I hope 2012 is sweet for you

Over at The Shabby Tea Room the New Year challenge is to create a card or project on the theme of 'A Colorful and Shabby New Year' using the colours pink or red and green, blue and yellow with this photo as inspiration....

So to try to capture the sense of fun and exuberance in the image I created this ensemble for our New Year Celebration...

There's a goodie bag of sweets and a carton of juice to sweeten the party mood.

The stripeyness of the challenge photo just begged for the use of some Baker's string. Unfortunately I have been unable to source any locally so I used what was in a spare ironing board cover - red and white string is used in such covers to gather, tighten & secure the cover around the ironing board.

I did find however some cute yellow stripey buttons ideal for the project


The cute, cute clown is an image from The Graphics Fairy which you will see I have edited quite a bit. But he/she is just soooo cute.

The bag is my favourite thing to make - its an origami folded bag made with light green paper (though you can't really see it in the photo) with the front decorated. The handles on the bag were taken from another shop paper bag & re-used. I also added some crepe paper streamers inside the bag as extra decorative packaging.



I put sweets in a cellophane bag and added some paper to seal the bag. Inspired by some of the ideas in my Jan/Feb 2012 copy of Papercrafts magazine.


Somewhere, either in a mag or on a blog (if someone can point me in the direction I will add a link) the question has been posed as to what our favourite papercrafting tool is. Well, for me, although I only just got it, it has to be and I feel certain it will be in the future this Sew Easy Stitch Piercer. I love seeing the stitching on other people's projects but am not confident in my sewing skills nor my rickety old sewing machine to risk gorgeous papers being chewed to shreds in the process. This gadget pierces holes just in the right places for you to be able to handstitch using the holes. Simple but very effective!

All the challenge colours are there in the papers used which are appropriately enough Bo Bunny Sweet Tooth Collection (the wavy stripey one) and the polka dot one is from Melissa Frances' Kitschy Kitchen collection.

So much fun and colour I tried to incorporate I fear my project may just resemble a rather loud party. Great fun doing it though! Hope you all have fun too looking at it.