Heart of Christmas: November

Heart of Christmas: November

Welcome to the Heart of Christmas 2020 where the Art with Heart team share their Christmas inspiration with you on the third Monday of each month.

Today I’m sharing with you an advent calendar that I made for my 4 year old niece – it is the Christmas Countdown kit. Advent calendars are a tradition in our family, in fact last year my boys turned 18 and 21 and it was the first Christmas they didn’t have an advent calendar!

This advent calendar was so easy to make using the Christmas Countdown kit. All I needed was some adhesive because the kit includes the paper for the front of the drawers, the numbers and stickers to personalise each drawer.

The big decision with a refillable advent calendar is what to put inside the drawers. My boys would receive a gold coin and a chocolate coin each day. On Christmas Eve we would go shopping and they would use half their coins to buy a gift for their brother and then we would visit a local street renowned for their Christmas lights where my boys would donate the rest of their coins to a charity.

For my niece I’ve mixed things up a bit. She is just getting into LEGO so I bought a little LEGO set for her and split the pieces between 1/3 of the drawers, filling the other drawers with baubles to hang on her Christmas tree and of course some chocolate coins!

As this will be my niece’s first ever advent calendar and I won’t be there to explain the concept to her I made a matching card and envelope to go with the calendar. I used the left over stickers and paper drawer fronts to decorate my card and envelope.

The tree for the envelope and the card is made by adhering the stickers and paper to some card stock and then punching it out with the tree punch. I’ve also punched out the star from the die cuts included in the kit and used a red bow sticker, also included in the kit.

I don’t want my niece to lose her tiny LEGO pieces so I cut out the front of the LEGO box and stuck it to a mini Paper Pumpkin box. Inside the box I put the LEGO instructions and a ziplock bag to keep everything safe.

Here’s the inside of the card – the “no peeking” sentiment comes from the Itty bitty Christmas stamp set, as does the sentiment on the front of the card.

Once I’d written inside the card and explained the concept of an advent calendar to my niece, I placed the card on top of the mini Paper Pumpkin box and tied them together with the Mossy Meadow diagonal striped ribbon.

I’m so excited to be carrying on this Christmas tradition in our family with this beautiful Christmas advent calendar.

The lovely Judy May is hosting our Heart of Christmas showcase this year. To see the other Christmas creations go back to Judy’s post.

If you’d like me to post you your very own copy of the August – December Mini catalogue (AKA the Holiday Catalogue), the 2020-21 Stampin Up! Annual Catalogue, the 2020-21 Beginners Brochure, or to simply find out about more about Stampin’ Up! contact me.

In the meantime, wherever you are in the world, stay safe, stay calm…and keep on crafting xxx

Click on the photos below to purchase the items to make this Advent Calendar and matching card.

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Heart of Christmas Week 26

Heart of Christmas Week 26

Welcome back to another week of Christmas Inspiration with the Art With Heart team.

I began this project this time last year, when I was inspired by a biscuit tin that perfectly matched a stamp set from last year’s holiday catalogue…totally trees. The colour scheme also matched our Stampin’ Up! colours (night of navy, pool party, Bermuda bay and whisper white) and I planned to make a card topper to attach to the middle of the lid, covering the words ‘Time for biscuits’.

I ate all the biscuits from the tin (the things we do for crafting!), washed it out, worked out all the measurements, and cut and punched 24 squares of card stock to make the 24 boxes.

Can you guess what happened next? Well, let’s just put it this way, maths never was my best subject! I realised I’d calculated incorrectly…only 15 of my 24 advent boxes fitted into the tin and the whole ‘advent calendar in a tin’ idea was a total flop!

For the past year my mistake has haunted me every time I opened my craft cupboard. I wanted to throw it into the bin but didn’t want to waste all that cardstock. So yesterday I decided it was time to work out how I could save this project.

Just because my boxes don’t fit into the biscuit tin they were designed to fit into doesn’t mean I couldn’t still use them as an advent calendar. I just had to think outside the square. For starters, I could display them on my cake stands.

