Christmas Present Adventures, Part 3

Now that my husband and I are finished celebrating our 4 days of Christmas celebrations, I can finally post about what I made for presents! I gave away gift baskets filled with upcycled handmade goodies, and today I am going to cover the paper gifts!

As I hinted in an earlier post, I covered a LOT of pencils in security envelope linings. I am seriously in love with the patterns that are used, and I have to say I really like how they look wrapped around pencils!

Now, to go with the pencils I also made magnetic paper pads. Since my goal was to make everything out of recycled materials as much as possible, these paper pads were no exception!

The idea actually came about when there was a mistake made with one of my photocopy orders at school. I was left with a whole stack of colored paper, printed on one side. So I simply photocopied lines on the other side and cut them up! I used leftover invitations from my wedding for the backing, and used some magnetic strips that I had stashed away.

I bound the pages together using clear Silicone, and it worked great! The pages are held together well, but also tear away really easily. The overall effect was very cute, and I was very pleased with how they turned out.

And then finally, I gave out lots of paper star ornaments!

My house has been filled with these stars for months now, I had so much fun folding them! And they looked just darling hanging in a tree.

Tomorrow I will share the food related pieces that I made! I hope that everyone had a wonderful time with the Holidays, and are looking forward to a Happy New Year!

Crafty Present Adventures!

I gave my friend her crafty present yesterday, so I can finally blog about it here! Remember the Facebook gifts that I blogged about in August? Well, it turns out that I forgot about someone! I felt so bad that I kinda went overboard with this crafty gift. Once I started making fun crafty things I couldn't stop! So here are all the different parts to her present:

First I covered some colored pencils in dictionary pages that had their different colors on them.

This was my first time trying this, and I love how they turned out!

I also covered some more pencils in security envelope liners. I love how they look. I definitely want to continue making these!

I was going to stop there, but then I decided to make a pad of paper to go with the pencils. I took some pages from an old daily calendar and tried a new way of making a pad of paper. This pad will allow each of the pages to rip away quickly and easily!

For the back of the pad I used some cardboard from the packaging for my husband's Kindle. The letters were done in a gloss coating, so they only show up in the light. I love how it looks!

Again, I was going to stop there, but then I got another fun idea. The last time that this friend was over to my house she commented on how my paper butterflies would look really cute as hairpieces. So I decided to do just that!

I like how you can see the word "Introduction" going through this butterfly

And the butterfly with the feathers and netting looked great in her hair!

So this would have been a logical place to stop, right? But then I wanted to make some kind of bag to put everything into. So I went through my fabric scraps and found part of one of my husband's old shirts that I had previously used to make a skirt out of.

I used the existing buttons as the closure for the bag, and then re-stitched the pocket to the front of the bag.

The pocket was just perfect to put the pencils in!

I had so much fun putting together all of these little crafty gifts! Sometimes having a reason to craft is the best way to get inspiration. Right now I'm going to focus on putting together Christmas presents, which I probably won't blog about here until after they have been received. But I'm sure I'll have enough side crafty projects to keep this blog updated between now and January!