Our Runaway Hearts

Christmas season is fast approaching and I currently have no job to buy the abundance of Christmas cards needed to mail to my friends. After nursing my Starbucks addiction, I decided to 'upcycle' the lovely red cup and solve my Christmas card dilemma.

You will need:

8.5" x 11" piece of cream card stock

a scrap of light brown or beige card stock

a Starbucks cup

red and brown twine

buttons (optional)

gold glitter

a hot glue gun

scissors

mod podge

a small round object (to trace circles)

a black fine tip Sharpie

Let's get started!

1. Fold the cream card stock in hamburger style and cut it in half. Then fold one of the halves into half to form your card. I decided to round out the corners of my card so if you'd also like to it's best to do it now. Set the card aside.

2. Cut out the bottom of the Starbucks cup and then cut it open along the side where the barista would write in your drink (this gives you more of the pattern to work with and makes the cup easier to work with too).

3. Take the object you've chosen to trace for your ornament size and trace the amount of ornaments you want on your card. I used rings and traced 4 ornaments (1 large one and 3 small ones). Cut the circles out.

4. I didn't like the flat look of the ornaments against the card stock so I wrapped red twine around the edge to make them stand out more and embellished some of the patterns that I chose to cut out and attached the twine with Mod Podge. When you've Mod Podged the twine on, it's a good idea to apply a coat over the whole thing to make sure nothing falls off.

5. Place the ornaments where you want them on your card and put a tick mark at the top of the ornament and the two sides.

6. Set the ornaments aside and draw the top part of the ornament that has the hook you put on the tree (I don't know what to call it sorry!). Use the ticks you made as guidelines. You want the top to be about 1/2cm above the tick and the sides to be about halfway from the center of the ornament. When you're satisfied with your drawing, go over it in black Sharpie and add some gold glitter.

7. Glue the ornaments in place. I found some buttons lying around that I thought would be nice to incorporate so I added those too.

8. Use the Mod Podge to glue on the brown twine the ornaments will hang from.

9. Tie a bow for each of your ornaments and hot glue them to the base of the string. You want to place the bows just above the gold glittered top part.

10. Cut out a small piece of cream card stock and write your greeting down, I chose to go with "deck the halls", and at this point you can either glue it directly to the beige scrap of card stock OR you can cut out three small cardboard squares, glue them to the back of your greeting, glue the cardboard to the beige card stock, and then glue the beige card stock down.

Voila! A cute holiday card made with some TLC!<3

Questions, comments, concerns? Please comment down below, I'd love to help you out(:

Hi everyone!

I found these really cool speckled turquoise beads at the bead shop the other day and thought they would make a really funky bracelet.

I think it turned out really well so I whipped up this tutorial to share with all of you

You will need:

a silk strand (it needs to be able to wrap around your wrist 3 times just to be safe)
stone beads of your choice (mine are a speckled turquoise)
a button
a needle
thread that coordinates with the rest of your bracelet

Now for the how to:

Fold the silk strand into three with the tail of the strand longer by 1.5 index finger lengths

Make sure you DO NOT cut the silk. Hold the end without the tail and braid it.

When you have reached your desired length sew the strands together on both ends and wrap the thread around the braided ends of both sides. This will disguise the sewing and give it a little more style.