These little boxes can be displayed either horizontally or vertically.

And they also look great all lined up on my square cake stand.

Heres’ the view from the side…it highlights the cute washi tape and the ribbon

I also popped them into a the lid of a white box I had and layered a sheet of window sheeting over the top, then tied it all up with a bow.

This project is a great way to use a variety of washi tapes, ribbons, silver thread, die cuts and embellishments. I think the more you mix it up, the better it looks.

So how do you make the little boxes? Trust me, you don’t want to follow my measurements, but there’s a great online tool called the ‘box buster’ that lets you type in the finished measurements you want for your box. It then gives you the measurements you need to make that size box. These photos below will give you an idea of how I constructed my boxes using my envelope punch board, paper snips and tear and tape.

Once you’ve constructed your boxes it’s simply a matter of folding and assembling them, filling them with sweets, toys or a little note, wrapping each box with washi tape or ribbon, decorating with all your coordinating embellishments, and numbering 1-24.

Some of the numbers I created using the large numbers die cuts and some were stamped using the labeller stamp set.

Well that’s another project I’m glad I didn’t throw into the bin when it didn’t work out the way I originally intended it to!

To see what the rest of our lovely Art With Heart Team have made hop on over to Claire’s blog.

I’ll be back with some embossing inspiration tomorrow night and them the following week is our last Heart of Christmas blog hop for the year!

Happy crafting!

 

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“Tabs for Everything Advent Calendar” Card

“Tabs for Everything Advent Calendar” Card

 

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Do you love advent calendars as much as I do?

I’ve always loved advent calendars, but the one I remember most vividly from my childhood was a Christmas card that had a mini advent calendar as its front with a tiny image under each of the 24 flaps.

So as soon as we received the “Tabs for Everything” stamp set at Onstage earlier this year, I knew I needed to buy the matching Circle Tap punch and try to recreate this mini advent calendar card from my childhood.

 

The calendar flaps are simply created by punching out garden green, whisper white and cherry cobbler card stock with the circle tab punch, then cutting these punches in half and adhering the “t-bar section” to the card with tear’n’tape. The numbers are stamped with the labeler alphabet stamp set and the wreath in the middle of the card is made using the Santa’s Sleigh stamp set and matching dies, adhered with stamping dimensionals and decorated with silver thread and Rhinestone jewels.

I’m really happy with the final result but I will admit it took me a while to figure out how to make this card because most of my stamps do not have small enough images to fit under the Circle Tab punch. It was only when I got my hands on the Be Merry DSP that I worked out how to do this. I used my 3/4 inch (1.9cm) circle punch to punch out tiny images from the DSP…they were just the right size to fit under the tab. And there was enough variety in the design of the paper to allow me to punch out 24 different images so that every day is a suprise!

Because the pattern of the DSP wasn’t always centred or even around the main image I’d punched out I simply took my Garden Green and cherry Cobbler Markers out and extended the pattern of the DSP to further enhance the tiny images. The picture below show the bottom 5 images before I used the marker to extend the pattern (the rest of the images have already been done).

And here they are all done…I had so much fun doing these!

I needed a fairly large sentiment inside the card because I had to make the card base quite big (6 x 6 inches) to fit the 24 tags onto the front, so I used a combination of the stamps from the “Oh, what Fun” stamp set.

If you look closely at some of the numbered flaps on the advent calendar you’ll see some brand new gorgeous little ornament shapes in whisper white that I’ve used to stamp the numbers onto.

These are dies from a new Christmas bundle called “Carols for Christmas”, which you can order from the 1st August, one month ahead of the Holiday catalogue release date. You can see these little dies on the “Deck the Halls” card below, but in this picture they’re stamped with the ornament stamp from the Carols for Christmas set.

I hope you enjoyed stopped by today. You can see all the other beautiful cards the Art With Heart Team have made by going to Claire’s blog.

You can also click on the links below to purchase any of the supplies I’ve used for this card.

I’ll be back next week with some more Christmas Card inspiration.

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