For anyone who is drawn to the small details, the patterns in security envelopes can be quite nice. Here are a few from a Flickr photo set called Security Patterns.

Great for little collages and other things, or try reusing the envelopes by turning them inside out, as shown in this Design*Sponge tutorial.

As you can tell, my craft projects have become few and far between these days, but I’ve had a few little things I’ve worked on in the last two months.

In November and December, I went against my previous decision to quit swaps for a bit, and signed up for a few of the final Coloriffic Swap-O-Rama swaps. I really liked the color combinations, and shopping for other people is fun. Here’s what I came up with for the two swaps:

One of the swap requirements is to include one handmade item, so I made a little card/envelope set for the November swap, and then for the December swap, I put together one of my square collage postcards.

Sadly, the packages I got through these swaps didn’t exactly knock my socks off, so to speak, but oh well. At least I enjoyed putting them together and making my swap partners happy.

Shortly after the second swap, I joined in on a bit of card- and envelope-making at this month’s South Bay Craft Group meeting. I don’t send out holiday cards, so I just made some general ones, based on a cute postcard I have. And some envelopes of course. The paper was just too lovely to pass up.

And the most recent craft project was a shared one for a work holiday party that I helped to organize. We decided to decorate gingerbread cookies as the main event, and of course we had to have a contest for it, complete with varied categories and matching trophies. Our little trophy team came up with these four trophies during two long nights after work hours. It was a lot of fun and I think everyone who attended the party liked them as well.

It might look like I haven’t been doing much of anything crafty in the last few months, but that’s not entirely true. (It’s not entirely false either though.)

I’ve been pretty busy at work in the last few months, and the only crafting I did for awhile was participating in craft group meeting projects or making mini envelopes for my eBay auctions. That changed last month though, after a huge Halloween crafting project developed.

So, I haven’t dressed up for Halloween much in the last decade or so, and certainly not at work. However, when I found out that it’s a big deal at my new job, especially within my group, I thought I’d at least give it a try. My team talked about dressing up in a common theme, and eventually we (mostly) agreed upon one theme. One of my co-workers and I took this project on fully, and started coming up with rough sketches and even creating a prototype costume to see if it would actually work out.

After the first version worked well enough and the whole team seemed to like it, we went shopping and set up a few sewing sessions with the team. Ultimately, it was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun (with only occasional frustrations ), and in the end we made 6 whole costumes from scratch and helped put together a 7th costume from purchased items. Here are a few photos of the final result:

I hadn’t sewn for awhile, but I am definitely thinking about doing a bit more. But may after I recover from these, and hopefully not with any ironing board fabric or much felt!

YUZEN wooden clothes pins
Originally uploaded by karaku*

Aren’t these gorgeous?

You can buy these and other handmade items from the creator at her Etsy store.

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been up to much crafting as of late. Things have been a bit busy around here lately, as I’ve been working on switching jobs at my company (finally falling into place!) and also looking for a new place to live (close, but still looking). This hasn’t exactly left me with much energy, let alone much interest in the things I sometimes do for fun, especially when things didn’t seem to be going my way or weren’t very clear.

I won’t get all philosophical about this all, going on about whether or not I missed crafting, or whatever else. Just that I think I’m starting to get back into it gradually, working on an occasional project here or there. Make a few envelopes, put together a few cards.

That said, I know that a lot will be going on in the next month or two, so I will probably not be posting tons of projects. But that’s ok.

 

(These were made for a swap with the color scheme of yellow, black, and white.)

Oh, and for what it’s worth, it seems like everyone liked the top envelope in my last entry’s photo. That one is actually made with a “baby” envelope template from Paper Source, so it looks like they created a good style.