Birthday card for my future son-in-law...

After he receives this, I could be the cause of an engagement gone wrong!  Andy and I have an ongoing, fun, sarcastic relationship and use any excuse to whip one another.  My daughter threw him a 40th birthday party a few weeks ago and I must have said something cutting about his age (who me?  I'd NEVER say anything like that about my Andy boy!).  So the other day I had called to see how my daughter was feeling and Andy answered the phone.  Caller ID is so unfair -- he answered the phone with "I'm not talking to you!".

Okay, wise guy!  Here's a birthday card for my favorite maybe-NOT-future, son-in-law...

I created the door out of chocolate card stock and used a Cheery Lynn door die and aged it with gold and white chalk inks.  I then computerized the sign on the door and hung it with a brad.  The background wooden planks are made using a gold card stock, then rubbed with 3 different shades of brown then white.  The planks and nails are drawn in with a black Copic marker.

When you open the door, there's a Zombie staring at you. (heh! heh! - see where I'm going here?)

And here's my birthday greeting for my MAYBE-one-of-these-days son-in-law.  The font is a little wonky, but it says Birthdays are like Zombies... they just keep coming and coming until you're dead".  I used a crackle stencil and dabbed it with brown ink and edged it to age it a bit.  "Age" being the operative word here.

I think this is going to be one of those "I got the last word in" episodes.  What fun -- I can hardly wait to see what Andy's next volley will be!

Ciao for now!

Ciao Bella! 

Cascading box

Hello my friends.  My posts get fewer and fewer these days, don't they?  I'm so busy with Craft-Dee BowZ that I neglect to post on my original blog.  The only reason this is being posted  on Ciao Bella is because it does not  have a bow (shhhh!  I know that's blasphemy for me!)!  Yikes!  How could I create a project without a bow?

Having said that, this is something I had seen on YouTube quite a few years ago and I tripped across it again and decided it's time to try it.  It was more than easy!!  The toughest part is making up your mind how you want to embellish it!  I kept it fairly minimal since I'll be teaching this in December.

I've called it the Cascading Box project.  I have no idea (as usual) where I found the original and what it was called.  This was so much fun to make!  You start with a 6 x 11-3/4" piece of DP for the box base and then create four small boxes (for the inside - see picture below), origami style, and a cover.

Here's the completed closed project.  I used IO tree dies as well as the small snowflakes which were adhered and  suspended on white thread.   I just wanted some sort of movement with this project for some reason.  The ferns are also from IO.

And this is what it looks liked opened up.  Isn't it a great, fun thing to do?  And doesn't it look like the boxes are cascading, hence the name I dubbed it?

 

Here's a close-up of the box cover.  I did this using five different snowflake dies. I used dimensional tape (sometimes doubling it up) on each layer to give it the height that I wanted.   I then glittered them once they were all together by dipping a paintbrush into PPA glue and brushing it on and then sprinkling white glitter over it all.  It's really much prettier in person.  The pine boughs were done in a similar way using a frosting glitter.

Well, that's it for now.  Hope this inspires you!

Ciao for now!

Ciao Bella!