3D Christmas Village

Here's a quick peak at the growing Christmas village I've been building using many different SVGCuts.com kits.  I built some of these last year and just got around to embellishing them this year. Others were built over the past few months and are still works in progress.  Most of them sit on a black bookshelf, so the photos aren't the greatest. 

I have so much fun picking out the papers and thinking of ways to make these unique.  And the more I look at the same kits done by others, I get even more wonderful ideas and inspiration.  

I hope you enjoy this photo gallery of Christmas Cove, a coastal village of my own imagination which is a very merry place to live!

 

I added some icicles to "Flurry Chapel," aka the Silent Night church.

 

Got bling? I went a little crazy adding sparkle and shine to this gingerbread house from the Happy Holidays kit.

This is the 3D Snowy House from the Winter's Chill kit.  I added a 1" miniaturized wreath from the Silent Night kit. Thank goodness for fork bows, because there was no other way I would have been able to tie one that small! I also added some coach lights from the Enchanted Autumn Pumpkin Carriage. 

I used one of the snowflakes from the Winter Gazebo kit and fashioned a weathervane of sorts to go on top of the gazebo. The pine garland is Pine Twine from Tim Holtz. I keep meaning to add some shadow figures to this so they show through when it's lit up. Maybe next year!  

This is Maple Manor all decked out for Christmas. I added a widow's walk to the top as I grew up in New England and remember seeing so many beautiful historic homes along the coast with them on the roof.  I added some sidelights around the front door and made a wreath from Tim Holtz Boxwood twine and jingle brads.  I never got around to adding a fence and some other details to this project, so I guess I'll be decking this one out next year as well.

Last but certainly not least, here's Candy Cane light (from the Seaside kit) along with the Christmas Tree from Santa's Surprises. So much more I want to do to further embellish these too, all I need is time!

Thanks for joining me on this short tour through Christmas Cove.  Happy Holidays!

Piano Box Card

I decided to add a few Christmas touches to the SVGCuts.com Piano Box Card from the Summer Box Cards kit.

Instead of using the flowers that came in the kit, I miniaturized some poinsettias from the wreath in the Santa's Surprises kit which is also from SVGCuts.

I even found a teeny tiny snippet of Silent Night sheet music in my Tim Holtz stash that I added. Love it! I'm so pleased with how this turned out. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Disney Explosion Box

At the request of a good friend, I set out to create a spectacular Disney-themed explosion box for her to use when gifting some theme park passes this Christmas.

 

I neglected to take pictures of a lot of things along the way, and these are by no means detailed instructions, but here' the basic gist of it:

I started out my box using the SVGCuts.com Small Snowflake Box from the Winter Gazebo kit. To turn it into an explosion box, I cut the pieces called 'bottom sides' into 6 panels. I left the tabs at the bottom for gluing, but the panel on the right has a side tab that is not needed, so I cut it off as well. When all was done, I had six panels that looked like this:

Next I cut out the pieces called 'bottom' - two hexagons - and set about gluing my 6 panels to the largest bottom piece, one on each of the six sides.. I used the leftover hexagon bottom to cover up the glued tabs and finish it off neatly.

I used my Cricut Disney cartridge to cut out the various characters and decorated the panels with an embossed background, the characters and some bling to weight down the flaps.  Mickey and Minnie are mounted on some acetate strips, so they move around and look like they're really jumping for joy! The flap with Mickey's hand is a pull-out pocket where I added a message about going to Disney.

I added a sliceform tree that I found a pattern for online. It required a lot of tweaking, but I got it to work out for me. I stuck it on a doily 'tree skirt' with some hot glue and added some mini presents to finish off the inside.

For the exterior, I created some decorative panels in red to go around the outside panels and added white ovals to the two front panels to look like Mickey's pants buttons.

I made the plain box lid (in the extras folder) and decorated it with some festive greenery (from a Cricut cartridge) on the outside and then hid a little surprise for one of the recipients (also a Star Wars fan) on the inside of the lid.

