Happy New Year

I can't believe that it's been so long since my last posting. I have been busy visiting and creating, just not posting. Since school has been out, I have been finishing up several tags from Tim Holtz's 12 tags of Christmas; making Christmas presents (I can't post them til next week because we aren't exchanging til Saturday); visiting our son and girlfriend in south Florida;  playing with Grace who was home for a few days and spending time with Cait and Tony (They loved their quilt and it looks great on their bed). I finished my December daily journal. (I plan to take more picture and update the slideshow) I really looked forward to writing in it each evening and I am trying to decide how I want to continue journaling in the new year. I think I am going to add a diary or calendar section to my smash journal - which still needs a cover and binding. I bought more Christmas scrapbook paper to make journals for presents next year when Jan and I spent a whole day shopping all the craft, bead and quilt shops for sales. I even broke down and ordered the "Noel" and "reindeer" dies from Blue Moon Scrapbooking.

For the past few days I have spent lots of time preparing for a new class at the quilt shop: it's for a fabric covered notebook. I have had a great time making book covers for everyone. I will post a slideshow as soon as I finish the last one and take the last picture.


It's charm deadline time again: I finished mine last week. This month's theme was "Oz" and it was a challenge for me. I like the finished look. All the components are Holtz influenced: the green globe (florist marble) is glued to a Holtz charm; the picture is a fragment; the shoe is shrink plastic that was shrunk in a melting pot of utee. Holtz does a great video for this technique as part of one of his tags. Ellen Hudson took his technique a bit further: she puts the charm back into a hot, empty pot and sprinkles on glitter when the utee softens. It worked great - the whole house sparkles. I love how the packaging came out: the Holtz brick wall embossing folder is perfect and of course I had to use blue gingham ribbon.

Now I have to get my brain to settle on a floral expression for the next exchange.