This is what I made for the ladies at the office and for my daughters teacher. The are simply votive candles with rub ons.

I was at Micheals looking for individual glass votive holders which were nearly $1 a piece. Then I picked up the votive candles which were around .40 a piece. So I have already spent roughly $1.50 once you include tax and I still needed to buy the rub ons. Just as I was leaving the candle aisle I spotted something! A box of 12 glass votive holders with candles for $8.00 which actually only cost me $4.80 after my 40% coupon. I bought a couple different packs of Christmas rub ons for around $1 - $1.50 each and was able to make at least 2 candles with each pack. Put them in a cello back with some ribbon and a tag and there you have a nice, quick and affordable gift.

Labels: Christmas, Rub Ons

link | posted by Melissia at 9:52 PM
1 comments

I decided I wanted to do something different for the class treat this year. I really wasn't up for paper crafting, so I pulled out the plastic canvas and shipped up these kissing reindeer. They are super easy to make, but a bit time consuming. I should have known better and not waited until just a few days before I needed them to get started on them. I was up late into the night, but I got them done and to my surprise they kids loved them. They had so much fun playing with them, clipping them on their hair and clothes, making them talk. It was great!


You squeeze their cheeks and they give you a kiss.


I had picked these cute stacking jelly candy sticks and added a little stamped tag to them.


I decided not to make Christmas cards this year and felt guilty for not getting use out of any Christmas stamps, so I stamped the tags.

Labels: Christmas, Plastic Canvas, Sewing, Treats

link | posted by Melissia at 9:41 PM
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I have made a few of these in the past and they are always fun to do, not to mention VERY quick and simple. I made this to hold my gift for the office party.

You start with an empty paint can that you can purchase at most builder stores like Home Depot and Lowes. I wrapped it in 2 12x12 pieces of paper that are cut down to fit the height of the can. A white strip of white cardstock, cut with scalloped scissors to give it a ruffle effect for the trim on the enter of the coat. 2 pieces of black card stock to go around the can for the belt and cut out square for the belt buckle. You can buy a small feather boa from most craft stores and probably fabric stores. I cut 2 pieces to size and glued them around the top and bottom for fur trim on the coat. I never know what to put on the lid so I just cut a circle and put some white letter rub on's on it. The handle is carefully removed and covered with pony beads (or you can tie a bunch of ribbons around it). And that's it!! I use double sided tape when attaching paper to the can and glue when attaching paper to paper.

Labels: Christmas

link | posted by Melissia at 1:30 PM
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I am just thrilled with the way this years Valentine treats turned out for my daughter’s class. I can not take credit for design however. Let me tell you the whole story about these treats.

It started in January of 2009 when I picked up the froggy cello bags from the dollar spot at Target. I had nothing special planned for them, just put some candies in them and add a little V-day bag topper and send them to school for V-day treats. Well for some reason I decided not to use them (or perhaps by the time I got around to doing the treats I had forgotten about the bags I had bought a month earlier). Whatever the case, they were still in my cabinet a year later and I had not given them a second thought. That is until I was scanning my blog line feeds one day and came across a project that not only used the very same frog baggies, but had made a matching bag topper that was so irresistibly cute that I had to lift the idea.

There was just one small tiny problem. I didn’t know what size punches she used to make the frog and I don’t have punches in various sizes, so I had a hard time gauging the size of Mr. Frog. Thankfully, there were only 3 different shapes used to make the frog (circle, oval, flower), all of which my Cricut can cut. The problem is that my Cricut only cuts the 3 basic shapes from 1 to 5.5 inches. After cutting a circle for his pupil at 1” it was obvious that it was going to be too big. So I had to be a little more creative. I had the right punch to make the ovals which were for his mouth and legs so really it was just the 4 different size circles that were going to give me trouble since I only had a circle punch that would be the right size for the one on his belly.

To make the other 3 circle sizes I used the In My Garden cartridge. If you have that one you will see that the flowers on the top row of the key pad have various size circles for the inside of the flowers. Since the actual flower would cut at 1”, the inside will cut smaller of course. So I played around with the different circles and different sizes and was able to come up with the right size for the remaining 3 circles. Brilliant I must say!! (and also a little bit of a pain in the arse as well.)

The toes for the frog were also cut from one of the flowers on the same cartridge. This wasn’t too difficult to figure out because I had seem people use flower punches to make toes several times before. It was just a matter of looking at the different flowers on the cart. to see which petals made the best toes. I was able to cut both sets of toes from 1 flower.

