Easy Handmade Christmas Crafts For Kids

It’s no secret to those who know me that Scrapbooking Directions is a hobby site.  I would love to be able to devote all of my waking hours to making it MUCH more than that – but in all honesty, I would miss the other work I do, too much to do that.   So I do a little of this and a little of that to make myself complete.

So if you are asking,  what this other work is…I will share it with you. For starters, I help Small Businesses get more traffic, more leads and more sales on their websites.  I do this in many ways – which are (on the most part) customized to the needs of each unique client.

But I also author and co-author a lot of educational eBooks as well.  One of the most recent that I worked on was for one my client Ornaments And More - they specialize in Personalized Christmas Ornaments  — and their ornaments are amazing.  So amazing that I personally order somewhere between 10-15 new ornaments every year.

Anyhow…the eBook I worked on for them was Easy Homemade Christmas Ornaments - this book is remarkable!  It’s probably one of the best ones I’ve ever worked on.  Now I don’t take full credit for that by any means…in fact, I give most of the credit to my editor and all of the elves at Ornaments And More who provided their input, did all of the crafts with their children, took photo’s of the supplies and finished products and designed the fun and cheerful layout of the book.

I mean it – this Christmas Crafts book is probably one of the coolest Christmas ebooks on the planet!  We took the best Christmas Ornament Crafts we could find and made them current and easy enough for kids between 2-6 to make (let alone the whole family).  Some of the ornaments in this eBook are absolutely adorable!  They have button wreaths, snowglobes, glittered Popsicle snowflakes and so much more!  I highly recommend it if you are starting to get into that holiday spirit and want to involve the kids!

I am certain everyone will love making these crafts!  PLUS all of the supplies used in the books can be purchased for $70 or less at your local dollar stores!

Christmas Planner to Keep You Organized?

Today one of my nearest and dearest business collegues announced one of her most awaited products EVER! A Christmas Planner!

Veteran Scrapbooker & Professional Organizer, Sherry Borsheim has devoted her outstanding organization skills to help all of us stay organized during this busy holiday season. Now more than ever, while many spend more time at work to KEEP their jobs, and others try to plan better so they can spend less money because they have no jobs…this Christmas Planner is just what is needed!

She’s even made a very special offer to the first 50 buyers so that you can get it while its hot…

Check it out…

Christmas can be a very stressful time for many people with more commitments and things to do than any other time of the year.

The Christmas Planner is a place to organize all your lists, ideas, thoughts and plans and is reusable year after year.

The Christmas Planner is made up of:

• 21 tabs to organize all your Christmas lists, plans, baking, menus, entertaining, Christmas card list, traditions, favourite quotes, decorating measurements and so much more
• An evaluation process to help you create more meaning and less stress during the holidays year after year
• Printable forms and title pages ready for you to use today!

Simplify the holidays and focus on the things that really matter. Avoid last minute stress and be more relaxed this Christmas!

Christmas Scrapbook / Card Making Mix

Are you getting ready for the Holiday Season yet? Are you looking for a really unique and creative way to share a few treasured photo’s or stories with your loved ones (when they visit; or by way of a gift to them)?

ScrapbookingDirections.com is getting ready. We’ve combined the amazing joy we have for Card Making with the admiration and pride we take in Scrapbooking.

Together – these two skills create the perfect Christmas Cover Story.

The Christmas Cover Story is a Scrapbook Page – using a HandMade Card as a cover to the “story”.  (In other words; when the card is opened; there is a Christmas Photo (usually of the kids and Santa) and there is a warm Christmas story by way of a journaling piece on the opposite side of the card as well.

This is a great way to profile the artistic side of scrapbooking and card making – - and turn the page into an interactive experience for viewers.

As alternatives to keeping this page to yourself and locking it away in your scrapbook album (behind the covers and under a protector) – you may wish to present it as a gift to someone else.

If so…you could attach 2-3 pouches of Hot Chocolate inside the card with a warm and cozey sentiment for the holidays.   OR you can turn the card into and envelope of sorts for wallet sized photo’s of the kids (as a Christmas Gift).

**If you DO exercise the alternatives – you will most probably need to adhere the page to a canvas (purchased at a local craft store) – and package it with care so that nothing falls out of it or gets ruined in transit.

The details and step by step instructions behind this cover story will be shared in a Christmas eBook by FaveCrafts.com this year and we are very excited about the opportunity.

We will be doing a lot of external giving and sharing this year in fact.

Stay tuned for more!

Halloween Card Ideas

If you frequent this website enough you must know by now that I (Cijaye DePradine; owner of this site and the primary author) am a huge fan of all things Halloween.  I just love how UNIQUE it is.  I also love how it lends itself to creative minds across the globe.  So for this article…I wanted to feature some of those creative minds.  I am sharing some of my all time favorite Halloween Cards and Halloween Card Ideas – done by others.

