holiday card retrospective 2004-2009.

Before I show you this year's cards (I've sent 10, and I have just finished writing 13 more that will go out tomorrow), let's take a little look down memory lane of past winter holiday cards.

2004 - brr snowman.


Very homemade. Not much to say about this one -- I remember having fun making them, but they're not particularly noteworthy (hah, get it?) or very impressive.

2005 - poinsettia.


This was the second design that I went through this year -- the first card I tried wrapping up like a present, but it came out looking really bad, so at the last minute I used a bunch of stuff that I already had (the lacy background paper was leftover from an envelope project that I never finished, and the poinsettia was made out of construction paper (fancy, right?)). I think the center of the flower is bits of ribbon. Crafty, crafty.

2006 - starlight mint.


In 2006 I really got into decorating things with starlight mints. I had planned on making starlight mint magnets in this style (and I did actually make a few) but then decided that they'd be too difficult to send, so I just wrapped up the painted discs and glued them to the card.

2007 - gingerbread man.


I think I like this one the best -- I made a stencil for the gingerbread man out of a 5x7 notecard and then used normal acrylic paint. My apartment had a bunch of these painted gingerbread men hanging up all over while I waited for them to dry. I had a stencil for the heart buttons too, but I think the most fun part was putting them in the vellum envelopes!

2008 - handcut snowflake.


You've seen this before (I was actually in the habit of taking pictures of crafts and posting them in this blog at this point last year) so I'll just link to last year's post.

And that brings us to this year's winter holiday card. I give you, "Let it snow":



And another view, lotsa cards:


After last year's cut out cards, I felt like I was skimping on the cardmaking this year since I wasn't spending 15 minutes per card, but in the end, I really like em. The "Let it sn_w" is a stamp that I got at Make an Impression in Bellevue Square, and the snowflake is a paper punch that I got at Paper Zone (Shoreline). The ink is a Colorcube that I probably bought in 1995 -- still good (and apparently worth the 6 bucks that I spent on it, even though it felt like a lot of money at the time)!

Hmm. Looking through these, it appears that I really like blue cardstock for winter, apparently.

christmas, christmas time is heeeere...

I saw a car adorned with this today:

(image from amazon.com.)

It's the Reindeer Car Kit!

Is it embarrassing that I think it's kind of cute? I'm not saying that I'd buy one (no, really, I don't want one), but it made me smile when I saw a little Ford Focus driving down Boren Avenue with the antlers sticking out the top of the windows and the little red nose on the grill.

Other holiday news: I finished making my cards, but have only sent about half of them. I took pictures, but I want to do a holiday card retrospective first, so I need to take pictures of past year's cards before I can post this year's. But in the meantime, here's a teaser.

The design from last year was these hand-cut snowflakes:

crafternoon 2: the sequel.

    

D hosted a crafternoon this weekend and showed me and Erma how to make earrings. D apparently used to work in a bead store (envious!) and learned a bunch of nifty techniques (she also has some very awesome tools and lots of beads/gemstones/etc.

The first style just has beads on a headpin, and then you use a pair of round needle nose pliers to make the loop at the top and wind it shut. The second (purple ones) technique that D taught us to do uses two of the headpins, but instead of attaching them directly to the earring base, you attach one at each end a small length of chain, and then attach the middle of the chain to the earring base. It looks a little more dainty, but it was slightly nervewracking to remember to attach the loop of the headpins onto the chain before winding them closed.

All in all, a very fun crafternoon -- and kind of a nice quick craft to do. I need to learn more quick-crafts (knitting is not a quick craft that you can finish a project in one afternoon) to make homemade gifts a more viable option for the holidays. I think the first pair will be a Christmas gift this year; the second pair I think I'll keep.

(Also, please ignore my neck fat; it's difficult to take a picture of your own ear.)

thanksgiving baking.

For Thanksgiving, it was requested that I make both a pecan pie and a pumpkin pie. I only own one pie dish though, so I decided to make the pecan pie as a tart -- partially because I usually find pecan pies too sweet (too much corn syrup/sugar), and partially because of the pie pan situation.

For the pecan pie tart, I used this recipe, which calls for some espresso and grated chocolate. It was delicious the first day; not as good as leftovers.


(You may be able to see some of the espresso or chocolate specs on the largest version of this photo.)

For the pumpkin pie, I just used the normal libby's pumpkin pie recipe (from the back of the can). For the first time ever, I had the right amount of filling for one pie. Usually, I end up with too much filling, but this time it worked perfectly!

The pie tasted delicious a few days after Thanksgiving (much better than it did the first day, for some reason).



Both crusts are the Mark Bittman "How to Cook Everything" basic butter pie crust recipe and they turned out pretty well also. Really interesting to see how the crust worked as a pie crust and as a tart crust (not pre-baked vs. pre-baked). I think I like it better pre-baked (which is what he recommends in the book, so it's not surprising), but that's often a little too much effort for me.

Yay for successful Thanksgiving pies! (And my blog post is only like a week and a half late!)