Happy New Year Everyone. I hope you all had a great time and now that the dust has settled, the pineneedles are well and truly stuck in the carpet pile and the holly has wilted, you may be in the need of a little crafting time?!
One of my Grandad's favourite sayings was 'we have a houseful of food and nothing to eat' and when I looked at my groaning fridge and freezer a few days before Christmas I thought of him and it made me smile as I wasn't sure what we would have for dinner that night despite all the food! You then spend the next week trying to use up all the leftover food instead of throwing it away and wasting it and I am a bit paranoid about this as I can't bear waste.
Now you could be forgiven for thinking that you have come to the wrong Blog and that this is a cookery website, well it isn't, but I like to apply similar principles to my crafting as I do with food and I can't bear waste there either. Before I owned Bellaboo I used to subscribe to a wonderful monthly kit which gave me such joy when it arrived and I would, in time, make a couple of layouts using the kit and before I did any more with it another month would have flown by and I would have another kit to treasure and stroke and make the odd layout with. Eventually I had all these wonderful packs of goodies that I just wasn't getting round to using and so I want to challenge you to 'use up your leftovers'!
For the November Kit, 'Sidewalks', my wonderful Design Team put together all the layouts etc and then (very sweetly) handed me their leftover bits and pieces! The leftovers included two full pieces of patterned papers, one half piece, lots of tiny pieces, an incomplete sticker sheet, some cardstock, bits of ribbon and lace and a few brads, buttons and a couple of the Flags from the Add-on. I loved the Kit (well I should, I chose it!) and so wanted to use it and so challenged myself to using up these leftover bits and pieces. The results can be seen below and I still have some more bits that I can use for some simple cards or notelets etc.
'You bring such Joy' Layout
'Birthday Boy' Card
'Birthday Wishes' Card
'Special Friend' Card
'Thank You' Card
The alphabet that comes with the Kit is such good value as it has so many letters on it; I still have loads left even having used the amount I did above. Even the very simple 'Thank you' card looks effective with just the small amounts of patterned paper and I have lots of bits left to make some more similarly simple cards.
Although the initial outlay of a kit can seem expensive, if you are clever (lots of gutting of cardstock if you layer up on layouts etc) and a bit careful you can make one kit go a very long way. I could easily have made another couple of layouts instead of the cards but as the first three months of the year are packed with birthdays in our family, I chose to do the cards instead.
Do let me know how you get on and send in any samples you have of your thrifty side :).
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