Crafty Musings by Hagit

Guest gifts/favors

 

A few days ago, I invited some good friends over , and I wanted to give them something small, just for being good friends, for showing up and celebrating with me.

 I bought the sweetest little pocket books at a dollar store, and stamped them with this friendship stamp, and then started drawing little portraits.

I've just started drawing very recently, so I'm not very comfortable or confident in my drawing, but this was fun! I just let myself enjoy this as an exercise:

 

 And I was so happy with how they turned out, that I colored them in, and stuck them on my stamped pocketbooks:

 

 I then sewed small drawstring bags to slip them into, and I was done!

 

 Here they are, all together:

 

 I loved working on these small gifts, and since I'm always looking for simple ideas for quick gifts, I collected some on a Pinterest board, for everyone to use. Here it is, my quick gifts board.

What about you? do you have any good ideas for small, simple and quick handmade gifts?

 

 

Accordion mini-album

I haven't scrapbooked in a long time, and this week I made two (double sided) accordion minis for my mom and my mother in law. Filled with photos of our son.

 It was lots of fun putting these small books together.

I thouhgt of them more as picture frames than memory keeping albums, and didn't do any journaling or add embellishments.

 Mainly paper and washi tape.

Oh and I love paper packs. I love how easy it is when everything fits together so nicely. Not everything needs to be hard, right? ;-) 

This is already the second album. The photos are the same, the layouts aren't. 

 

I thought it would be simple to make two identical albums.

 

 

Apparently, I can't do that. :)
So I played it a little more. Pages are similar, just not identical.

And here they are, ready to be gifted. 

 

 I enjoyed this so much!

Scrapbooking as therapy

Who knew scrapbooking could be this therapeutic?

I started this mini with Basic Grey Stella Ruby papers, because I've been hoarding them for so long, and I love them. It was time to use them. I decided to just start cutting and pasting, 

And then sewing came naturally, since these papers are made based on sewing patterns.

As I sat there, looking at my stitched papers, thinking what content to put on them, I remembered my (deceased) grandparents' pictures, and knew this album was made for them.

A place to hold stories, memories,

Birthday cards and letters and even CDs of family movies:

This small album holds so many pictures, stories and memories, and I'm happy to have them all saved in my personal way,

But what was even more special to me was the process. I started off just choosing pretty paper, and from there on I was swept by thoughts, reminiscing, sifting through old (dusty!) documents and letters and birthday cards (I had received from my grandparents), some from over 30 years ago.

The Guest Book

My friend, Gali, celebrated her birthday several months ago, and I made a guest book where we all wished her our birthday greetings. I wrote about this in my Hebrew blog a long time ago, but this post reminded me that I had made something similar, and I wanted to share it here too.

I had returned from Japan a few weeks before the birthday party, where I bought a Fuji Instax camera, and I really wanted to use it in a way that would not only be for taking pictures, but taking instant pictures where you actually do need them on the spot. So I came up with the guest book.

I used an old book cover, inserted a binder mechanism, and put in some scrapbooking paper. I embellished the pages lightly with some stickers and ribbon, and created lines to write on with washi tape (another something I brought from Japan! :)):

 

See the library card on the right? I love it! It's a very old book, and that card even has columns for you to write whether or not you enjoyed the book!

This another one of the pages I prepared:

And these are the final pages, with our instant pictures and birthday greetings (view larger here):

 

And the book, closed:

I really liked the outcome, I think it was a great surprise for the birthday girl, and a great keepsake from her party, with pictures and birthday wishes.

If you have other original ideas for guest/birthday wish books or original ways of using my instax, I'd love to know! share them here, I'm going to need some more!:-)

(All pictures in this post were taken by Gali)

The Proposal Mini

I have a confession to make. I don't have a single complete album at home. Certainly, I've completed quite a few albums for other people - one for my sister, one for my brother, one for my father's 60th birthday, and many others for friends' babies. But when it comes to me and my stories, I've begun the "workshops in Holland" album, the "Amsterdam" album, the one about my grandparents, the one about all the houses I've lived in, the one about the trip to the West coast two years ago - yes, I've actually bought albums and started working in all of these, but not one of them is complete!

So I've decided on a whole new concept. Forget the album. I want the stories, and they have to be small. To start off, I made a small mini about The Proposal (I'm getting married in 3 months :-). It took me one evening, I kept is as simple as possible, used old catalog pages I've been saving for years (literally. Some of the pages are from a catalog I brought back from Holland 3 years ago...), and here it is. For the cover, I used Elise Blaha's tutorial , only instead of paper, I used a card and envelopes I bought in Target, and instead of the ribbon, I sewed through the middle. I really like how clean and simple it turned out to be!

It's in Hebrew, and a bit personal, so I'll show just a few pages. Here it is empty, most of the papers are recycled from catalogs, and there's one Anahata Katkin postcard and a small Basic Grey paper as well.

Still empty:

This glassine envelope is also something I've been saving for ages. It was the packaging of a brooch I bought at Thymbyl Design on Etsy, and I liked the way the ribbon was wrapped around it. The married couple inside are on a free card, an ad for a local photographer. I liked how they look through the glassine envelope:

And now with the photos and text (Hebrew):