Shop from home in your jammies today – and through the weekend – for my Black Friday Sale going on in my etsy shop. Go to L7Designs Etsy Shop to find all of my listed items for sale! To make it easy for everyone, the sale price is the listed price – no discount codes or coupons necessary!
Take advantage of my sale and stock up on cards and gift tags for the holiday season, birthdays and thank yous for the new year!
Thanks for creating with me!
One of the things I love most about being part of Etsy’s EtsyGreetings Team is not only how much of a community our team is, but the efforts everyone strives to put into doing team activities. Right now our team has two events going on – A fantastic Holiday Boutique event – see details on the EtsyGreetings.blogspot.com site and a fun Blog Hop.
This blog hop isn’t centered around any particular giveaway or sale; there are no hoops for you to jump through to get what you want. Some of the blogs are featuring downloadable templates and instructions for some of their own holiday traditions (I hear one of them even has a handmade advent calendar!). Keep reading through the hop to find more of these great handmade holiday treasures and traditions!
One of my favorite, or most memorable, holiday handmade traditions isn’t I guess technically “tradition”, but it’s something my Grammie (my grandmother on my Mom’s side) did almost every year for Christmas. Grammie always went all-out for the Holidays. She made Thanksgiving and Christmas memorable for the whole family just from the attention and care she put into everything. Honestly, she could have made Costco lasagne look like an amazing feast just from the presentation. I’m not going to write about her culinary skills, though.
Every Christmas, Grammie made opening gifts that much more special by hand-stamping her gift wrap. Her gift wrap was hand-stamped by her on Kraft or butcher paper. The gift wrap was always beautiful and since it was hand-stamped, no package was the same. She sometimes used different colors, green or red; and the hand stamped decorations on the packages somehow made it more special. Growing up I wasn’t as into papercrafts like I am now, and I wish that I could have her rubber stamps in my collection.
Hand-stamping gift wrap isn’t difficult, or very time consuming to do. It doesn’t have to have a specific design, although you can do that if you have the time or desire to. Use whatever images, sentiments or shapes that you want – Christmas trees, nativity scenes, Christmas stars, mittens, snowmen, angels, etc. Get some plain white or Kraft paper – you can buy HUGE rolls for around $20-25 online (check out Discount School Supply for multiple colors of butcher paper rolls!)- and a lot of companies will ship free (Side Note: I’ve never bought from the Discount School Supply yet, so I don’t know what their products or service is like, but they do have an awesome variety of butcher paper rolls)! Use a variety of ink colors to make your stamps pop more – Cranberry Red, Green, Gold and decorate more with glitter dots, buttons and ribbon to make your packages extra special!
Sorry, I haven’t even started my Christmas shopping this year so I don’t have any pictures of handmade wrapping paper yet, but I will post some before Christmas!
Thank you for creating with me!
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Life has gotten in the way of my motivation to update my blog and website more often! As I have become more and more busy with life things (moving to a new “home”, still unpacking, family gatherings, weddings, etc) and crafty things (lots of new listings in my etsy shop, playing with wood letters and shapes and learning how to carve wood!) I have less time to maintain my blog as it is currently set up. Thankfully, I am married to an incredibly talented man who happens to be an interactive designer! I have no ETA yet, but we are working on re-vamping my blog and site to make it easier for me to keep up to date with my blog and pictures so it is not quite so time consuming and complicated. I will try to keep an update on our progress!
In other news, though, I have been hard at work keeping my etsy shop up to date with new cards and designs. I have expanded my shop to include gift tags and mini cards as well. Mini cards are 3″x3″ cards – folded just like a regular card, and make great gift tags and gift cards. I am working on keeping a stock of gift tags and mini cards for birthdays and the Christmas holiday season coming up! They have been selling fast so check my etsy shop often for new product!
Here is a quick peek at some of the cards and gift tags I have listed in my shop right now!
Last fall my mother-in-law discovered a wonderful lady here in Boise that designs and cuts shapes and words/letters from MDF (medium-density fiberboard). I think she found her through a local scrapbooking store who was featuring some of her work. Anyway, Nicole of Sweet Pickle Designs cuts out these adorable shapes and words from wood and then decorates them with paint, paper and other sorts of decorating embellishments (i.e. ribbon, buttons, etc). She has an etsy shop called Sweet Pickle Designs Co where she sells a select few of her creations pre-decorated, but my MIL and I have been ordering just the wood for a while now – and doing custom shapes and words! (Nicole even featured some of Connie’s (MIL) creations in her blog this month!)
