all the little stories

My mom’s birthday was last Tuesday but tonight we took her out to celebrate! Just for fun, I wanted to share some pictures of the lovely presents I found for her on Etsy and the packaging I used.

The main gift for my mom was this necklace from zafirenia’s shop:

I thought it would be fun and feel good to support other artists on Etsy this year. I’m so glad I did. I think the things I found were really fantastic!

I have been saving this cake box that I made last year for something special. It turns out that this was the something special!

But the coolest thing of the day was when I pulled out the extra supplies leftover from when I printed the box—pieces that didn’t work for anything then, but I put to good use today! I also had a beautiful set of cards to give my mom that were made by a friend of mine. She is a digital scrapbooking designer, but I didn’t know that she was a fine artist as well until a few weeks ago when she posted her Etsy link on Facebook.

So, I wanted to wrap the cards in a brown paper bag. When I opened the cabinet in the kitchen that holds all our various shopping bags, sitting on top was a yellow paper gift bag. It was the perfect color yellow to go with those hybrid extras!

I decided to deconstruct the bag:

I ripped the bottom seams apart and then tore the side seam, too. Then I snipped up the bag to fit the gift…

Here is the paper with Heather’s lovely cards inside:

Heather’s shop is here: Ooh la la, Artsy! Shop!

My mom has recently become a fine artist herself, working with watercolors. I thought she would really appreciate them because of that. Aren’t they pretty?!

Then, I just wrapped up the cards like a Christmas present:

I “parcelfied” them with some black twine and added the hybrid tag.

And this is the part that just gets me—a random bag in the cabinet just happens to match a random “Happy Birthday” tag that I made to go with a matching cake box from a year and a half ago?! That’s not coincidence. That’s was a little gift from the Daddy of All Things Creative. I got goosebumps. So cool.

Here’s everything together:

I had some scraps of leftover printed paper and I made a butterfly out of my Martha Stewart punches. I stamped “MOM” on the bottom in Stampin’ Up! White Craft ink with my nifty clearance aisle find (also Martha Stewart, purchased for just $3!).

And there we have it! A lovely coordinating gift set.

It’s cake without the calories. Ha! Delightful.

Thanks for listening all about my crafty afternoon. 😀

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2011 at 12:07 am and is filed under arts & crafts, just life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.