Friday, December 14, 2007

Christmas meme

I stole this from Melissa who stole it from someone else who stole it from someone else. I needed this break this afternoon....

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
I'm using a combination of both this year (see photos in previous post). Every year my mother makes a few cloth gift bags out of christmassy fabric. These get reused and passed around every year.

2. Real or artificial tree? Little skinny artificial one. I'd love a real one, but I'm away a lot during the holidays and I can't deal with the mess a real one would make.

3. When do you put up the tree? The weekend after Thanksgiving.

4. When do you take it down? That night after the cats have knocked it over and stripped the ornaments off, broken half of them and hid the rest.... (but really the first time I have a few spare hours after new years...)

5. Do you like eggnog? No, but I heard a rumor that my next door neighbor makes his from scratch and it will change my life. I'm waiting for my invitation...

6. Favorite gift received as a child? None, because I never got the Easy Bake Oven I asked for every year up until I was 18.

7. Do you have a nativity scene? No.

8. Hardest person to buy for? Brother. He doesn't like stuff.

9. Easiest person to buy for? tie between mom and sis.

10. Worst Christmas present you ever got? When I was a kid Gramma W would give us mittens every year. We were always bummed - we wanted toys. What I wouldn't give now to have someone making me custom sized, fair isle mittens to match my new coat every year... Kids are dumb.

11. Mail or email Christmas cards? I try to mail them...but usually don't get to it.

12. Favorite Christmas movie? Love Actually

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? I usually pick up one or two things in late summer or fall, but the real shopping (and knitting) starts in November.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? No, but once my brother gave me something he found in a dumpster. Does that count?

15. Favorite thing to eat on Christmas? Christmas Eve we always have fondue and champagne. It makes me happy.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Clear

17. Favorite Christmas song? This year's favorite is Wizard Chess by Harry and the Potters.

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Home to mom and dad's in Vermont

19. Can you name all of Santa’s Reindeer? maybe. I can't be bothered to try though....

20. Angel or star on top of tree? Star (mine is rusty metal)

21. Open presents Christmas Eve or morning? Morning. In PJs, with good coffee and mom's coffee cake.

22. Most annoying thing this time of year? There's no time....

23. Do you decorate your tree in any theme or color? no

24. What do you leave for Santa? Cookies. And this year he's getting a bottle of Sam Adams Winter Lager with them. 'Cause man that beer goes good with cookies - seriously!

Simple Craftastic Tags (and a book)

I'm a bad bad blogger.... I promise to be better after the holidays.

In the meantime, I wanted to share these easy gift tags I made using symbol, dingbat, wingding and ornament fonts. I collect these sort of fonts and never have a use for them.

These were done using the Apple Symbols font that came installed on my Mac.

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These are mostly from Zapf Dingbats, Bodoni Ornaments, Adobe Woodtype Ornaments and a font called Type Embellishments One.

dingbat tags.JPG

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I used Adobe InDesign to make these. There is a Glyphs pallet in the Type menu that lets you look at a whole font at once and easily paste the characters you want into your document. I resized the characters and changed the colors. I drew circles and squares around them with a very light dotted frame so they were easier to cut out. Laser printed on free cardstock samples from a paper company that I had lying around the office.

They look pretty good combined with the bags I bought at Ikea and the paper from the bargain bins at Target!

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If anyone wants these, leave me a comment with your email and I'll send them to you as a PDF.

And....

BIG NEWS!!!!

Melissa's BOOK is out. The launch party is tomorrow (12/15/07) 1pm-3pm at Webs (changed from Sunday due to the impending Nor'easter...). I'm not a sock knitter, but somehow I 'volunteered' to demonstrate the technique during the launch, so if you're going to be there I'd recommend watching one of the other Two-at-a-Time models instead...

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