Here are a few of the projects I’ve been working on – some of them are for our house and some I am giving away to family and friends. (and as always I’ll do custom work!) It’s difficult to see in some of these pictures, but the edges of all the wood pieces are painted with a coordinating acrylic paint. On my facebook fan page are additional pictures as well as pictures of a recent chipboard accordion album I made!
I apologize in advance for the quality of some of these pictures! Our apartment doesn’t have good lighting at all!
Thanks for creating with me!
It has been a few months since I have updated my website and I apologize. I have been updating my facebook fan page much more regularly since it’s a little easier to just pop a couple pictures on there.
In my last post, I mentioned I am working on a large custom order for 6 custom-designed chipboard word albums. I posted the first two LOVE albums in that post and am delighted to announce that I have finished the third album, PEACE, and am currently working on the 4th, FAITH. I updated my portfolio, facebook fan page and flickr page with pictures of PEACE. I hope you like them! The theme for PEACE was earth tones with an emphasis on orange and silver. I fell in love with the Sophia line from SEI (Sew Easy Inspirations) and felt it was perfect for the album. The Sophia paper has an assortment of coordinating embellishments like rub-ons and cardstock cutouts that I used to decorate the album, along with various pieces of ribbon, paper flowers and silver brads.
Tomorrow or Friday I hope to have FAITH finished, pictured posted for you to see! Please share with your friends and family! I would love to have more orders for these books! As long as the word is 5 letters or less, I can custom design any word you wish (please no profanity). I am currently charging $20 per album for these projects. Please contact me with any questions!
Thanks for creating with me!
We’re into the Holiday season now! Normally I do a lot of designer, individual Christmas cards for my shop, but with getting sick for almost 3 weeks last month, I did not get a chance to put any together! I do have a few single Christmas cards in my shop, as well as a few 6-card sets. Handmade cards make amazing Christmas cards – they mean so much more than store-bought and show that you truly made the effort on your friends and family this year!
I received a couple fantastic custom orders this month for some really fun projects I’m excited for! The first order was for 6 custom word albums; each album is a different word, decorated with a different theme. I have the first two albums finished and have posted pictures for the first (LOVE album with a green theme), as well as the second LOVE album, this one with a black, white, red and silver theme. I am hoping to get all these albums finished by early next week! I am so far having a lot of fun with these. It is a lot of work cutting everything out manually from the illustration board, but doing the entire thing custom makes it that much more special!
In addition to these custom albums, I got a custom order for two picture frames! I have decorated picture frames before, but haven’t done so in a while and I’m really excited to go at them again! This custom order is for another friend of mine who is expecting her first baby in January. One frame is for her nursery (in a sailboat theme, I love it!), the other is for her mother-in-law. I have some great ideas for the nursery frame and I’m excited to see how it turns out!
I will also have a couple Thank You cards posted to my shop, hopefully this afternoon that I put together a couple weeks ago and just haven’t had the time to post them!
Check out my Portfolio page to see the custom word albums!
Thanks for creating with me!
L7Designs is on Facebook! Thanks to my wonderful fans, friends and family I was able to secure my very own page name for my Facebook fan page! Go to http://www.facebook.com/L7Designs and become a fan!
I do a lot of updates on my facebook fan page of new products, things I’m working on, upcoming sales and other shop announcements! (Like the sale I am having next week to celebrate the birth of my niece, Hannah!)
Thanks for creating with me!
L7 Designs was featured in a PINK Hope Treasury on Etsy.com for Breast Cancer Awareness!
Check it out by click on this link or copying and pasting it into your browser: http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list_west.php?room_id=72782!
Thanks to Karenskitch.etsy.com!
Oh boy this has been the month for illness in our house! This past week, both my husband and I were extremely sick with the flu (I could have used a nice get well card!). Yesterday was the first day for an entire week that I felt relatively healthy enough to sit at my craft table and make some cards. Let me tell you, it has been miserable! But I am happy to say that we are on the road, albiet slowly, to recovery. I realize I am about a month behind in getting any Christmas cards posted to my etsy shop, so that is what I will be working on this week!
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