Cafe de Paris

The theme this year is Socks in the City... which probably doesn't mean anything to you, so let me explain. For a good ten years now, we've gone to France with the family, a total of 11 of us to begin with, with additions along the way, and now we've grown to 15! As there's little space in the car we decided to buy themed presents, so everyone buys everyone else a present to do with their theme. This has ranged from, all 10 presents having to fit in a shoebox (which was decorated), each present fitting in an envelope, colours, numbers, having to fit it in a buttertub and star signs. This year, each present has to fit inside a sock, as well as having something to do with a city, mine is Monte Carlo.
Now I've got the explanation out the way,  can show you this:

This is going to hold the voucher for one of the presents, with the gap in the middle showing the voucher. I used colour pencils for the sign and then used glitter for the writing. Quite simple really! But at least now you can start thinking about the difficulties I've been having with my shopping.... how many female presents can you think of that fit in a sock and relate to Monte Carlo?! :)

Christmas Tag No. 3

When...Santa got stuck up the chimney, he began to shout...!

Half a day of school canceled because of the heating not working? Ooh, yes please! I took the opportunity to come up with this, after my brainwave of ideas in the middle of my French exam this morning :)

I used a 10 x 8cm card with curved corners. I did the chimney bricks with some orange pieces of paper, leaving some gaps in between. You can't see it very well because my phone camera's a bit pants, but I coloured the snow with light blue and grey pencils, before going round the edge with a thin line of glitter. I also coloured in Santa's legs with pencil. The fur on the top of his boots is some handmade paper with bits of glitter in and the boots are done with some patterned embossed black paper. 

Christmas Tree O Christmas Tree!

I was having a little search on Google to find some ideas for Christmas cards, and came across this website, with a lovely book tree!

So I found one of my Dad's books that he didn't like because the ending was rubbish, and followed the simple instructions on how to make it! So I sliced out a thirty page section of the book, and fold each page into a triangle shape, whilst still glued at the spine. I didn't cut the corner off but you can if you wish. I then repeated this with another set of thirty pages and used some strong double sided tape that I had to hand to stick the two halves together. Finally (which you can't really see!) I used silver paint to go over the edges of the pages, so it now glitters a bit, and made a small cylinder out of silver card to stand it on. A really simple bit of origami to make a lovely little decoration :)