Hi! What do Angry Birds have to do with Christmas?? I have no idea but they are everywhere, aren't they? Just stick a Santa hat on them and they are perfect for the holiday season. My kids and lots of other kids seem to like them a lot so I decided to make tons of Angry Birds! I had first seen this post HERE on Jenny's blog about some Angry Birds she had made and she provides the link to the original source. I just had to find my own way of making them with the dies/punches that I have.
So here's a photo of 47 Angry Birds made from just thin cardstock. I chose thin cardstock so I could cut more than one sheet at a time and so it would move faster. I used Spellbinders circle nestabilities for the bodies. The beak is a cat/bat ear from PTI's Halloween sweet treats dies set. The feathers on the head is from My Favorite Things daisy die. The eyes are punches and the eyebrows are hand cut. Yes, that was the most painful part. Hand cutting all those eyebrows! But without them, they wouldn't be Angry Birds!
So my 2 older kids and I decided that bookmarks would be the best to give away since they are older now. And if I had just stuck these on a package with candy it would surely have been tossed away. My daughter gave her class instructions not to throw them away. Hahaha. She also helped me with stringing on the twine and sticking the labels on.
A little close up photo. The bookmark die is from PTI.
We tied on some candy canes with more twine and they were set to go.
I made Angry Birds for my youngest too. He's too young to read so I decided to make ornaments for them instead. And these are made from FUN FOAM!! These came out so fun! The green tag is PTI's Tag Sale #4 die. We tied on some ribbon and bells, and added candy canes in the bags too. My youngest kid's teacher dressed up as an Angry Bird for Halloween too!
So I am finally finished with the kids' stuff. But I still have teacher gifts for my younger son's teachers to wrap. Thank goodness I still have the weekend to finish up. But I hate waiting til the last minute.
I have to share this photo of the pictures/cards my youngest made for his teachers. He keeps requesting that I post his projects on my blog too. Future blogger, I suppose.
Oh and if you haven't checked it out yet, I have been "spied" on TGF! See HERE. It's my first time ever being spied. So if you've got time, play along please!
Thanks so much for reading and hope you're enjoying the holiday season!
Hi, hi, hi! I'm kind of excited to share my project today. Hehe. I've been wanting to make something like this for a while now and finally completed it yesterday. I started the project but got kind of stuck and had to rethink some parts. Then got like an a-ha! moment yesterday which really pushed me through to finishing. But first let's mention the challenges that inspired this:
I made a checkers board game using TGF's Wonderland digi set. Digital stamps are great for this kind of project. I thought the blue/berry colors would make a fun board game. The board itself measures 12 by 12 inches. I just cut the berry squares and glued them onto the blue cardstock.
I made a little pizza box (measures about 4 by 5.5 inches) to hold the checkers pieces. The letters were made with PTI's alphabet die set The digis are relatively small so I had to color carefully.
Inside of the box. There are 24 pieces, 12 blue and 12 berry. And yes, small rabbits to color as well. But with digis it was easy to shrink them down to the size I needed.
The pieces were made from the smallest Spellbinders lacey circles die. I had thought about what to make the pieces from and at first I had planned to cut out lots of chipboard and layer them. Yeah, sound crazy? I've done crazy kind of cutting before but this time I really just did not feel like cutting out a gazillion little pieces so that's where I got kind of stuck. So I pushed this project aside and thought I wouldn't get to finish it. But the other day after I had made my tree stamp out of thick fun foam, I thought, hey, I should use FUN FOAM! Yay, for FUN FOAM! Even though the fun foam is thick (6 mm) it is still really easy to cut through in the Big Shot. So I just had to cut 24 pieces out of fun foam. Doable, yes! And they are really light and still stackable if you want to king your pieces.
My game board was also glued on a piece of foam board that I had around the house. I just traced my cardstock and used a metal ruler and blade to cut through the board. It's light but sturdy. You could make this more durable with lamination and even magnetic! I thought about making the board and pieces magnetic--wouldn't that be fun? But in the end I went with simple and preserving my sanity.
Here are the pieces out on the board.
I even thought about making a chess set. Wouldn't that be neat too? Like a Twilight chess set using all the Twilight inspired digis from TGF. But who/what would all the pawns be? That would take some thinking.