The idea for the Mickey ears came from Sharalyn Morgan's blog post called Minnie Ears for Crystal. 

I used the SVGCuts.com Baseball Cap file from the Fun and Games kit to get this started.  I made my ears slightly different than Sharalyns in that I omitted the bow, put the ears in different placement due to how I wanted the box to face, and then I glittered the ears themselves and then sealed them with some Mod Podge so the glitter wouldn't get all over EVERYTHING!

Once the ears were all put together, I glued the baseball cap top (with ears) to the baseball cap base with some hot glue around the inside of the box.  The ears are what is going to be used to open the explosion box, so I needed it to stay together.

After the baseball cap/ears box was one glued unit, I then glued that to the top of the snowflake box lid:

 to get this:

Clear as mud, right?!!  Anyway, I think you get the idea. All you do now is lift up on the ears and the box 'explodes' open.

I'm told this project was a huge hit Christmas morning and I'm so very glad. It was a fun challenge to create this and come up with different ideas for how to make it special.

Thanks for stopping by!

Nativity Paperscape Card

I think the paperscape cards from Dreaming Tree are just so cool!  This Nativity card is from the Christmas Paperscape Cards collection.  As mentioned here previously, I just love projects that I can light up, so this is right up my alley. 

I frequently leave my cards unfinished (as I've done here) so that I can personalize them down the road when I decide who the recipient will be. I will likely add a foil message in the top section using my Minc machine, but I haven't made up my mind what I want to say yet.

I'm primarily posting this now because of the happy accident I discovered when gluing it all together. I used some starry looking paper from an old DCWV Christmas paper stack to cut out the background piece. It has the lyrics to "We Three Kings of Orient Are" printed in swirls all over the paper. I just stuck the 12x12" paper to my Cricut mat and hit go.

Check out where the "O Star of wonder..." lyric shows up on the paper.  The star placement couldn't be more perfect if I had planned it that way.  In fact, if I had tried to place the star where it landed, this probably would never have happened!!  #fuzzymathskills

I guess I was meant to use this paper for this particular project.  Couldn't be happier with the result.

Thanks for stopping by!

#xmaspaperscape3dsvg

Winter Village Box Card

It seems funny to say "Happy Halloween" when I'm here to show off some Christmas projects, but that's just the way it goes sometimes when it comes to seasonal crafting!

I just love Mary's new release of the More Christmas Box Cards kit at svgcuts.com. This Winter Village Box Card is one of my favorites in the kit (although I truly love them all) and so I thought I'd give it a go.

Katarina Ewa posted a picture of her version the other day where she altered the kit ever so slightly to create a vellum window in the front and put a small battery tea light inside.  I'm a sucker for anything that lights up and glows, so I had to try it too.  I love the result!  Thanks for the great idea Katarina!



Of course once I did that my wheels were turning and I had the idea to turn this card into a faux snow globe shaker card. I just recently picked up a Fuse tool at the craft store (using a 60% off coupon - what a deal!) and used it to create a round shaker pocket with some coordinating glitter, sequins and microbeads in it.

At first I tried it without a background paper, but I could see the bottom of the other layers through the window, so I just stamped the bottom of the front fence layer with some snowflakes and glued it in to provide a background for the shaker pocket.  Love it!

This was a really fun project to create and was really simple to cut out and assemble.  Now I have to decide which one I'll take on next - I think it might be the Front Door card.  

Have a great day. Thanks for stopping by!  

Black Cat Burlap Block

I just love the Black Cat Gift Bag that Mary designed for the Barn Party kit from svgcuts.com, but I didn't really have a need for a bag, so I decided to make this as a decoration instead.  I have some 5.5" burlap panels in my stash and re-sized the pieces to fit.

I was also happy to be able to use this orange pom pom fringe that I've had for a few years now.  I think I need to fluff some of them up, I just noticed that a few are looking a little flat in the photo!

