Foiled by the Flu

When I joined Karel's Calendar Blog Hop, I hoped that I would be inspired to create a full 12 month calendar. I did my January pages and wanted to post them earlier, but the flu put an end to that! So today the 27th of January 2011, I am posting my January Calendar.

Materials:

K & Company Winter Wonderland Paper
DCWV White Glitter Cardstock
12 x 12 Clear Acetate

Cricut Carts - Cindy Loo, Lacey Labels, Winter Frolic

Copics and Atyou Spica Pens
White Sakura Gelly Roll Pen
Distress Ink Tumbled Glass

Martha Stewart Snowflake Border and Punch

Stickles
Sizzix Snowflake Embossing Folder

To me, January is usually a month when we spend lots of time together indoors, so I used a picture of my home that we took last year at the end of January. This year, looking at my window at the 18 inches of snow we had last night, it looks almost exactly like the picture above! Anyway, back to the page.



These sweetheart snowflake pixies are from Sweet November available at All That Scraps. What's great about them is that they come in Digi and Rubber. There are actually three to the collection, but I only purchased Neva and Nixie. Neva is in Blue and Nixie is in the golden colors. I went with Digi on these as I have tightened my crafting budget and want to save on storage space. I printed them out with Cryogen White cardstock from Paper Temptress. That cardstock is a dream to color with, no bleeding! Colors blend so easily and it's just beautiful. There is the slightest hint of sparkle on it which leads to a very pretty finish with the copics. You can't see it in the picture, but when you see it "in person" the faint glow is there. I wanted to pull some colors from the papers, so on Neva, above, I went with B000, B02, B04, B05 for her snowflake dress and RV09, RV17 on the accents. I used YR01 and Yr85 along with one more YR color that my dear son must have put away for me when I wasn't looking, LOL! For Nixie, I used YR14, YR21, YR24 with just a touch of Y28 in the corners of her dress. For Nixie's snowflake accent I went with RV10, YR82 and YR21. For her hair, I used E34. E39, E57 and E47. I used my Clear Atyou Spica for extra glimmer and a White Gel pen for accents. I cut the snowflake fairies out and adhered them to some DCWV white glitter cardstock that I embossed with snowflakes and inked the edges with Distress ink Tumbled Glass. The shapes I adhered them to is from my Lacy Labels Cartridge. It's a great cartridge for what I call Faux Nestabilities. I cut Family from Lacy Labels, too. I used Winter Frolic to cut the phrase Warmth and Joy, and adhered it with pop dots. I punched a snowflake border on a piece of cardstock from my stash, to frame my photo, and added stickles in the center of each snowflake. I punched some more snowflakes from scraps and used stickles on them as well. That was just the top page!

My Bottom half was really simple. I printed the days on my computer, used a piece of the cryogen cardstock for the base, cut my numbers from Cindy Loo and added a cute bird chipboard sticker I found in my stash. The fun part was how I cut the word January and the year. First I cut my letters and 2011 with Cindy Loo on my K & Co. paper, then I went back with a 12 X 12 piece of craft acetate and repeated the cuts. I then embossed my cuts with the snowflake folder. I used my Zig Pen to adhere them together. It looks so cool when you see it. Much like the snowflake pixies, my pictures just don't do them justice.

I have been trying to get my craft room organized. Ugh, some days it seems like a losing battle! One of the chores on my clean up list is to organize my stamps so that I will actually use them more often! While I was digging through a pile of what I refer to as "test images" I found this little Manga Girl from Sugar Nellie that I was using to test colors to see how they blended.

She is one of my earlier attempts using the Copics, so I decided to use her  as she was. I added a little stickles on her wand, shoes, bow and collar, cut her out and sat her on the top of the calendar grid. I think she looks sweet there.

One final note, I needed something to hang the calendar pages on, so I removed the clip from a dollar store clip board, and put it on a used Cricut mat. I used my big bite to punch a hole in each side on the top and bottom. I added some paper to the back of the mat to give it a more finished look. Then I used binder rings to connect the calendar page to the bottom. I used chipboard on the bottom page of the calendar so that it would be sturdy since it was going to be hanging. This solved my problem of not having all my calendar pages done at once!

How about a little candy?

This is was a really long post today, so for anyone who comments, I'll have a little drawing with random.org for some prima flowers and a cute little pixie stamp. I'll announce a winner on Sunday. Don't forget to leave me a way to reach you if I don't already have an email addy for you!

Happy Crafting!

Colleen