So, I got the shapes figured out and the frog put together to closely match the example I had. I used some pop dots for the body/mouth for a little dimension. I cut a the hart with my Cricut as well and stamped some little swirley things on the cardstock with a retired SU background stamp. The “Hoppy Valentines Day” was printed on a clear label because I didn’t feel like fussing with trying to print it on the cardstock. All that was left was to fill the bags with some heart shaped candy. I went to Wal-Mart in search of some hearts and while looking in the V-day aisle I saw some cut pink animal marshmallows. I think they were cats, but that doesn’t really matter. Behind those were some blue ones that may or may not have been puppies. Again, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that behind those I found the green frogs!!! How perfect do these frog marshmallows match the whole packaging I just made for the treats?!?! I was amazed at my luck. So I snatched up several of the 3 pack marshmallow frogs and a bag of chocolate heart candy because I new there was going to have to be something else in the bag with the frogs, or the frogs would have be lost in the cello bags.

While assembling the treats I was a little disappointed to discover that a green frog printed on the cello bags was in just the right spot to cover up much of the little candy frog. I wanted the candy frogs to be clearly visible in the bags, so I did the best I could and placed a piece of white cardstock in the bag and used double sided tape to stick the heart to it and placed the frog along side the heart. This allowed for the frog to be moved over enough so that the frog on the bag was not “toad”ally (get it?) covering the candy frog.

I folded the bags up tight and small so that the frog wouldn’t have a lot of room to move during transport and used some green staples to attach the bag topper. On the back of the topper my daughter wrote each child’s name along with her own.

Labels: Treats, Valentines

link | posted by Melissia at 1:05 PM
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The witches shoe is another tutorial I found online with a pattern. Another project I expected to be a lot more difficult that it was. It is just cut 2 pieces, the inside liner and outside. The only difficult part of this project was getting the liner to match up right once you folded the shoe up. I think the liner pattern might have been a little off. I could never seem to cut it to fit just right. There would always be some black showing with the pieces came together. Not the end of the world, but a bit frustrating. I wish I could have thought of more creative ways to decorate the outside of the shoe, but anything I tried putting on it just looked wrong. I placed a bag of home made Halloween mix in each shoe and these were given to my co workers. The Happy Halloween and Witch Hat stamp on the baggie tag were from the Halloween set mentioned in my previous post.

Labels: Treats

link | posted by Melissia at 9:21 PM
3 comments

A quick card I made to go with some Halloween treats for my niece and nephew. I don’t know how well you can see it, but I used black stickles on the web. I really love using stickles and really need to start using them more on my cards. And I am proud to say that I used stamps that have been sitting around for a while and had not been used before. The stamp was $1 from Michaels that I picked up last year just because it was 25% off and surely I would need a spider in a web stamp at some point in my life, right? And who can pass up a .75 cent stamp? The Trick or Treat stamp came in a kit that I had bought on clearance probably 3 years ago and believe I actually used this one other time before.

Labels: Card, Halloween

link | posted by Melissia at 8:58 PM
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I had seen these on a craft blog with a little tutorial and thought they were so cute. I was worried they would be very time consuming and as usual, I waited until the near last minute to start working on them. The tutorial actually had you making them a bit bigger than what I did them. I only wanted to put a little bag of candy in them so I cut down on the height of the pumpkin. Surprisingly they did not take as long as I thought. I still ended up having to work on them well into the night to get them done, but it gave me something to do and reason to be crafty.

Labels: Halloween, Treats

link | posted by Melissia at 8:48 PM
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This birthday card was made for a friend. I had seen some really cute cards lately using the postage stamp template and it occurred to me that I have that template. It doesn’t have the current postage amount on it, but so what? I want to make some more cards with the postage template so I will see if I can fix that.

The cupcake stamps are again something I am using from my stash for the first time. These are from the clear $1 stamp packs from Michaels. The Happy Birthday is a SU stamp that most certainly has been used many, many times. It is such a great size to fill up an empty spot on a card. I embossed the dots on the card with my Cuttlebug (something else that does not get used as often as it should). I used SU chalks for a little color around the cupcakes. I thought it turned out pretty cute.

Labels: Card

link | posted by Melissia at 11:34 PM
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I made these for my daughters class for her birthday treat. I wrapped Reese's PB Cups with pattern paper and crimped the ends. I wrapped a thin strip of solid cardstock around the middle and topped it with a scalloped circle. The cupcake stamp is one from Michael's dollar spot colored with pencils.

Mini pinatas that I made for her Build A Bear party using the new SU Build A Bear stamps.


