Curious Cat Bookmark

     These curious kitties will hold your place for you.

Materials:
*Cardstock in color or pattern that you would like the cat to be
*Pen
*Scissors
*X-acto knife
*All purpose adhesive and googly eyes (optional)

Directions:
*Print out the cat bookmark template given below.

*Trace the outline of the cat onto your chosen cardstock and cut out.
*Draw on "arms" for your cat, as shown in the template.
*Cut along the "arm" lines using the X-acto knife.
*Draw a face for your cat.  Add googly eyes if you'd like.

Paper Snowflake Ornaments

Materials:
*Paper snowflakes cut from either plain printer paper or from sales flyers.
*Cardstock that matches your snowflake
*Pencil
*Drinking glass
*Scissors
*All purpose adhesive
*Ribbon

Directions:
Note: for a video tutorial of how to make a six-pointed paper snowflake, see my Six Pointed Paper Snowflake tutorial.  For a pictorial tutorial, see the beginning of my Sales Flyer Snowflake Bows tutorial.
*Create paper snowflakes by tracing around the rim of the drinking glass onto the paper that you would like to make your snowflake and then fold up and cut out either using your own method or by following one of the above tutorials.
*Trace the rim of the drinking glass onto the cardstock and then cut out the resulting circle.
*Glue the snowflake to the cardstock.
*Cut off some ribbon or thread and form a loop.  Glue the loop to the back of the ornament.

Photo Ornament Holiday Card

     I love the idea of ornament cards.  Ordinary cards are nice, but it can be hard to figure out what to do with them once the holiday season is over (if you're looking for some ideas, see these three posts).  With ornament cards, you can place them on your tree and they're small enough that they take up little storage space.  However, they tend to be expensive if you buy them from a photo printing store.  Luckily for me, I figured out a way to make them inexpensively at home.

Shameless Promotion of Brian's Work Interlude

     Before I get into the heart of today's blog post, I want to take a minute to shamelessly promote my partner in crime, Brian's new coloring book because it is awesome.  It's called Maineiac Coloring (if you're unfamiliar with the term, Maineiac is another nickname for someone from the state of Maine) and it features 30 pages of his hand drawn, whimsical illustrations for you to color.  You can find a preview of it here, and if you like his work, please consider buying a copy.  If you have a colorer on your holiday shopping list, it would make for a fantastic gift and you can feel good knowing your money is going to help a couple of grad students pay for their school/living expenses.
     Now, without further ado, we return to your regularly scheduled crafting.

Photo Ornament Card

Materials:
*Patterned cardstock
*Digital photo and photo editing program
*Scissors
*All purpose adhesive
*Acid free pen
*Hole punch
*Ribbon

Directions:
*In a photo editing program (I used Jasc Paint Shop Pro), open a copy (not the original) of the photo you would like to use for your card.
*Using a white circle, frame the photo.
*Draw a white line across the bottom of the encircled part of the photo about 3/4 of the way down.
*Erase everything below the white line.
*Draw a black circle encompassing the white circle.
*Erase everything outside the black circle.  It may help to draw a second white circle and place that around the black circle and then erase so that you don't have to come close to the black circle with your erasing.
*Once it's all finished, you should end up with something like this:

*Print out your photo at the desired size.  Mine was about 2.75" at its widest point.
*Write your holiday message at the bottom of the photo (alternatively, you could add text using your photo editing program).
*Print out the below snowflake at your desired size (mine measured about 3.5" across) and trace onto patterned paper.

*Punch a hole through the top of one of the arms of the snowflake and thread the ribbon through, knotting the two ends of the ribbon together to form a loop.
*Glue your photo onto the center of the snowflake.

"Owl I Want for Christmas is You" Printable Ornament

Materials
*"Owl I Want for Christmas" printable (see below)
*Colored pencils
*Patterned paper
*Scissors
*Metallic thread
*Pencil
*All purpose adhesive

Directions:
*Print out a copy of the "Owl I Want for Christmas" printable.

*Color in the two circular owl panels and then cut out the shapes.

*Trace the flower-type shape onto the patterned paper, flipping over the template between traces and making sure to otherwise keep the same orientation of the template.  The scallops are not all even, so lining the two shapes up to fit can be difficult if not planned out carefully in advance.

*Cut out the flower shapes.

*Cut off a length of metallic thread and fold it in half.  Glue the ends to the back side of one of the flower shapes.

*Glue the second flower back to back with the first, making sure the two shapes fit together correctly before gluing.

*Glue the circular owl panels to either side of the flower shape.

