Candy Coated Popcorn

My daughter's preschool class is having a valentine's day party tomorrow. My plan was to send little marshmallow pops for her school friends, but those hopes were dashed last night when the only marshmallows I could find in the house were grotesquely misshapen. There was not a hope in hell that they would look at all good. I resigned myself to just providing little cards for her friends, until I remembered something I'd seen on a blog a few days earlier. This Blessed Nest posted lovely candy-coated popcorn-and-m&ms treat bags. I just so happened to have Wilton candy melts in my pantry in a rainbow of colours, so I adapted her idea a little bit for what I had in my pantry.

Super Easy Candy Coated Popcorn
(adapted from This Blessed Nest)

Popcorn
Candy Melts in desired colours, ~1 oz per generous cup of popped popcorn
Salt (optional)

Pop your popcorn. Place in a large bowl.

In a double boiler or a heatproof bowl over a pot of boiling water, melt candy melts. Drizzle candy melts over popcorn, and toss to coat. Sprinkle a little salt as you toss if you like your popcorn salty & sweet.

Spread popcorn on a parchment-covered baking pan, and let sit for half an hour or so, until candy coating has set. Break apart gently with your hands, since the pieces will have stuck together.

The tags are also homemade - now that my craft area has been reorganized, I was able to find exactly what I needed to make these cute little tags, the perfect size for ziploc sandwich baggies! I used all stuff from Stampin' Up - Whisper White & Real Red cardstock, Wild Wasabi, Real Red & Pink Pirouette ink, and stamps from Wild About You, and Goody Goody Gumdrops.

Worm Wishes!

Good lord, has it really been almost three months since I updated last? Eek. I have had a lot of projects on the go, but really, none of them have been fit for blog posting. On top of that, my craft area is a royal disaster. I got a new sewing machine and table at the end of January, which required some re-organizing that turned more into a piling of things in different places. Not exactly great for encouraging the crafty flow! Anyway, my daughter was invited to a birthday party for one of her little friends, so I decided to whip together this adorable card for the birthday boy! Pretty much a CASE of this card, but with a few of my own touches. I really like the shape I got for the greeting - I just cut out circles and snipped the top and bottom off to get a neat shape! I probably would have used ovals, but I don't own those punches yet so this was good enough.


The ingredients:
- Paper: SU Close to Cocoa, More Mustard, Whisper White, Chocolate Chip DSP
- Ink: SU Bravo Burgindy
- Stamps: SU Bugs & Kisses
- Other: Misc ribbon, circle punches, dimensionals

Always My Valentine

For someone who hasn't celebrated Valentines Day since elementary school, I sure am into the v-day cards this year! I am not sure where all this inspiration is coming from. This one all started while I was organizing my multitude of Martha Stewart glitters. The Rose Quartz one just caught my eye, and I was determined to finally make a sparkly card. The rest just kind of fell into place! I am thinking of redoing this card with two hearts together, one just looks so lonely all by itself.


The ingredients:
- Paper: SU Ruby Red, Cameo Coral, Blush Blossom
- Ink: SU Ruby Red, Versamark
- Stamps: SU Always, Circle of Friendship
- Other: Martha Stewart lace-edge punch, Scallop circle punch, circle punches, Fiskars mini heart punch, SU Heat & Stick powder, Martha Stewart glitter in Rose Quartz.

Pink Love

Now that Christmas is over and the new year has just begun, I have turned my crafty focus to the upcoming holidays. First up, Valentine's Day! I'm normally not one for hearts and pink and lacey stuff, but for some reason, inspiration has struck. This was a pretty simple card that I whipped up in less than an hour of total working time. I am not 100% sure on the colouring of the hearts - I used the various pinks from the SU pastels set, which I normally love, but it's not doin' it for me this time. If I make this card again, I may stamp the image onto some watercolour paper (if I can ever find it!) and use my ink pads and aquapainter to colour it.

The ingredients:
- Paper: SU Pink Pirouette, Rose Red, Chocolate Chip, Whisper White, Pink Pirouette DSP
- Ink: SU Basic Black
- Stamps: SU A Little Bit of Happiness (Hostess)
- Other: Martha Stewart lace-edge punch, SU Stampin' Pastels, SU Mat Pack & paper piercer

The End of the Christmas Cards

So, it's December 19, and what did I do last night? That's right. I finished my christmas cards. Where the hell did this month go, anyway? Thankfully 95% of the people I still have to send cards to are local, so even though I popped them in the mail on my way to work this morning, they should still arrive before the 25th.

This card was sort of a "WTF can I do with very little effort" deal, and I managed to sucker my husband into helping. I wanted something that was neat but simple - no colouring, no ribbon-tying, no using scissors to cut anything, no heat embossing, just layers of colour and a simple assembly. I am not 100% sold on the snowflake in the scallop circle embellishment, but at 8pm on a cold Thursday, I wasn't about to go out in search of something better! So, here it is!


The ingredients:
- Paper: SU Whisper White, Bashful Blue, Close to Cocoa
- Ink: SU Bashful Blue, Close to Cocoa
- Stamps: SU Happy Everything, unidentified SU snowflake (no idea what set it came from! it was an extra in an ebay purchase!)
- Other: circle punches, scallop circle punch, scallop edge punch, Cuttlebug Snowflakes embossing folder

Christmas Kitty

For the past three years, I have faithfully gone to the Calgary Art Market & Craft Sale, and every year I am drawn hopelessly to the Old Island Stamp Co's booth like a moth to a flame. I fell in love with this adorable christmas kitty, it's perfect for holiday cards!

The ingredients:
- Paper: Misc kraft brown, SU Whisper White, Old Olive, Ruby Red
- Stamp: Old Island Stamp Co Christmas Cat (732-D)
- Other: Green ribbon (Michaels), corner rounder punch (for the scallops), ticket corner punch, SU Watercolor Wonder crayons, D'Vine Swirls embossing folder

The Great Conversion Project

Take one love of rubber stamps, and add a crazy desire to actually start collecting awesome sets. Cut with a little bit of no space in the craft area. What does this leave? An insane project to convert all my stamps to a vinyl cling system. I suppose it's not that insane - I really don't have a lot of stamps to convert compared to some of my friends. But it's proving to be quite the process nonetheless! The little stamps are the hardest, having to make such tiny snips through the foam and rubber, argh! On the plus side, this allows me to re-trim stamps that weren't trimmed very well in the first place!

So, what is this vinyl cling system? It's genius, really. Instead of permanently mounting my stamps onto wooden blocks, I am adhering a layer of vinyl cling to the foam on the sticky side. The vinyl has enough static charge to temporarily adhere to an acrylic block. For sets like Stampin' Up that come with the rubber dies already attached to sticky foam, I just use vinyl cling. For stamps that are rubber-die-only, I use a product called EZ-Mount, which is a foam layer with adhesive on one side and vinyl on the other. I used EZ-Mount a lot for converting stamps that were wood-mounted previously, because it was easier to get the rubber off the foam than to get the rubber and the foam off the wood.

For storage, I am opting to use a binder system rather than the popular CD-case system. Most unmounted stamp sets fit nicely into a regular CD jewel case (not the slim kind), but I decided to purchase hole-punched acrylic sheets to store my stamps in a zip-up binder. I'm not sure how well this will work out in the long run, I may yet switch to CD cases as I'm already filling up my second binder.

I plan to post a tutorial on precisely how I decided to attack this project at some point. For those who are visual in nature, I have made sure that I have photographed the process from beginning to end, so it all makes sense.