Merry Christmas!

We had a lovely family dinner at my in-laws last night.

Today, after Christmas Service, we caught up with some old friends and their family.

Then on to our favourite pastime: reading over a cuppa.  The little one's engaged in her favourite pastime too - napping.

Our books and brews of choice:

Hope you have a wonderful rest of the week!

Miss Spoken is right

E: Hey Mom, I love you more.
Me: More than what?
E: More than my toys.

O Christmas Tree!

This Christmas tree I made for our regular swap generated some interest on fellow swapper's Facebook post.  So I thought I'd post a quick tutorial on how I made it.

The idea started months ago, while I was making this layout:

Seeing how the rosettes stacked so beautifully, I experimented with making each die-cut strip into fans, and folding one segment to the back to get more contact area.

A dab of glue and a bit of pinching later:

The base of the tree is formed from half a die-cut strip.  Three segments lay flat while the rest are accordion folded and stuck on.

The base and three fan shapes layered on to an embossed ATC card base, topped with a gold brad on a vellum circle:

All done!

Latest layout featuring Sizzix, for Made With Love.

With the kiddo at home and lots of year-end errands to run, time for scrapping is considerably reduced. So it's really a time-saver to use large embellishments to finish the layout faster. The 657390 Daisy Blast, at a whopping 4 3/4", has lots of "real estate" for dressing it up.



For this layout, I simply wound twine around the petals:



and through the holes in the centre:



Hope you have a blast making quick layouts too!