Sales Flyer Snowflake Bows

'Tis the season for sales.  No doubt you've been inundated with countless flyers informing you of all the deals that are going on.  Instead of tossing them, use these brightly colored advertisements to make bows for your holiday gifts.  I got the idea for this craft from this site.

Materials:
*Sales flyers, magazine ads, or other brightly colored paper scraps
*Pen
*Drinking glass
*Scissors
*Brad
*Washer
*All purpose adhesive

Directions:
Note: for a video tutorial of how to make a six-pointed paper snowflake, see my Six Pointed Paper Snowflake tutorial.
*To create a six-pointed paper snowflake, choose a portion of the advertisement that you would like to use for your snowflake.  Place the glass over this space and trace around it to get a circle.

*Cut out the circle.

*Fold the circle in half.

*Fold over about 1/3 of the half circle, such that the resulting shape looks like two triangles of equal size.

*Fold the resulting shape in half to get this shape:

*Cut out triangles, semicircles, squiggly lines, etc from the folded shape.  Do not cut out the center.

*Unfold and you now have a paper snowflake.

*Repeat the above steps to create a second paper snowflake.

*Glue a washer to the center of one of the snowflakes and slide a brad through the center of the other.

*Slide the brad through the center of the second snowflake.

*Pull the two snowflakes together and fold over the prongs on the brad.  Now you have a colorful snowflake gift bow.

Duct Tape Fall Leaves Table Runner

     I got the idea for this table runner from the duct tape leaf garland I made a couple of years ago.  If you like this craft, be sure to check out that one too.

Materials:
*Duct tape in colors of your choice
*Leaf templates or leaves and paper
*2-3 cereal boxes
*Pen
*Scissors
*All purpose adhesive

Directions:
*Print out the leaf templates given below.  Alternately, you could collect leaves of your own and trace around them to make your own set of templates.

*Choose whichever leaf templates you like and line them up along the table that you intend to place the runner on, overlapping the tips and bottoms of the leaves slightly.  You can then either measure the combined length of the leaves and compare it to the length of the table or eyeball it to determine how many of each leaf type you'll need to create your runner.
*Select one of the leaf templates.  Place about 3 strips of duct tape (or five if you're planning on cutting out two copies of the same leaf) slightly wider than the template on the inside of one of the cereal boxes, with only a slight overlap between the strips.

*Trace the leaf template onto the duct tape.

*Repeat the previous two steps until you have created as many leaves as you want for your table runner and then cut out all of the leaves.

*Line the leaves up in whatever pattern you would like, overlapping the tips and bottoms of the leaves, and then glue the tips and bottoms of adjacent leaves together.  Let dry.

Thanksgiving Family Photos Tree Centerpiece

Materials:
*2 sheets of brown cardstock
*1 sheet of green cardstock
*1 sheet of red cardstock
*Pen
*Scissors
*All purpose adhesive
*Digital photos, computer, and printer
*Markers (optional)

Directions:
*Resize the below template to the desired size and print.  Alternately, if you have a Silhouette CAMEO, you can import this template into Silhouette Studio and have your machine cut out the pieces for you.  For a description of how to use my templates in Silhouette Studio, see this post.

*Trace each of the shapes twice, except for the leaf, which you can trace as many times as you would like.  Trace the tree and the extra set of roots onto brown cardstock, the half oval shape onto green cardstock, and the leaf onto red cardstock.  Cut out your shapes.

*Line up the two tree templates and glue together the top parts, but leave the rooty bottom part unglued, like this (you can see a double image at the bottom, where it's unglued, but not at the top, where it's glued together):

*Slide one of the green half ovals between the two trees and glue the roots to it.  Let dry.

*Glue the extra root pieces to the other green half oval (see above).  Let dry.
*Once everything has dried, cut a slit in the bottom of the glued together tree template, going about halfway up the green half oval.  Cut from the top of the other half oval about halfway down.  Your two pieces should look something like this:

*Fit the two pieces together to make a stand.  Due to the thickness of all of the cardstock pieces, it will be a snug fit.  If the two pieces don't fit together in such a way that the bottoms of the two half oval pieces touch the table, cut the slits a little deeper until they do.  Once you've made sure that they fit appropriately, you can disassemble the stand.

*Crop the photos into squares, paste them into a word document, shrink them down, and print them.  This is what mine looked like when printed onto a 4" x 6" sheet of photo paper:

*Cut out the photos, leaving white space around the edges to give a Polaroid-style look.
*If you want to go for a color-dipped photo look like I did, swipe a marker across the bottom of each one.
*Arrange the photos and leaves on the tree in a desired pattern and then glue down.  Set aside to dry.
*Once it's dry, slide the two half ovals together as before to make the tree stand.