Christmas Treats

Finally... the teased Christmas post.

I got a little, um... involved this year, with making Christmas treats for my family. In the past, I've always done jars of cocoa, with varying degrees of creativity. This year, I had some new ideas. Last spring, we went to Atlanta, and went to a burger place where I had the best pickles I've ever had. It got me inspired to try making my own pickles. I spent some time experimenting with recipes and came up with a great one, and my mom gave me some jars that she's had for a long time, so I canned those... then decided to make a whole basket of it. I saw these little houses in Inspired Ideas magazine (GREAT place for fun projects) and thought I'd make some to hold cocoa packets.



I added little pipe-cleaner wreaths, and the twinkle lights are small rhinestones - they turned out looking even more like lights after I covered the whole thing with glitter. Each box holds only one packet of cocoa, so I made another packet to put underneath.



I based the tea towels on one that I saw at anthropologie - mine's very simplified from theirs, but I think they turned out cute.



And here's one of the completed baskets - pickles, pickle recipe, a house of cocoa, a box of marshmallows, and a tea towel.

I haven't forgotten!

I know I teased a blog post weeks ago from Twitter, but I'm still not ready to put up that post... waiting for the whole thing to be done. But in the meantime, I thought I'd put up the rest of the Christmas cards I ended up sending out.



I'm putting up two pictures here, because the first one is a better view of everything (click the photo for a larger version - with them all in one photo, it's kind of hard to see detail), but I forgot one card, so the second has it stuck in there. For three of the cards, I took my basic template that I created with the last card (patterned background, ribbon across the middle horizontally, and layered scalloped ovals) and played with it. I love the Basic Grey double-sided papers so much, because they're so easy to coordinate this kind of thing - just flip the paper over and you've got a scalloped oval that coordinates with the background. I heat-embossed the sentiment ovals with clear glitter embossing powder to give them a little texture and sparkle.



The other cards, the ones that aren't based on that same template, are made to feature this GORGEOUS flocked paper I got at Paper Source. I was actually planning to put a sentiment on the one with the wreath, but the wreath ended up looking so pretty by itself, I left it that way and added some "berries" with Tarnished Brass Distress Stickles. I could have sworn I had some red Stickles around here somewhere, but I think I've just looked at them several times and never gotten around to buying them. I like the tone-on-tone look, though.

Next time: Sparkle houses and everything that goes with them.