Christmas In July - Part 2

I believe I mentioned in my last post we were having a holiday dessert party which we needed gifts for to present to our guests.  Having a party also required invitations to notify everyone of our event, giving us another creative opportunity.  The budget was tight so my daughter and I decided to create our own invites made from all the supplies in my studio; we wanted to see how creative we could get without spending any additional money.  I pulled out all my holiday scrapbook papers, dimensional stickers and ink stamps to see what would go with our theme.  Here is what we made.

Once we looked at all our goodies we decided on a large postcard format for the printed part of the invite then cut a border print of the scrapbook paper to frame the printed cardstock keeping in mind the finished size of the envelopes they would go into.  It took several sets of dummy cards to get all the dimensions just right but it was worth a little effort to make sure we did not waste our supplies.  Once they were assembled we picked out the dimensional stickers to coordinate with each paper; we used three different paper prints making each invite very unique.  They came out so cute and they were very easy to make and assemble.  The same format could be used with any invite for all your upcoming occasions.

Once we put them in the envelopes we thought they looked a bit dull so we pulled out the invites and grabbed some ink and Christmas stamps then went to work stamping the envelopes, what a great time we had, we also stamped the back flap of each envelope to give it more festive cheer.  (Take note: if you embellish your invites you may need extra postage, we found that out the hard way as all the invites were returned to us for more postage, what a pain that was!)  We got a lot of positive comments on our handmade invitations making it worth all the time and attention we put into them.

Speaking of the Holiday Dessert Party, here are a couple of the photos of the table.

We kept the table decorations minimal letting the decadent desserts speak for themselves, YUM!!!  A “SWEET” time was had by all!

I have one more quick little decorating project to share with you to get you thinking about a little early creative holiday crafting.  Because I love to decorate for Christmas I usually make at least one new thing each year, sometimes it is a big project sometimes just something small.  Last year I wanted to find something a little elegant to dress up the chandelier hanging over the dinning room table.  I looked at a lot of stuff on the Internet and in the stores but I just could not find the right thing.  I went to Michael's for inspiration and found some tiny pre-decorated wreaths, believe it or not it was in the summer when they very first put out the Christmas supplies, the best time to buy since it goes fast and by September most of it is gone.  The wreaths were a bit basic so I purchased some red and gold embellishments to add some bling to each one. Because the red and gold berries were on floral wires all I had to do was wrap them into the wreaths.  I placed a wreath around each arm of the chandelier and added some dangling crystals, very elegant, unfortunately I cannot find the photo of them on the light fixture, darn it.  This year the wreaths will have to find a new home since we moved the dinning room table to a different spot and have not figured out how to move the chandelier to that spot without doing some costly electrical work.  Maybe I will place them around the candlesticks, something to think about.

Thanks for letting me share Christmas In July with you.  I hope you feel inspired to get working on some of those creative holiday gifts and decorations very soon. I know I am! I have already started making some fun Christmas gifts for all the ladies of the family.

See you soon.

Laurette