Where did my Christmas break go?

When I am not blogging, I am a teacher and one of the perks of working at a school is that I get two weeks off around Christmas.  This year, before I had left the building, I knew what I would be doing during the break.  I had put off a lot of crafts during the semester that were finally going to be completed.

One of these crafts was these cute little notebooks I discovered from Kerry's Paper Crafts.  She has a great video tutorial that explains how to make them.  While she is an avid stamper, I am not so I chose to use textured paper and print labels for my notebooks and they look just a good.


The next project I had was to gift wrap stocking stuffers with pages cut out of discarded books. Before I move on, I should say that I am an avid reader and it was hard for me to cut out the pages in the first place, but I made my sister and her boyfriend "secret compartment books" and had hundreds of pages that needed to be used.  


Around Black Friday, I bought a bunch of ELF make-up and decided to use the book pages to wrap them.  Here is how they turned out:

How I made them:

Tools:

• book pages
• hot glue
• buttons (optional)
• tape
• scissors
• time

1. Hot glue four pages together to make a larger rectangle.  Since I only cut out a piece of each page, none of them were big enough to wrap on item, but if your pages are large enough, skip this step. Also, if you are wrapping a large item, glue together as many pages as you need to completely cover the object.

2. Wrap the present as usual.  No tricks here.

3.  Cut out petals for flowers.  I just free handed these by drawing a leaf shape on one paper and using it as a template for the rest of my petals.  I also used the same petal shape for the bows- these are just petals folded in half.

4. After you have cut out more petals than you think you will need (it is never enough!), start assembling your flowers.  I am sure there is a more professional way to sew these together or something, but I just held the tips of the petals together and when I liked the arrangement, hot glued them together.

5.  Once that glue dried, I used buttons to be the center of my flowers (and hid the hot glue.)

After I made these, I found a blogger that did something very similar and surpassed my crafting ideas.  Here is her version of it and even more crafts using book pages.  I am impressed!

So these are a couple crafts I worked on before Christmas.  Later I will add some of the meals we made and some more craft ideas. 






-Sen