That’s right – I do honor others and their fine work – wherever I can!

So here is my first – all time favorite.  It’s a Halloween Card in the Shape and Dimensions of a Coffin.

If you spend the time scrolling down on the Simple Flourishes site – you will find the details of this card.

I think Jennifer did a fantastic job with the entire project.  From the concept of course through to the  fine selection of the paper to the incredibly cool insides once it’s opened.

Way to go Jennifer; you got my attention with this Halloween Card!  Fantastic Idea!

Next in line is…this Halloween Card from Shanna at My Next 30 Years!

This card came about according to Shanna because of a Hero Arts Stamp Collection that she won!  You go girl!

But what got my attention was the insanely creative use of patterned papers here.

I love the hand made texturizing Shanna did on some but not all of the papers.  I love the 3 Dimensional effects with the tree – oh and of course breathing life into the tree with the spooky eyes!  FANTASTIC.

This halloween card is full of ideas.  In fact its awe inspiring.

I absolutely love it Shanna!  And I have that ribbon too!  I might just have to scraplift a little from you and add that ribbon to my halloween card!

You are a phenomenal designer Shanna.  Thank you for showing your work to the world!

Closely following the preceeding masterpieces is from Kim Moreno at Living the Circus Life.

What can I say – there is a common theme among these cards…they are not SIMPLE.  They are creative.  They make ME wonder “How did they come up with the idea for that”?  They make me wonder how creative I can get.

One thing to note when looking for Halloween Card Ideas of your own – and reviewing those done by others – is that many of these designers that do such a fantastic job – are designers by trade.  They know color, they know spacing, they now measurement, they know textures etc.

Some are simply born with these skills – others go through years and years of schooling for it.  These designers can provide you with plenty of Halloween Card Ideas – even if they aren’t halloween cards.

I highly recommend looking at what they do and how they do it.

Analyze every spare space on the project as well as all elements.  It appears that Kim not only cleverly selected the perfect patterned papers for this project but she also brought out the sanding block to sand the edges (perhaps) and she selected the perfect place to set her white eyelets and thread the ribbon and tied that all of with a skull charm!  Nice work Kim.  I love it!

Kim has a LOT more Halloween cards on her site – as well as some fantastic other event cards.  You have to visit!

And finally for today – we have this collection of cards from Love is In the Details

These cards are pieced together from their Midnight Fog Kit. The single card on the left was pieced together by Mel Blackburn and those 3 on the right were pieced together by Lisa Tottle!  Nice work ladies.  You have all inspired me today.

This was one of the best hours ever spent in my life (reviewing Halloween Card Ideas online and choosing my personal favorites).  I am truly beside myself in admiration of your abilities.

Love it!

Happy Halloween All.

Halloween Party Invitations and Digital Halloween Titles

Are you feeling a little anxious about your upcoming Halloween Party – or Halloween Event?  Are you in charge of all the Halloween party planning?  Do you need printable halloween cards and invitations, posters or even titles that you can apply to digital scrapbook pages for display on the projector at your party?

We have just the solution for you!  Our sister site, Halloween Games For Kids has a great supply of digital halloween scrapbook items (titles and other graphics), printable halloween cards and printable halloween invitations READY for download RIGHT NOW.

Go ahead and get yours today!

 

Halloween Scrapbook Challenges

Hallow Scrapbookers….

We are finally down to the last few days before Halloween and our Scrapbooking Minds are starting to spook even us out.  We are dreaming up new layout ideas, new scrapbook page designs, new everything and anything Halloween.  But then we are hit with the “I can’t get started” bug. So what do we do?

We stop – and do a Halloween Scrapbook Challenge.

All you have to do for our Halloween Scrapbook Challenges is complete the challenge of your choice – post a summary of it here (in the comments section) and provide a link to the Image in a public gallery (you may use ours or another) and that’s it.  We will select our favorite….THEN…

Our winner will receive a free Christmas Scrapbook Digi-Kit and will be featured in our newsletter,

PLUS our top 25 winners of all challenges – will be featured in our Scrapbooking Directions Favorite challenges book – and they will ALL get that book for FREE!

Halloween Scrapbook Challenge #1 (WebSite Challenge):

Take inspiration only – from this image from Better Homes and Gardens and make it your own.  Share your finished scrapbook page with us (by leaving a comment with details here) and check back for our chosen winner.  Note: To win – you have to come up with the most creative evolution of this page as possible. That’s it, that’s all. Enjoy.

Halloween Scrapbook Challenge #2 (Image Idea Challenge):

Now this one is going to be a little trickier.  I am assuming this will be an Advanced Scrapbooking Challenge for most of you – but I encourage everyone to try!

