multi-task holiday season crafting [BPC blog hop]

Season’s greetings!

It’s the holiday season, and that means days are short, to-do lists are long, and time is precious. The one pitfall I try very hard to avoid is making the mistake of not making time to be creative.

Today I am participating in the Big Picture 12 days of Christmas instructor blog hop! As a multi-tasking woman this time of year I am combining my contribution with a “25 days of holiday crafting” post with a real gift I needed to wrap up this afternoon.

See how that works? Not only can you multi-task by crafting in especially useful ways, but I find that I feel better because I’m crafting – even if it is small projects and short amounts of time. Multi-tasking is my absolute favorite thing to do during December! It’s a holiday tradition really, and I love the challenge.

Today I am going to share with you a how-to on this gift card holder – gift cards are a favorite thing of mine to give, but I like to take 5-10minutes and dress them up a bit. That is truly all it takes! It gives me the chance to play with crafty things AND fancy-fy a gift for someone.

First, you need an idea. I took a little Starbucks gift card holder and covered the front with white cardstock. Because COME ON. I’m not giving someone a gift card that SAYS where the gift card is from right on the front!

To get some color on it I just dotted distress stain onto my craft mat, then misted my gift card holder with water and rubbed it around…

Bam! As you can see it turns out there was a hidden pattern on the sides – cool! This idea is one I borrowed from Tim Holtz – he’s been doing this for backgrounds on his tags this week. scrap-lifting, another great time saver!

I misted with my green patina perfect pearls mist, then closed it up (gift card inside), wrapped with some green tulle, added a charm…

then I stamped some holly leaves + my one and only Christmas sentiment stamp (love it!), edged with gold paint…

Then my deer seemed too silver, so I dabbed some (caramel) alcohol ink onto him and it’s ready to go!  I timed myself with this project – it took 7 minutes start to finish and I am SO much happier with giving away this Starbucks gift card than if I had just handed it over plain.

supplies:

InLinkz.com

If you’re short on time this holiday season, consider multi-tasking so that you can feel that you are accomplishing things while also getting to be creative. Looking for more ideas? Please do continue along the hop! The next blog hop stop is Karen Grunberg http://www.karenika.com/ 

Want to know more about the Big Picture Class “12 days of Christmas” that I’m a part of? Head on over to the class registration page and check it out. It’s a great way to get inspiration for a dozen scrapbook pages from a dozen BPC instructors. I’m so happy to be a part of it – and see what the other instructors have come up with too!

Here is a full listing of the instructors participating in today’s blog hop:

Nic Howard http://nichoward.typepad.com
Georgana Hall http://www.georganahall.typepad.com
Stacy Julian http://stacyjulian.com/blog
Tami Morrison www.bcre8uv.typepad.com 
Wendy Smedley  www.wendysmedley.typepad.com 
Lisa Day  http://www.lisaday.typepad.com
Kelly Purkey  http://kellypurkey.typepad.com
Elizabeth Dillow  www.elizabethdillow.typepad.com
Karen Grunberg http://www.karenika.com