Holiday Home Tour

The Noblesville Preservation Alliance offered a delightful holiday home tour. Inside, the homes were filled with gorgeous decorations. Outside, the intermittent snow completed the look. It was a picture postcard kind of a night.

Readying Our Home for the Holidays

Decorating for our first holiday season in our new home has been very enjoyable. I purchased a few new items, brought out some of the old, and created some things too.

One of my new finds is this Santa bag from the Home Goods store. It was difficult to choose a design as there was a fabulous assortment of them there.

Builders Home Tour

Each year toward the end of September, there is a builders home tour in my area. Do you enjoy looking at the latest home building and decorating ideas? I sure do! Even though we just moved, I was interested to see if I could pick up an idea or two for my new house. Let me show you what I found.

New Home Porches

Dragon Boat Woven Holiday Ornament

Time to brag again about our local library that offers outstanding craft classes! Last evening we made a dragon boat woven holiday ornament. This is how mine turned out.

June Art Class: Door Knobs

At our tables we were greeted with a special treat: a popcorn-filled jar that served as a wedding table favor from a group member's daughter's wedding.

May Art Class

There are always 3 parts to our monthly art class: swapping artist trading cards, sharing the pages we made for a circle journal and making a project.

Here are artist trading cards I received from my friends. Since we made envelopes with the Envelope Punch Board last month, our trading cards reflected what we learned from that. So our trading cards this month were little envelopes with notes inside.

April Art Class

In April, we created some interesting pieces with the Envelope Punch Board.

Make It/Take It: Thanks Mom!

Last evening I attended a craft event at the local library. It was to make this spinning photo cube for Mother's Day. We were told to bring 4 photos that were 3 3/8 inches square. Of course I waited until the last minute to find my photos. So I got out a box of random photos and found 4 oldies but goodies. They seemed to coordinate well together so I decided to give them a try. Also, they were already 3 3/8 inches square. That's the size that photos used to be when I was a kid. 

Here I am in the 70s with my little sister 8 years younger than me. Isn't she adorable?

What is Gamsol?

I'm a bit behind on posting what we've been doing in my monthly art class. We created this framed layered flower in our March art class. 

Plants for the Planet

Once again my local library presented an interesting class, this one in honor of Earth Day. It was called "Plants for the Planet." The library provided all of the materials to make this recycled vase with a Sweet William plant inside.

Leathercraft Bracelet Class

My local library offers many kinds of classes each month. I attended an Excel class in January and some craft classes too. The craft classes are free and include all of the materials needed. Isn't that amazing? The classes are normally very simple but I always learn something new. This month I attended the "Make Your Own Leathercraft Bracelets" class. I had never worked with leather before and probably never would if it hadn't been for the generosity of my library.

February Art Class - Tissue Paper Transfer

I'm really late in publishing this post, but later is better than never, right?! I think I procrastinated in creating this blog post because it is very detailed and it took me awhile to organize my thoughts. If you can hang in there with me, I think you will learn some neat things...I sure did!

In our February art class, we created a little book with a sliding cover, and decorated an egg and peat pot with printed tissue paper. The technique we used was called tissue paper transfer.

Completed Circle Journal

Last year I shared with you the circle journal I was working on each month with my friends in my Not Your Ordinary Art Class. Each month we created a page in each other's journal based on the theme each member chose for her journal.

My journal, which has the theme "Green," is now complete.  I wanted to share it with you to possibly offer some ideas in case you would like to do this with your own group. 

The printed and cut cover images of Irish kids came from The Graphics Fairy blog. I've made gift tags, die cuts and greeting cards with these cuties before.