Holiday Happiness Blog Hop!

Happy Holidays everyone!! We hope your season has been filled with goodness and of course, lots of crafty time!!  This month the Sparklers Design Team, Tuesday’s Talent~Sarah McClellan and I have an inspiration filled blog hop for you.  Grab your favorite hot beverage (if you’re freezing like we are in the Midwest) and relax while you tour our blogs.  

Here’s today’s line up just in case you get lost along the way.
Jody @ SpiegelMom Scraps <<< you’re here!
Kat Benjamin
Sarah McClellan
Louise Gannon Forsyth
Charity Feit

It’s been a wonderful year and I’ve been working hard to bring you some fabulous new products. One of the favorites are my new Birds of a Feather Felties!! These beauties are die cut from a high quality wool felt and perfect for embellishing your scrapbook pages, cards, Project Life spreads and more!! Here’s a look at the debut colors before I show you my layouts today.  Check out this little gallery for the new goodies!

Ok, now for my blog hop layouts!!  For my first layout, I attached a few different colors of Birds of a Feather Felties using my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher and tacky glue.  I also think running them through the sewing machine would be fabulous!! The other brand new felt die cuts are my Cloudy Days Felties. I love their soft fluffiness.

These photos were taken in October when our youngest daughter met my Nana in Florida for the first time. They met on Nana’s 85th birthday and it couldn’t have been more special for us all!  I used Dear Lizzy Serendipity collection papers, along with various other embellishments.

Here are a couple close ups so you can really see the beautiful texture of the felt feathers and the cork hearts.

My next layout is a blast from the past, 4 years ago to be exact.  This photo was taken when Abby was only 2 weeks old and crying the entire time we tried to take this photo.  The other four girls are truly being troopers here!  I used Elle’s Studio papers and cut apart pieces to create the layout.  

I knew I wanted to create a couple windows in the layout somewhere and decided to make one on the top and one on the bottom of the red patterned paper section.  I used a 2 inch circle punch.  To make my shaker/type windows I knew I had to create some dimension and lift the red patterned paper off the main background.  To do this, I mounted several pieces of basic craft foam on the back.   This is what the backside of the this section looks like… a hot mess right!  The red pieces are the craft foam, which is what I’ve been using to add larger areas of dimension onto my cards and layouts.   I learned this cost effective trick from Jennifer McGuire, love that girl! I adhered the craft foam with Scotch two sided tape, as my tape runner didn’t work well on the spongy surface.  Next, I created my sequin pocket with the actual sequin packaging I use for my products.  This is a great way for you to reuse many kinds of packaging items for various manufactures.  Give it a try!  

And, here’s my flashback holiday layout!  The sequins I used were Gold Stardust and Christmas Wishes.

This is my next favorite thing on this layout.  I heat embossed this lovely wood veneer from Heidi Swapp with my favorite gold embossing powder; Ranger, Liquid Platinum. It’s not a bright, harsh gold.  It’s soft and beautiful.

 Wow!  I hope you all enjoyed the Holiday Happiness Blog Hop kick off here and have been inspired to do some creating this month!  To help jump start you, I also have 4 challenges going on on my Facebook page for you play along with this month.  Just click the challenges titles to be taken over to the Facebook event and check them out.

~  Anything goes

~ Layout sketch (designed my me!)

~ Holiday card sketch (Freshly Made Sketches)

~Three ingredients: Wood Veneer, something circular (brad, doily, etc) and patterned paper from your stash

You’re next stop is the talented Kat Benjamin!  Be sure to comment on all the blogs also….. you know there’s a prize for that you guys!!