Wrapping it up: Making your own wrapping paper

I have been buying Christmas (and Sinterklaas, a Dutch tradition) presents over the last few days and really felt like doing some wrapping. I have been using, and loving, plain old kraft packing paper to wrap up presents. Pimping them with colourful ribbon and tags. Occasionally I had also stamped on the kraft paper with kids alphabet stamps. I'd personalize the paper by stamping the birthday boy or girl's name all over it, quite a hit I can tell you;-)

So today I wanted to try something a bit more sophisticated for a grown up Christmas present. I decided to stamp a pattern of two different Christmas stamps in bright white ink. I really love how the bright white contrasts against the brown kraft paper.

Here's how I did it:

You need: Kraft packing paper (post office or office supply store), stamps and good opaque white stamping ink.

1. Spread out the paper
2. Pick out a stamp
3. Ink up the stamp really, really well. It really pays off to ink the stamp (and not push the stamp onto the ink).
   
4. Stamp away, generously re-inking after every print you make. I did mine in relatively straight and evenly spaced lines as it seemed to fit with the clean images I was stamping but of course you can do it any way you like. I would recommend you keep the pattern quite tight so you can see it well ones you have actually wrapped something with it. 
5. Leave it to dry for a while as the paper is quite glossy and not so porous. I ended up using a heat gun to help it along a bit.
6. If you like your images to really pop out (and have lots of time) you can choose to emboss them with white embossing ink. It will look great. I made a few tags and embossed those and you can really see the difference. 
7. Wrap up your goodies....

Making the most of every scrap: Quick Kids Cards and my first shaker card:-)

Boy, it's been a while since I did some proper crafting but today was the day and it felt great! I've been meaning to have a go at two things for a while:

1. Using my son's foam letters to make kids birthday cards and
2. Making some sort of shaker card.

And today was the day:-)

I really like making cards for kids but I approach them a little different than I would a card for an adult. I try to keep them simple, fun and attractive. And if at all possible made of basic inexpensive materials that could possibly inspire them to make something similar themselves and wouldn't make their parents feel too guilty about tossing them either;-)

The cards you can see above fit al those criteria really well. They're birthday cards for three girls aged between 4 and 6, the age in which, in The Netherlands, reading, writing and learning your ABC's is a big part of your life so hence the use of these glittery letters. These came from a big jar of glittery letters I bought for my son but he is never interested in them so they now finally have a good use:-) The squares were all punched out of scrap card- and scrapbooking paper and I used a stamp for the sentiment*. I made these three cards in about an hour and a half (including punching out about 40 or so squares to be used on future projects).

I then still needed a card for a 2 yo boy and I really wanted to make something that would be appealing to him. Now boys really like touching and trying things not just look at something 'pretty' LOL so I had a go at making a shaker card. It was my first ever and I am quite pleased with how it turned out:

The background is made of paper scraps again and I really LOVE it. I used an old overhead projector sheet (same as I used for my Silhouette Stencils) as the window and glued it to the paper frame with superglue just to make sure it couldn't come undone and all the contents spilling out. I filled up the space in between with assorted sequins, the turtle and octopus are glued to the background. I then used double sided tape to attach top and bottom. I only had really thin tape which means there is not a lot of space between window and background so it doesn't shakes very vigorously but it is still interesting for little curious boy I'd think. But I am really going to look for some thicker double sided tape to  create a bit more air. But all in all I am very happy with my first attempt.

* Fijne Verjaardag = Happy Birthday 

Ik vind je Lief = I think your sweet