Me Possibly now.

• Black Friday sales. People stand outside for hours only to find that all of the big-ticket items have already been claimed. No wonder why there are so many fights. 

• people who lined up outside of a dollar store on Black Friday. Haha. It was a joke.

• the beginning of December! Or as I like to call it, fiiiiiiinnneeeee you can play Christmas music now :)

• for reading! Have a great weekend!!

Winter is here!

Thanksgiving is over. We can officially start talking about winter, right?

Yes? Great. Thank you.

:)

I have a friend who likes polar bears and has a winter birthday!!

Gobble Gobble

It almost looks like I'm trying to be Google's homepage!!

Who am I kidding? Google's doodles are far superior to mind :)

I had a hard time figuring out Thanksgiving things that could be shaped into G's and L's.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it!!

High Five Turkey

Whoever thought of using a hand print to create a turkey was a genius! 

Charlie wishes you a...what does that say?

If you watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you'll know that Charlie (probably the best male character on that show) can't read or write all too well. He once thought pirates lived inside a room because the door was marked, "Private". His less-than-spectacular spelling has been the subject of many of the jokes on that show.

The man on this card, due to my inability to draw well (let alone faces!), looks more like a surprised mountain man than Charlie Kelly (or rather, the actor, Charlie Day). And this is why I had to write his name. Tsk tsk.

Where have I been?

Where have I been?!

I honestly haven't been churning out very many greeting cards or paper crafts, unfortunately. So much for my 2012 New Year's Resolution! Shame on me. Hopefully the need for greeting cards in the upcoming months (so many holidays!) will give me my much needed motivation!

Also, this is completely unrelated, but Haagen-Dazs sells green tea ice cream and it is absolutely delicious!

Chili

The Elevated Envelope

I signed up to be a part of The Elevated Envelope project. It's a penpal project that allows strangers from around the world to send handmade envelopes to one another. The creator and organizer, Tara, put us into groups of 4 or 10-ish (depending on how ambitious we were) and we sent envelopes to the people in our group . I was obviously not very ambitious so I chose to be put in a group with 3 other people. The theme our group was given was "sweet" so all of my envelopes deal with sweets. I wish I didn't procrastinate and make my envelopes a few days before the deadline because my envelopes sure look janky, heehee. If you look at Tara's blog, you'll see the lovely envelope creations that other people have made. It's really inspiring :)

CTRL+C and CTRL+V #8

Other Works of Art: Japanese stationery items

I went to Japan recently and visited Itoya, a gigantic stationery store in Ginza, Tokyo. They have everything stationery-related imaginable there. Here are some of the things I purchased that really blew my mind!
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This is called the Deco Rush decorating tape. It looks like a regular white-out dispenser, but it dispenses cutely designed tape! I chose the one with whimsical dogs. The Deco Rush is super easy to use and it dispenses onto paper quite cleanly.

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I've never gotten so excited about a pen before in my life, but the FRIXION pen by Pilot is amazing. It works like a regular pen, but the trick is at the opposite end of the writing tip. The white rubbery end is an eraser! It never leaves eraser dust and will never shrink down. The eraser works very well.

I drew three squiggly lines, one in each color, and then rubbed the eraser about three times down each squiggle.
Look at how clean it is!

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This is the Beetle Tip highlighter that has two interesting ridges; it's so you can highlight in three different ways!! Use the thick ridge for bold lines, the thin ridge for thin lines, and both to make double lines!! This should make highlighting very interesting. You can highlight words, underline words, and surround words with two lines. 

Blackberry Birthday

Outside

Inside

I'm back again! I think. 

Don't have wrapping paper?

You can just cover the top of a gift box with pretty magazine paper and a paper flower!

The green pipe cleaner, unfortunately, did not stick to the magazine paper with glue so I stuck it to the box with cute piano tape!

Recycling?

So if you need something to put chocolates or cookies in, just use a box, clean it up, cover any writing with paper (hearts) and line the bottom with parchment paper! Most of my recent posts haven't been card-related...oops.

              

Ummm yeahhhh paper flowers

Soooo I guess I didn't really keep my promise, did I? My last post was over...a month ago? This is terrible. What happened to meeee?

Well, here are some paper flowers that I've made now that the weather is getting nicer here in NYC. I ventured to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens this past weekend, but there still weren't too many things in bloom outside. I hope the warmer weather we've been getting changes that!

The petals are paper hearts made out of magazine papers. Each flower is comprised of about 8 hearts and they are secured with a brad in the center. The stems are just green pipe cleaners.

My favorite one

Close second? Eh, eh?

In a "vase" on a wall