Christmas House Swap

I participated in my very first art swap - Christmas houses. Here are the pages that I made and submitted.

Each person made ten pages and sent them to the hostess who took one from each set and bound them into a book for each of us. It was so exciting to receive the book in the mail. I will post pictures of the final book later.

I WON A BOOK!

Wow! I am so excited. I won a book give-away over at Craftside.typepad.com! Take a few minutes to go over and peruse their wonderful blog. This is the book that I won:

Over at Craftside, they were using old recycled Christmas cards to make new greeting cards. There are some great ideas. I have pulled out many of my old greeting cards and I am using them in my altered art. More pictures to come.

Lovely Give-away at Jones Design Co

There is a lovely freebie of printable gift tags and a fabulous December give-away over at  http://jonesdesigncompany.com/. You should really take a few minutes to browse her blog. She has wonderful ideas and a beautiful blog and some great tutorials.  Plus, you might win something really pretty. All you have to do is comment on her blog.  Here is a peek at one of her photos showing some of her darling gift tags.

I'm definitely going to print them out and use them this year. Have fun and good luck!

Putting Up the Tree

Our annual tradition is to put the Christmas tree up the weekend after Thanksgiving, and this year was no different. I was blessed to have all three children here and Ron and Jess graciously put together the artificial tree. My camera seems to have gone on the blink so most of my pictures are blurry. But it is what it is. Each child has their own box of special ornaments along with the standard ornaments that we have collected over the years. Christmas carols were playing, and Jess insisted on retrieving the remainder of our ornaments and trim from the attic - so everyone was happy.

The final product - well, almost. Kate still has to add her ornaments. She was too busy with school to help decorate. But she was sitting nearby doing her homework.