Home for the Holidays with Verve!

My subject title is multi purposeful! I really am going home for the holidays! Well, the thanksgiving holidays anyway! :) We're packing up the kiddos into the truck and making a very long 9 hour drive to Indiana. Please pray for me with no potty accidents and boys who dont try to poke each other!

The other reason for my post is Verve's Project Parade for the month! Now if it no small secret that I'm in love with verve's stamps along with the sketches, challenges, and delicious inspiration from the design team. It truly is the best place for me to go to work up the crafty mojo! And each month they have a project parade showing off the releases from that month fit with a prize at the end!

This month's project parade was to make a holiday gift. The samples from the design team were all less than $10! Well i followed suit making a gift for less than $5. Go me!!!!

I simply altered a candle jar. I love giving candles, and AC Moore has these fabulously smelling candles for only $4! All the paper and ribbon used on my candle were scraps! (the paper is actually baby boy paper! shh, dont tell the candle it's not christmas paper!)

Here is my gift...


Now of course since it's around the jar of the candle it was hard for me to photograph the scene. So here's a couple other shots...






This was super easy and quick to make! I always have these jar candles around (because we always have them lit in the house, and at 4 bucks a piece and them going on sale for 2 for $5 often, i buy them a lot!) So all i needed was a 3.5 strip of patterened paper, whatever other scraps and bit you want to embellish with and then maybe some ribbon. You could easily add other 3D embellishments. I stuck to paper piecing to make the images stand out. And since they were pieced onto the main patterned paper, i didnt want to distract from them so i kept the entire thing pretty flat.

To paper piece the trees and snowflakes i just stamped them onto paper and cut them out. I also stamped onto the main paper and glued the cutouts inside the stamped images. Also stamping on the background helps to give the paper pieced image a little more oompf.

I hope that everyone has a fantastically wonderful thanksgiving holiday and for those traveling, please be safe!