Christmas Gift Certificate Tree

If you haven't already caught on, the one thing I love as much as crafting is giving gifts. I think it's the perfect outlet for my creativity. I absolutely love coming up with thoughtful gifts tailored to the recipient.

For Christmas, I decided to get my brother and his girlfriend a bunch of gift certificates to restaurants in the neighborhood in Chicago that they lived. While I thought this to be a fitting gift for them, I thought it sounded kinda boring..."here....they're gift cards for a bunch of restaurants". So, I came up with a nice way to display them that didn't seem so flat.

First I purchased a piece of rectangular foam and a gift bag from Hobby Lobby. I used a wine gift bag, and the piece of foam was probably 3/4 of the height of the gift bag. I went outside in my backyard and cut 5 or so twigs off of the leaf-less tree (it was winter time), and arranged them so they looked like a mini-tree.

Then, I made little envelopes out of cardstock and scrapbooking paper that fit each of the gift certificates. Sorry I do not have a tutorial for these....but, stay tuned - I promise to do one soon! 

With this one I used a striped patterned paper and I cut it into strips. I laid the strips out to look like a Christmas tree and cut out a non-perfect star for the top (Who likes perfect things anyways?). This one is created as a sleeve, where the top is open and the gift certificate slips out of the top. 

This one was made with patterned paper, some cardstock (the off-white) and some stickers. This one is also created as a sleeve. Notice that I cut a semi-circle at the top for easy removal of the gift certificate. 

I tried to make this one look more like an envelope. The snowman sticker is meant to look like a stamp and on the back I cut a slit and tucked the folded part of the cardstock into it to close it.

I went simple with this one. This was the first one I made, so I didn't figure out that I should cut a semi-circle on the top. With this one you actually couldn't pull the gift certificate out unless you ripped the ribbon off. It is also a sleeve for the gift certificate.

At each of the restaurants I went to, they gave me a take out menu to go with the gift certificates. I slipped those in the wine-shaped gift bag, as they were the perfect size to hide in there. 

While the gift was slightly difficult to transport, I felt much better giving this than I would have a stack of gift certificates. I think overall it turned out to be a nice gift that keeps on giving. 

Happy Christmas Gifting :)

Scrapbooking

I've been with my boyfriend for just over 3 years now. He has an Uncle, Warren, whose wife passed away in 2007, which is way before I met my boyfriend or any of his family (obviously). Warren had a bunch of sympathy cards from his wife's passing and he wanted to have a scrapbook made with them so he could look back on them and read the nice notes people wrote about his wife. I will take any excuse for a creative outlet, and I love making other people happy, so I volunteered to make the scrapbook for him. The scrapbook turned out much better than I (or he) expected, so I thought I would share some pictures I took of the scrapbook before I gave it to Warren. Sorry the pictures aren't the best, I took these before I even had the idea of a craft blog.

This is actually the first page I did. I never do the first page of a scrapbook first because I feel like I don't have the creative juices running. I like to get an idea of the overall theme of the scrapbook, so I usually do the first page last or close to the end. Anyways, the smaller cut out on the left hand page actually has some depth to it. I bought one of those 70 cent foam pieces from Hobby Lobby to be able to add a little depth to my scrapbooking. Kinda a fun effect. 

This page is the perfect example of a great color combination. With this project, I basically had a stack of cards to pick from. In the beginning, it was really easy to match colors and make great page compositions, toward the end you will notice some not-so-great color combos. 

This is one of my favorite pages of the entire scrapbook. I absolutely love how the page on the right turned out. I grabbed a bunch of scraps of cardstock in colors that matched the card fronts and just played around with it. 

This is another one of my favorite pages. I love the purple flower design with the light teal and purple. 

 

I was a little skeptical about using such a bright color in a sympathy scrapbook, but I think tying in bits of orange with the pastel pink actually worked okay without being too in-your-face bright. 

Again, love this color combo.

This layout is a bit mismatched. Basically I wanted to try some new techniques. I love the simplicity of the page on the left with the complexity of the woven scraps of cardstock. It wasn't too difficult to do, either. I had just bought a new hexagonal stencil (by far my favorite shape). I think overall the pages turned out nice separately, but I am not entirely sold on them together. 

This is another great example of the use of scraps of cardstock that turned out really nicely. 

Warren had these little heart cut-outs that people had written notes on. I am guessing they were from the service that was held. I punched holes in all of them and thought it would be cute to make them look like they were being strung up across the page. 

I love a simple last page. Especially for such a delicate topic, it's a nice way to wrap up.

Happy Scrapping :)