Hi! I wasn't feeling much like creating anything too complicated for my kids' classmates/teachers for Valentine's Day. We just bought some candy for the kids and cute heart shaped boxes of See's Candies for the teachers. I don't know, I was just feeling a bit lazy. But my older son wanted to pass out pencils so okay, I guess I could do something with these pencils I bought from Walmart. Pretty inexpensive, I think they were 99 cents for a 12 pack. So I remembered this post about making foam pencil toppers, see HERE. (You should check out the post, she even used cookie cutters to make imprints on the foam to cut out. She had lots of fun ideas). Pretty easy and fast and quick, and I had some leftover foam from my Angry Birds.
I used MFT's heart die to cut out hearts in different colored foam. The foam is pretty thin.
After cutting the hearts out, I just held them in half and cut 2 slits with my scissors that were just big enough for me to slide the pencil through. So simple!
My son wrote his name on the back of the hearts with a Sharpie. We made 20 this time though I know there are less kids than that because somehow he didn't have enough Angry Birds to pass out during Christmas. I had made an exact amount of Angry Birds for his class but I think he lost track when he started passing them out so a couple of his classmates didn't get one. Oh well. So this time I made sure to send a couple extra.
Hi! Remember Grease, the movie? That is one of my favorite movies. Love all the songs and it was on TV again last night as I was washing the dishes. I thought it was a nice coincidence since my project I just completed was somewhat inspired by that Summer Nights song and just summer in general.
Wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't so rainy here? Storming again today and couldn't take nice pictures in the gloomy weather. Anyway, I had mentioned I was into this 3D paper piecing technique as shown HERE. This is the project that has been driving me a bit bonkers. Maybe I was trying to do too much into one project and I kept changing my mind on what I should do. So it took me much longer to finish this than I had planned. It's not quite how I had envisioned it at first but I guess it's okay and I'm glad to be done with it and move on. Oh, and this project is also for TGF's Retro-fresh challenge--a whole new dimension.
I wanted to make a foam book like the ones they have for kids. I thought it would be fun and different. I looked at one of my kids' foam books to copy how they put it together.
So then I turned this into a summer themed mini scrapbook. Maybe we'll put small photo collages on the empty pages.
I ended up covering the edges of the foam with washi tape. I used 6 mm foam and our local craft store didn't have light blue like I wanted so I used white. Guess it didn't matter since I ended up covering it.
This is Anya from TGF's Sunshine Kit. I paper pieced her using the 3D technique.
Here is a view of the different layers. I also die cut the foam to have a rectangle cutout so that Anya wouldn't get smashed and it would give the page a bit more dimension.
I covered the inside rectangle edge with washi tape too.
The left page is blank. I wasn't sure if I should put a sentiment on there but then just decided to leave it for maybe some short journaling and a photo.
TGF's Surfer Anya. She took a bit of layering. But I do love how she turned out.
She's tucked into the rectangle cutout too.
The last set of pages.
TGF's Surfer Ian.
3D paper pieced again. These were the 3 I did first before Geisha Anya in my previous post.
I "borrowed" some fishy stickers from my kids. Hehe.
Geez, my hands are freezing now even though I have gloves on. Yeah, it's kind of hard to type with gloves on. After lunch I think the kids and I will cuddle together with all our blankets and pillows on the living room floor. Hopefully, they will fall asleep and take a nap. We actually slept like that last night. Kind of like a sleepover in our own living room. Can't wait for some sun.
Hi! PTI is having their Make It Monday challenge to use fun foam. I thought I'd give fun foam a try. I couldn't find any pretty colors of fun foam in my kids' stash and I told myself I wasn't going to buy it just to do this challenge but I so happened to be at Ben Franklin and bought just one sheet of pink fun foam. I didn't even really know what I wanted to make. Just wanted the pink one! I had my doubts too about using fun foam. Like it's good for kids' crafts but I couldn't really imagine it being sophisticated, you know? The good thing is that it cuts so nicely. You really could make a lot of cute die cuts for kids to craft with.
Anyway, I used Delightful Dahlia stamp set and dies to create the card above. The leaves are die cut with PTI felt and stamped too. The dahlia is stamped in raspberry fizz and cardstock is hibiscus burst. I really need to expand my color combo choices.
Just a close up photo. Yeah, I still have my doubts about fun foam. Pearls and fun foam? I don't know if I'm totally loving it.
Thanks for reading and hope you're having a great weekend!
