Heavenly Crafts

This month is my absolute busiest month of the year as far as work is concerned.  I end up spending all hours at my computer preparing accounts and tax returns, and the only free time I have is spent sleeping! So if comes as somewhat of a shock to find that I have gone and signed myself up for the design contest at Hummie's world!  Sleep is definitely overrated and I am sure I can squeeze some designing time in, despite having 30 tax returns to do...plus the associated accounts......

I like to make my own Calendars each year to give as gifts and usually, I buy the latest celebrate from Shabby Princess as the templates are really easy to use.  Basically each calendar is pre-formatted, like quick pages, and all you have to do is get each month;s page, add the dates and photographs and you are done. I say that like it is easy (which is it) and doesn't take long.  However, I found that it can take me two or three days (not all day everyday!) to put the calendar together.  I was looking forward to seeing what Shabby Princess came up with this year, as I love her designs, but to my disappointment she just produced calendar dates!


That left me with a real quandary, whether to use an old SO calendar template, and just change the dates, or to create my own calendar form scratch.  Well, since I have been giving the calendars to the same people each year, I didn't want to risk them checking back on earlier year's calendars to find out I re-used it, so decided to create my own calendars from scratch.  Naive as I am, I never realised just how much time it would take to do this!


Anyhow, since I am on the hybrid CT at The Studio, I was able to use loads of their kits and I started with the 2012 calendar dates from Nibbles Skribbles (I had already used these to make my desktop calendar), coupled with the 2011 8x8 calendar and templates form Julie C Designs:

Now I know these were 2011 templates from Julie, but I loved the idea of being able to put notes on the calendar, plus it came with 8x8 templates for the layout as well. How good was that?!!!  I had to squash each page template as my calendar was A4 size and took some poetic licence with each month's layout.


I used a different kit for each month and this is my final calendar.  Please excuse the quality here as I was printing on plain cardstock (I had run out of the heavy weight photo paper) so the colours aren't quite right.  I was really only printing to see how they looked and have actually tweaked several of them since then.



After spending what feels like months making the calendar, I really didn't have the energy to photograph all 12 pages, so this is the digital copy of each month:





I am really pleased with how it has turned out but the only problem now is finding the time to print another 15 of them out and then bind them!  I always have trouble with the binding as this time of year is one of the few occasions when I get my Zutter binding machine out.  Every year without fail I have to check the instruction manual to make sure I am binding everything the right way!


The kits I used were as follows:



All of these can be found at The Studio.


Let me know what you think of the calendar and if you make your own, I'd love to see your calendars.


Happy scrapping!

Life has been hectic here recently, even more so than usual!  Our daughter came back from University last night, and it was so nice to see her again, not having seen her for three whole months.  The longest she had ever been away form home before was for weekends away, so I really missed her.  We do everything together, shopping, walking, going to the pictures, the theatre, you name it, we go together, so she left a bog whole in my life.  It meant I had to drag hubbie along to the pictures to see the Three Musketeers and he was not impressed!


However, because I have been so busy with work (the 31 January tax filing deadline really does have a habit of interfering with Christmas ;), this meant I hadn't got around to finishing my daughter's advent calendar - and don't even mention the calendars for my elder two boys and my eldest's girlfriend.  they are still waiting to be cut out and stuck together......  So yesterday was spent in a combination of making the sleigh (which you will see below), preparing the church notices for today and finishing off our daughter's advent calendar.  I ended up putting the last chocolate into the calendar as hubbie and daughter got back form the station!  Talk about timing!!!!


I have also been playing around with various kits from The Studio recently in an attempt to make more Christmas cards.  After all, there are so many gorgeous Christmas kits around, why not use some of them to make unique personal cards this year?


So, I used the following kits:


Christmas cards - set 1 by Darlene H

Decadent Season kit by Julie C Designs and Paper Capers ~Designs (I fell in love with this kit when I first saw it, it is absolutely gorgeous!)






and one I have previously used, Winter's Delight kit by Lara's Digi World.  This is another gorgeous kit:








I only used a few element from each kit and this is what I came up with:

Well, I get millions of emails in my inbox each day, or at least that is how it often seems, but I had one yesterday offering a free Santa's sleigh template: 

You can get this free "Santa's Magical Sleigh" card making template from Card Carousel.  Just visit www.cardcarousel.co.uk/free/sleigh.html.  How awesome is that?  And just in time for Christmas, too!!!!


I don't know about you, but I definitely want to have a go at making one of these :).