I added some purple bling stickers to the corners, some green Stickles along the bottom edge of the pleated collar and some Halloween washi tape around the outside edges.  He's going to look so cute on my bookshelf!  I love how this came out.

Thanks for stopping by!

Spider Venom Bottle Label

When I purchased the Spider Venom Party Pack from birdscards.com I saw this fun bottle label which can be added to a wine bottle for some spooky goodness.

I immediately thought of a fun square bottle I have saved for the purposes of making some potion bottles and I knew that this would look great on it!  I re-sized it a bit so it would fit my bottle - the label pictured here is only about 2.5" wide!

I also had to the idea to cut the 'venom' letters out of Heidi Swapp toner paper and run this through my Minc to add some shiny, purple-foiled goodness.  It's not the easiest to photograph, but hopefully you can see the gleam in the picture below.  This angle also shows off the facets on the spider body (gem stickers) better too.

I think I'm going to fill the bottle with some bright green glittery liquid and once that's done and sealed, I'll stick my label on. I don't want to risk splashing it the bottle filling stage.

Thanks for stopping by!

Pumpkin Party Box Card

Here's my quick version of the Pumpkin Party Box Card from the new Barn Party kit available from svgcuts.com.  I used a Viva Decor Perlen-Pen to make the eyeballs as I didn't have any pearl 'bling' small enough to fit in there. I was also lucky to have found the Tim Holtz Halloween trim at Michaels a few weeks ago, and used that as a decoration on the front fringe flap (say that three times fast!!).

Incidentally, if you like Tim Holtz holiday trims, I just found the new Christmas ones at Jo-Anns yesterday (10/4/15) along with a bunch of his new 2015 distress colors and other holiday goodies.  It was a good shopping day for me, but bad day for my wallet!

One other helpful tip: this is not the easiest card to get in the envelope (well, for me anyway) because the fringe wants to pop-up and snag on the envelope. I just laid a flat piece of cardstock over top of the card to aid my sliding it into the envelope, kind of like a shoe horn. Worked like a charm!  You could probably also put it in upside down (head first) but I like to see the pumpkins peeking at you when you open the envelope.

Thanks for stopping by!

Birdhouse Tag

I'm so happy to see that the business of creating and selling .svg files for cutting machines is really taking off.  I've been able to shop at two new svg stores just in the past week!

This adorable birdhouse tag comes from birdscards.com and is part of a free svg kit called Birdhouse.  The free kit also includes a 3D birdhouse gift box, and three lovely birdhouse-themed cards.

It probably took me longer to pick out the paper for this tag than it did to cut it out and put it together.  I'm thinking these would be adorable in Christmas colors too.

Now I'm off to do some more svg shopping and kick off my weekend with some serious paper-crafting. I think I just have to have Bird's Halloween kit - everything in it is so cute, but the spiderweb bag is a must have!

Happy weekend and thanks for stopping by.  

Spooky Coffin Box

Here's the 2nd freebie I downloaded from 3dsvg.com.  It's called Spooky Coffin and I think it's really cute!
I can picture this done in all kinds of different colors or patterned papers. Maybe even some embossing.

Wouldn't black, gray and white be cool?  Or maybe a glittery blood moon like we're going to see in the sky on 9/28/15.  I might make some more of these as little Halloween treat boxes for some friends and co-workers, but I just purchased the 'everything' bundle from 3dsvg, so for now I'm going to go poke around and see what I can get into next.

Thanks for stopping by!

Stingy Jack Lantern

If you haven't already checked out the designs at 3dsvg.com, make sure you pay them a visit. 

Right now you can download this Stingy Jack Lantern file for FREE.  There's a free Spooky Coffin box too which I hope to build over the weekend!

I love how quickly and easily this went together.  I substituted plain vellum and a color changing tealight (found in the Home Depot Halloween section) for the printed vellum as I didn't have any inkjet vellum handy.  I think this came out really great and I'm looking forward to doing some shopping on the new site over the weekend.    

