Laminator Review

Michael got me a laminator for Christmas!  Y’all, I’m probably more excited about this than any normal person would be, but I am *so freaking excited* about this!!!

It’s beautiful isn’t it.  Best part?  It’s only $30.  Seriously!

First I cut out a bunch of hearts and arrows using my Cricut.  Side note: I’m super excited to start on Valentine’s Day crafts!

Then you put the stuff you want laminated into a little pouch.  You get 100 of them for $15.  That’s super cheap!

I was a little worried that all of the hearts could shift around since I had to tilt the pouch a bit to put it in the machine, but I needn’t have worried.  I mean, you need to be careful and go slowly, but I didn’t have to glue them down or anything like I was afraid of.

The machine sucks them through and then they come out all perfectly laminated!  Squee!!!!

When I was teaching I had an unhealthy addiction fondness for the laminating machine.  I’m working on some fun stuff right now that I’ll put up on the blog soon!  🙂

December Daily Days 1-3

I’ve finally started working on mine!  I never did find a whole line of paper that I liked, so I’m using a bit of this and a bit of that.  Crate Paper, Echo Park, October Afternoon, My Mind’s Eye, and Authentique mainly.  It’s going to be a bit eclectic for sure.  lol.  I’m keeping the basic structure the same as my past December Dailies and October Daily: one 6×6 page front and back with additional pages added as needed.

I haven’t figured out what I want to do with the covers, but here’s day 1.  I’m not super happy with it, but sometimes you just have to do it and move on, know what I mean?  It’s last year’s My Mind’s Eye (why didn’t I buy more of that when I had the chance?!?  Still my fav Christmas line ever!) with some stickers from Echo Park, some washi tape and a Thicker number.

I added an extra page that I used the American Crafts knock-outs punch on.  I <3 that tool.  Also, American Crafts has the best costumer service ever.  I should probably write a whole blog post about that tool…  ::adding it to the list::

Here’s day 2 with the Crate Paper as a base along with an October Afternoon tag, an Echo Park number, some washi tape and a vellum tag also from Crate Paper.  I liked that it was more subtlely Christmas since these pictures look more like they were taken in June than December.

I added an extra page here too.

Only in Texas do you go shopping for a Christmas tree in a sundress.  Lol.

And of course another added page of decorating the tree.

I went ahead and left day 4 in so that you could see how the pages will look layered, but I’ll have a separate blog post with days 4-6 later.  I’m going to try to do 3 days per post so that we’re not still talking about December Daily in April.  I guess I better get cracking on those pages then!

 

Christmas Table

I had so much fun hosting Christmas Eve!  I had a few more ideas that I ran out of time for, but I’m really happy with what I did accomplish and now I have a list of ideas for next year.

We decided that it would be fun to have a theme for the food this year.  Since we decided while we were shopping at Ikea, Swedish seemed like the way to go.  We had meatballs, salmon, marinated cucumbers, and potato pancakes on the menu as our Swedish foods and then we had asparagus, salad and rolls in case the Swedish food was gross.  Luckily it was all delish!

I seriously love plates and I probably have more than any one person really needs, but I can’t help myself.  🙂  I don’t quite have enough of these salad plates so I alternated with the plain ones.  Hopefully it looked intentional.

I made some napkins out of flannel with my serger.  I love that thing.  I also bought some red stripped juice glasses at Ikea that we used as wine glasses.

In the end the peppermint topiaries were too much with the stripped table runner, so I put them out on the island with some appetizers.  Funny story about the appetizers…  We weren’t planning on having any, but then I found these awesome bowls from Crate and Barrel that I was given last year when I was digging out my plates.  They are perfect!  That and my genetic inability to host an event without having enough food to feed a small army led me back to HEB on Christmas Eve.

I think everything turned out great and I loved the look of the red and white.  I think we’ll be sticking with that for a while.  🙂  Bonus, I just realized that I can repurpose a bunch of it for Kate’s second annual Valentine’s Day play group party!