Cupcake toppers also made for the Build A Bear Party using the SU Build A Bear stamps. I cut them out and glued them to a toothpick.

Labels: Treats

link | posted by Melissia at 2:24 PM
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This is the last week for summer camp for my daughter. I made the ever popular scalloped sandwiches for all of the staff. I am not exactly sure how many workers there are but I made 80 of them which I am sure was plenty. Very cheap thank you gift. I bought 2 bags of chocolate mints at the dollar store along with the basket. I weaved some ribbon that I had through it to cover up leaves that were painted on it. And of course I had the paper, stamps, inks and markers. I printed a thank you note off the computer, cut it with deco scissors and tied it to the basket with ribbon. We took them in this morning and they were a big hit.

Labels: Treats

link | posted by Melissia at 8:57 PM
0 comments

I made this for a friend's birthday (I am sure she has gotten it by now so it should be safe to post this). This is kind of an out of the box for me. I don't tend to use these colors very often because I never feel like what I do with them works well. If that makes any sense.

I used some Not Quite Navy(SU) and Bravo Burgundy(SU) with some light cream color cardstock. I sponged around the cream with Close To Cocoa (SU) along with stamping the sentiment. I used burgundy ribbon and round button as well as a green heart button. I can not remember who the papers are by, but I had bought them long ago at Hobby Lobby. I used a black marker to make dots around the circles.

Sorry for the pic quality.

Labels: Card

link | posted by Melissia at 5:11 PM
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I actually took a couple hours in my craft room today and made these 2 cards that I have been wanting to make for a long time now. These cards were based on designs I saw from Dawn G (sorry I can not remember the last name).

Labels: Card

link | posted by Melissia at 9:08 PM
2 comments

These are the gifts given out to my daughters softball team tonight. Sorry for the bad color on the pictures. I forgot to put the flash on.

2x2 cards using the team colors of Navy and Pink. The girls play with yellow softballs (not white like I played with back in the day). The CCC stands for Capstone Construction Company which is the Coach's company and our team sponsor. These were for the girls and on the inside it says, "I had a ball playing with you!" and my daughter signed them.


These are bag tags for the girls to put on their equipment bags (if they want). I stamped and colored the bunny and sponged the sky and grass. I added all the girls names on them and included a small black zip tie for them to attach it with.

Very simple treat. I sandwiched the top of the pixie stix between two black scallop punches and added the punched circles which I added the 'stitches' to with a red marker. These were also for the girls.

The items above and 2 pieces of bubble gum were packaged in clear envelopes for each girl.

Cards for the coaches and assistant coaches/helpers similar to the mini ones I made for the girls. After taking the picture I added CCC to the top right corner of the pink cardstock. I wish I had used a bigger 'thank you' stamp. Cameron wrote a personal thank you note in each one. I made 5 in all.

This was the gift for the coach and assistant coaches/helpers. I probably should have taken a picture before wrapping them. It's a large plastic popcorn bucket with yellow crinkled paper filler in the bottom, 2 boxes of movie candy, 1 bag of micro popcorn, 2 suckers, 1 bottle Diet Coke, 1 bottle Sprite, a gift card for Blockbuster and the card above.

Labels: Card, Treats

link | posted by Melissia at 9:32 PM
11 comments

I haven't been doing much scrapping and stamping, but I did pull my sewing machine out a couple weeks ago and tried my hand at a few things. I don't get a lunch at work, but I have an hour between work and picking up my daughter from school so I eat lunch between the 2 places. I had been looking for a cute lunch bag. The only ones I liked were all more than I wanted to pay for a little lunch bag. So I made this round drawstring bag. The four outside fabrics came from Wal Mart. The inside is lined with a waterproof material called PUL. I probably have about $3.00 of materials in it. It did take a while to make, but after making one, I am sure I could do another in a couple of hours.

I have a water bottle carrier that I made for my daughter and some reusable snack bags that I will snap some pictures of pretty soon.

Labels: Projects, Sewing

link | posted by Melissia at 7:24 PM
1 comments

I had intended to make many more cards this past Easter, but I waited until the last minute and was only able to make a few. All of the stamped images used on the following cards were $1 stamps from Michaels. Also used were Prima and Bazzill flowers, pattern paper from DCWV, SU cardstock and a little bit of white stickles.

Labels: Card

link | posted by Melissia at 7:16 PM
1 comments

Hi! I'm Melissia. I am a wife of 9 years, a mother of 6.5 years and a program assistant for almost 2 years. I enjoy paper crafting and doing various other crafts. I also enjoy reading, blurfing, brain games and spending time with my daughter.

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