Crafty Adventure Presents!

Just a quick post about some of the awesome crafty presents I got this Christmas! I am really excited about all of them!

My little sister is teaching English (the language) in S. Korea for a year, so she brought me back some awesome presents. Included in these awesome presents were three rolls of hand-pressed paper that are just GORGEOUS. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet, but it is definitely going to be something special. And she also remembered to bring me back all kinds of fun plastic bags! They are so neat.

Also pictured above are two crafty books that I received. One of my cousins gave me the Origami Jewelry book, and it is just full of really cute ideas. She has done a lot of origami herself, so it was really neat to receive this book from her. Another cousin gave me the Embellishing book, which is also full of some amazing ideas. She even told me that she had really wanted to photocopy some of the pages before she gave me the book! I can't wait to start crafting with ideas from these books!

My Grandmother knows that I love to craft, and she loves all the things that I make. So I received a big heavy present from her with a gift tag that read "To Mariko, who loves to make things. Love, Grandma." And in this big heavy present was this box of amazing crafty bits!

Now, this picture really doesn't do this amazing collection justice, because I haven't fully unpacked it yet. There is another layer of bags beneath the ones that you see, and there is just an amazing assortment of stuff in them! I've found TONS of beads, broken necklaces, brooches, watches, earrings, shells, confetti... You name it, it's probably in there. Apparently my Grandma found a huge bag of all this stuff in a thrift store! How cool is that??? I'm always looking for big bags of random stuff, but I have never found one even CLOSE to this amazing. I am sooo excited to go through everything and become inspired. She already sorted through a lot of the stuff and categorized them into little bags, which will help a lot.

I definitely had a wonderful Christmas with lots of family, and lots of fun crafty presents! But now I have to focus on New Year's Eve, which has really snuck up on me. I mentioned before that this year's New Year's Eve theme is "Dinosaur Prom". Here's a little preview of what that means...

Intrigued? I hope so! I'll be posting about it soon!!!