Easy Neighbor Gifts

This holiday season is all about giving right? Right. I wanted to get our neighbor gifts ready early this year (HA! it's not even December yet), and I decided to go with an easy gift that has cute word play. My mom always made these (along with plates of goodies to hand out to neighbors), and I wanted to copy her. 

All it takes is some cheap wire whisks (i got mine from Walmart-pack of 3=under$3) and some Kisses. Well, you can see I used hugs. I obviously wasn't thinking straight when I got to that candy isle. I LOVE Hugs...so Hugs it is...

just pretend they are Kisses, okay?



Wrap a small handful of Kisses in some Cling Wrap, and maneuver them inside the whisk like so:

Then I got on my computer and printed out the phrase: "We "whisk" you a Merry "kiss"mas!

Cut them out and grabbed my washi tape(i got mine from Target).

I tore off a long peice, and folded it over. Then I glued the cut out phrase to the tape, and cut the end of the tape to look like a little banner/flag:

Punched a hole through the left end...

Threaded some ribbon through, tied it up, and ta da:

You've got your neighbor gifts all ready to deliver!

Christmas Vinyl

So there's this spot above my sink that has been in desperate need of some lovin', and I finally got around to it the other day. I liked this craft because it was super fast, yet looks super cute. I already had the red wreath, but it looked lonely and too small to stay there by itself. When this little phrase popped into my head I knew exactly what to do with it!

Here's how:
I wanted a classy font and a fun font. I chose Lucidia Handwriting for "'tis the season", Century Gothic for "to be", and LDJ Kris Kringle  for "Jolly".



Because the Lucidia Handwriting font is "cursif-ey" (i know, not a word..) the letters touched and there was overlapping that was going to occur, which meant that cutting into letters, where letters weren't supposed to be cut was going to happen. I fixed that easily by tracing the whole phrase. See how it's blacked out up there along the right side? Doing this also made it WAY easier for me to put it on the wall (phrase vs individual letters). Here's where I got stupid-HA-and I'm pretty embarrassed about it: I wanted to still have the letters with "spaces" (the s,e,a,o) be cut out, but I didn't know how. So I just typed up those letters (underneath the blackout phrase) thinking that I would just take out that letter and use it for the above....have I lost you? Ha ha. I know. I'm ridiculous. Anyways, in the end I bagged that complicated idea and just stayed with the blacked out (traced) phrase. I added the "to be" phrase on there and cut my vinyl(i got mine at Walmart forever ago, $9-there are way better deals on Amazon for packs if you're wanting to try out a bunch of different colors).



Then I just added the "Jolly" to the same paper, deleted the other phrases, and cut. I know that it'll have to come down after the holiday, but for now it's a great little touch to that little kitchen of ours!

Gingerbread Garland

Just wanted to stop in and share this simple craft with you today. I went AWOL decorating the casa for Christmas over here, and as I was pulling fake snow out of boxes and setting up mangers, I decided that a gingerbread garland would look cute in my kitchen.

So I went over to Lettering Delights to find myself a cute little gingerbread man. There were tons of cute ones, but I was looking for a more traditional shape, and finally stumbled across the Old World Christmas graphic set. Here is what it looks like:

LD: cut it sale!

Okay all you crafters, you do NOT want to miss this sale going on NOW until November 29th at midnight, MST. Seriously, Lettering Delights has the cutest cut-its around!

Just click HERE or the picture above to start shopping!

Alphabet Cards

It might seem silly that I am already making Bronx these, but I couldn't help myself. I really wanted to make him some cute animal/alphabet flash cards! I knew Lettering Delights had a ton of cute animals I wanted to use, so I headed over there, pulled out my Silhouette, and got to work.

I got all my animals from Lettering Delights BUT the alligator, kangaroo, narwhal, quail, umbrella bird, and vulture. The alligator, kangaroo, umbrella bird, and vulture I found on Pinterest, and the narwhal and quail I found on google images. I took them into the silhouette studio and traced them. Easy peasy. I also kept track of where I got each file, so if you want to do them yourself, here's the list:
(just click the pic and you'll go right to the site)

For the bird and fish:

For the cat, horse, pig, and rabbit:

For the dog:




For the elephant:




For the giraffe and yak:






For the iguana and snake:




For the jellyfish:




For the lion and monkey:




For the owl:




For the turtle and fox:




For the whale:




For the zebra:



(if you notice above, i actually cut my own zebra "stripes" freehand with sizzors)

On the back(or front i guess, however you look at it) I used the font "A Truer Blue" to cut out the capital and lowercase letters. I took the above photos before I added their names, because i was trying to decide if i wanted to free hand them or cut each animal name out. I decided to cut the names out("Ariel" font), and I added them directly underneath each animal.


I knew I wanted them laminated to make them last longer, and when I was at Costco the other week, I remembered that my mom had gotten her laminator from there. I called and asked her how she liked it, and she did, so I grabbed my own (it's the Purple Cow brand-i found it over by the ink cartridges and office stuff). Totally worth the $19.85, especially since I am going to use it for multiple projects! It was suuuper easy to set up and use too (ha-i'm always nervous for that part!).



Here they are all done and laminated! I'm so excited to finally finish this project. What I forget is that having a baby around makes everything take 10x longer. ha ha. So instead of busting this out in an afternoon, it took me like 2 weeks. The baby's definitely worth it :) I sat down with little B today(4months yesterday!) and went through them all, and he loved looking at the colors!

Essie vs China Glaze...

I posted this over on my family blog,

but realized it should have gone over here..

I think we've established the fact that I love me some nail polish.

I'd even go as far to say that I collect it.

There is something so alluring to me about those small clean bottles of color,

which is probably why I threw down $15.50 for two bottles (yes, $7.75 each) of Essie nail polish the other week at Walmart.

Heheh.

I kinda felt guilty and sick after that expenditure.

However,

I needed to see what the big deal was.

Almost every fashion blogger loves this brand and I wanted to see for myself how "amazing" it actually was.

I am sad to report that I was disappointed.

The two colors I grabbed were "turquoise&caicos" and "sand tropez".

I tried "turquoise&caicos" first,

and it took me THREE coats to cover completely.

Uh, lame!

My "for audrey" by China Glaze covers in 1 and a half,

is basically the same color(i do love that it has my name in the title too...),

and only costs $3.29.

Dude.

All that kept going through my head while painting was this little chant:

"Rip off! Rip off! Rip off!"

I tried "sand tropez" a couple days ago and have decided it will probs be my go-to color for November.
This one covered better in two coats.
I do love it,

but that still doesn't mean I'll buy it again.

I'm SURE there's a cheaper color out there that I can find that's similar to it.

So I concluded that peeps must love the Essie brand,

which is totally cool,

but I'm a-okay with a cheaper brand.