The goal…to incorporate this backlit filigree idea (from Martha Stewart.com) into one of your scrapbook pages.

Perhaps you want to do it in a Scrapbook Title  – in a mat behind one of your primary photo’s or perhaps within a photo itself?  Hmmmm….what will you come up with?

We can not wait to see!

Again – please come back to this page and leave a comment detailing what you have done – and a link to a photo display of the final project.

We are very excited to see what you come up with!

Are you up to the Challenge?

Happy Halloween Scrapbooking!

Halloween Pumpkin Carving

If you are creative and crafty chances are very high that you are one of those types of persons who LOVES to go all out on the holidays and use your skills to create decorations around the home.  You probably set the scene with your homemade crafts for outstanding conversation pieces.   If Halloween were your holiday of choice, I don’t doubt that the care and attention you would give to Pumpkin Carving would be no different.

If you are interested in creating pumpkin carvings of your favorite celebrities, Scrapbooking Directions is very excited to say that NOW YOU CAN! We have teamed up with our sister site (halloween games for kids) to bring you one of their affiliate partners.  The pumpkin carving stencils you will find at Ultimate-Pumpkin-Stencils.com are pretty awesome. On the most part they are bang on!  They have all sorts…from Ellen Pumpkin Stencils to Lady Gaga Pumpkin Stencils as well as the entire Twilight and Glee Cast.  There are literally hundreds of different Pumpkin Stencils so we have no doubt that you will find the one you are looking for.  Click the image below to check for your favorite carving stencils today.

P.S. HalloweenGames4Kids.com is affiliated with this company not only as part of a revenue sharing agreement, but the owner of both ScrapbookingDirections.com and HalloweenGames4kids.com is actually a colleague of the owner of Ultimate Pumpkin Stencils. We would not recommend them if they didn’t have the highest possible standards in online business and customer service.  You are in good hands purcahsing through them.

Halloween Scrapbook Planning

The countdown is officially on for Halloween friends and for many of you it’s going to provide some of the best photos to Scrapbook let alone stories to share!

But do have a plan in place to maximize all that you get out of this halloween scrapbook?

For instance….Have you figured out what kind of album it will be? What kind of layouts you will create? What photos would be perfect? What patterned papers, stickers, rub on’s, accents, embellishments etc you will use?

Are you good at making lists? Maybe you can try for this project and see if it helps.

My list would probably start with what photo’s I would use. Here are some that come to mind right now….

Decorations in the house
Decorations outside of the house (our neighbors go all out each year)
The kids getting ready
Us getting ready
The final halloween costumes
The houses around the neighborhood
Our kids Opening their bags for candy
Our kids eating candy
Hubby and I sneaking candy to eat (lol)
The kids taking off the face paint
OR the kids sleeping with facepaint if we are all too lazy
And every great moment in between and after

You get the point right. The goal is get what you want from the event and make the absurd best out if in the scrapbook.

So what is your plan for this years halloween scrapbook? We’d love to hear about it- please comment.

Style At Home Organizing for Scrapbookers

Okay crafty ladies I KNOW you are going to love this one since so many of you have visited my Organize a Scrapbooking Room page,  emailed your comments and idea requests to me personally. I thank you for that PLUS I take your HINTS and offer you this as a follow up….

Today, I received my regular release of the “Style At Home” newsletter and was immediately excited to view the 99 Home Organizing tips they had to share.  You can view the page here: 99 Home Organizing Tips .  What I absolutely LOVE about this list is that it’s SIMPLE, its completely open to interpretation and for someone like myself who is really crafty – it makes me feel like I can take the tips to a WHOLE new level and make them EVEN BETTER than their original form.

For example…

Tip #1 suggests to :  ”Use old baby-food jars to hold spices. Stash them in a drawer upside down so this recycling trick looks sleek, not cheap. ”   Being a Scrapbooker, I immediately envisioned spray painting the lids and creating customized circular label tags that I could adhere to the top with the name of each spice on them.  I also envisioned creating labels for the jars themselves and laying them on their side – label up in the drawer.

This weekend in fact, I turned an old, unused IKEA Billy CD rack into a spice rack.  I love how it looks now, but can totally see the baby food jars looking amazing in them too! I might have to get another for the other side of the Billy Bookshelf I placed beside it (this will balance the display wall out better too). IKEA here I come!

Another thought that just came into my mind as well – is how great those baby food jars would look with my insane stock pile of buttons, brads, clips and fasteners in them too.   I could even see a use for at least 4 more of these IKEA CD racks to display those accents for easy access.

WOW!  What a fun little project each of these would be and how NICE my assortment of accents would look on display somewhere!  Sooo COOL!

