Making spirits bright

You might like to take the above scan and crop, tint or do whatever with it yourselves!

Today is the day I will get our Christmas preparations underway, and about time too or it will be Valentines Day as someone reminded me this morning when I mentioned our tree isn't even up yet! I have bought two magazines recently both full of Christmas ideas and one had a sheet of striped paper included (Australian Better Homes and Gardens) and the other (Australian Home Beautiful) a sheet of gift tags with quite nice designs. What to do?? First I scanned the tag sheet and made it black and white, cropped, copied and pasted onto a Word document to make my cards, then I tinted it two colours that toned with the striped paper and printed my cards out. Next I cut striped stars with my Fiskars star cutter and glued it on the 'O' in JOY and placed a layer of translucent paper over and stitched it on with silver thread on the sewing machine. I wrote a family Christmas letter and a festive message and printed out a card insert, trimmed and glued these in place and after a whole day I have three dozen handmade cards! Oh, also worked out my new printer and have addressed my envelopes as well. Now this may not seem too amazing to the scrapbookers out there but for those who know me I don't work well with paper and glue, so I am feeling pleased with myself.