Here's a view of the opposite side.  Happy weekend and thanks for stopping by!

Midnight Jamboree projects

We always ship a box of autumn goodies to a family member and candy is always included. I decided to make a few projects from the Midnight Jamboree kit from svgcuts.com to go in the box. I thought this cute little candy dish would make a fun seasonal decoration to go with the sweets. 

This spooky lantern is from the same kit. These are both quick and easy little projects that make fun Halloween decor.

Sunflower Box Card

I saw somebody post this idea on the svgcuts.com Facebook page a while back and knew I had to make one too. This started out as the poinsettia card from the Christmas Box Cards kit from svgcuts.com.  I didn't cut the flowers from that kit, but rather replaced them with three of the free sunflower svg also offered by svgcuts.com.

I didn't resize the sunflowers at all, I just cut them at the size they imported into Cricut Design Space.  I added a few sequins to the centers of two of the flowers and called it a day. Once again, I was delighted that I had some sunflower paper in my stash which I used for the decorative panels.  This card went together really quickly and I love how it turned out.

Perfect for another fall birthday celebration!  Thanks for stopping by.

Boho Butterflies Box Card

As I'm in need of a birthday card for a family member who is an avid gardener and lover of all creatures, great and small, I figured the new Boho Butterflies Box Card from svgcuts.com would be just perfect.

I had so much fun planning this out. I don't always remember to take pictures when I'm in the middle of crafting, but I was so tickled to find some Tim Holtz butterfly paper in my stash that I had to take pictures of it before I covered up most of it with the colorful butterflies:

Also, while in the midst of bringing the butterflies to life, I remembered that I have a few rubber stamp sets of butterflies and used a few of those to stamp patterns onto these lovely creatures.  I LOVE how they came out. I'll remember that for next time. I think patterned paper would be gorgeous too!  I also added some white dots with a white gel pen as I see that on a lot of butterfly pictures online.

And one last thing, I stapled some elastic to the opposite corners as shown in Steven Franco's video and then covered up the staples with the side panels that have the little brad on them.  This is the perfect way to present these cards to recipients who may not understand what a box card is and how it's supposed to open up.  

Colorful Corn Card

This is another project from the Enchanted Autumn kit found at svgcuts.com

It was fun playing around with the papers and gem stickers to make the corn on this card.  The possibilities are really endless with this one. I went for an Indian corn look as I've always associated that with Fall.

This made a lovely birthday card for a family member last November.  I think it would also make a fun piece of autumn art if enlarged and put on a burlap or canvas panel instead of a card front.

Corn Stalk Luminary

These adorable little cornstalk luminaries are from one of the first kits I ever purchased from svgcuts.com. The name of the kit is Enchanted Autumn and can be found here.

I think these would look great as part of a Thanksgiving place setting.  I've made several and display them in various places on my entertainment center along with some other autumn crafts to jazz things up a bit. In additional to having a thing for paper, I also love things that light up, so you can expect to see lots of illuminated projects in my posts.

I've been meaning to experiment with making them bigger to go around a larger 2.5" color-changing electronic tea light I have.  If I do, I'll update this post with a picture.  I think the changing colors might be kind of spooky for Halloween.

A Thing for Paper

I come from a long line of artsy crafters.  I remember my grandmother helping me build a homemade tissue box out of construction paper when I was home from school sick one day. I'm pretty sure that was the first 3D paper project I ever created!

Ever since I was a kid, I've had a thing for paper. And for making things. It all started with my sticker book in the early 80's.  I've dabbled in lots of other crafts since then, but I always come back to playing with paper. When the Cricut was first released, I HAD to have one!  Paper crafting sure has come a long way.

Over the past year or so, I've fallen in love with making 3D paper projects.  They are fun to build and even more fun to personalize.  And you can't beat the look of amazement on somebody's face when you give them the most amazing birthday card or a gift in a box that you made by hand, just for them.

I've been meaning to post some of these projects online for the longest time and figure there's no time like the present!