Next… Tip #2 was to: “Store all your instruction manuals in one binder in the kitchen or pantry.”  Okay – admittedly I am pretty bummed that I never thought of that one.  I have drawers and baskets all over my house containing warranties and instruction manuals – but placing them into an album (that I could pretty up the cover for) is such a great idea!  I can even go to town scrapbooking title pages onto page dividers so that I can sort the contents by “appliance” or “electronics” — OH YAY!  I am even MORE excited now! Yet another really cool project to do that will make something plain and boring look way better!

Tip #3 was to: “Collect your takeout menus in a binder. Or stuff them into a Ziploc bag and stash ‘em – where else? – on the fridge or in a cupboard.”  Now instinctively I jumped right to the idea of Scrapbooking another customized album for these loose papers that will forever be on an expiration list – but then I was conflicted about how I would sort them so that when they DO expire they would get tossed.  That’s when it hit me!  I remembered the Tickler File (introduced to me by Simply Productive).  The tickler file is a really cool accordion file that  is tabbed by DATE and MONTH.  So using this I would have CHOICE to sort by MONTH first and then depending on what month it is – I could move each stash to the exact DATES each coupon is to expire.  All I need to do with this filer is customize the cover.  Awesome!

Tip #43: “Those ubiquitous Danish butter cookie tins can be both an art project and art storage unit for kids. First let your child decoupage it. Then use it to hold crayons and pastels. ”   I use these for my embossing powders, colored wires and for my brushed velvet glitters. It’s absolutely perfect for these!  A little spraypaint on the exterior and some decoupaged paper piecing / titles and labels etc. goes a long way to turn these handy tins into the BEST scrapbooking supply organizers ever!

Anyhow…I am sure you can find inspiration in this Home Organizing list too.  Please comment if you have something new to add.

 

 

 

Halloween Scrapbooking Ideas

Halloween is FAST approaching and before you know it – it will be here. So what are you going to be doing for Halloween? Do you plan a big halloween party? Do you create your own posters or hand made halloween invitations? Perhaps you create or decorate halloween treat bags? Or even MAKE halloween treats as well?
Whatever you do it must be wildly creative and fun for you; otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it right…

So we decided to show you OUR Halloween Fun side too. Here are our top 3 Halloween Decorating Ideas to get the fun started today….(there will be more to come as the days go by).

=========================================================================== Hanging JackOLanterns Anyone?

Find as many of these regolit lampshades from Ikea ($4.00 USD) as you can fellow crafters and get the orange, yellow and black paint out so that you can turn your lampshades into REALLY cool pumpkins for display in or even outside the home on halloween eve. They are just soooo cool! They scream Halloween don’t they? EXTRA COOL TIPS: Try hanging these shades from a string of other lights (such as white christmas lights or halloween bulbs bought at specialty stores) and get the light flowing too. Also – if you want to get the kids REALLY going – add some Glow In The Dark paint for the eyes and mouth! ===========================================================================

NightMare Before Christmas Tree Of Your Own?

Now what about this. Start looking at that pot holding the ultra chic branches for design in the house a little differently for this Halloween… Why not turn them into your own personal “Nightmare Before Christmas” tree – and get the decorated sachets or remodelled (painted in halloween colors) christmas balls up! TIP: You may also want to make your own ghosts with stuffed cheese cloth or linen and wraphia nooses around the neck….and hang those too. ===========================================================================

Try This Mini Scrapbook Album with a BIG Spookiness About It.

Your halloween mini scrapbook album could be really creepy like this one … or it could be full of fun colors and cooky critter accents. Its entirely up to you what you do with your mini album for Halloween. If you get started your Halloween Mini Album today – and you have a solid plan for that Halloween Scrapbook Album – when you get the kids ready on Halloween you will know exactly what photo’s to take, why and in what sort of modes (tones , colors, angles, fstops etc)…and all you have to do is print, crop and place them later! TIP: We have the perfect Halloween Scrapbooking Papers for your album too! ===========================================================================

Halloween Scrapbook Titles In Need?

Try these Halloween Scrapbooking Titles in that Mini-Album too! With a little cracked glass, glossy accent or 3D foam – you can take these digital images to a whole new dimension on your Halloween Scrapbook Pages! ===========================================================================

What about READY made Halloween FUN STUFF for the Kids?

On another note; if making the time to be a creative designer or decorator this halloween is NOT on your side but you still want to have fun this year – in a creative way …you may wish to consider our Ultimate Halloween Party Collection for some cool treats! Included in this Halloween Party Kit are 96 pages of Halloween Games for Kids. Over 200 pages of Halloween Recipes and Crafts for ALL AGES, Halloween Safety Tips and 3 Free Printable Halloween Cards /Invitations. All for the incredibly low price of $14.99 (before discounts are applied)!!! ===========================================================================

Happy Hallo-Scrapping Crafty Peoples… :O)

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