Have you stopped by the My Mind’s Eye Blog lately? Wow! Wow! Wow! All the sneak peaks for CHA are up, and they are fabulous. And today I took a peak to find the MOST beautiful papercrafting projects using my  Be-Loved papers. Here are two of the photos, but be sure to check out the detail shots and credits on the MME Blog. So awesome!

If you’ve heard about Project 365 or are thinking about doing it, now is a great time to start. I’m sure you have *some* photos from 2010 and many more days are ahead of you still! This year I was planning on doing a modified version of 365 where I would compile photos from each month and make a few pages, and then at the end of the year get an album printed. However when I really started looking at how much fun taking just one single picture every day could be, I decided to go for it! So I made a super clean, super simple album template for the month of January. I wanted it to be very photo-oriented because with 365 photos of different things, you don’t want too much interfering with that. Plus I like really graphic and editorial style layouts. Here is the album that I designed:

You can see that it’s really basic. It has 8 pages wth spaces for 31 photos, and then a 9th page which has one line for a caption for each photo. I am going to make a corresponding album for every month of 2010. Each will be a variation based on the season, but they will all have the same look and feel so that if you followed the project through for the whole year, you would end up with a sleek coordinating album.

You can also personalize and modify the template to your specifications by adding digital elements and patterns. I decided to make a quick video tutorial to show you just how easy it is to compile your photos from 2010. Hopefully it will inspire you to start taking pictures! If you are unfamiliar with templates, this tutorial should give you a basic understanding of how templates work in general.  I used Photoshop Elements 8.0 but the same principles apply to other versions as well as full-featured Photoshop.

After quite a few requests for a more comprehensive planner, I created this 2010 Weekly Planner. Complete with yearly schedule of chores to keep your household organized.

There are 52 Week at a glance sheets that have daily chores, notes, menu, and a shopping list:

The best part of this printable PDF is the yearly chore chart:

Every day of the year is accounted for with all the chores that will keep your household organized and completely managed. Even items like backing up hard drives, filing receipts, scheduling carpet cleaning are all in there. If you can more or less stick to the schedule, your house will look amazing every single day, and you’ll wonder what to do with all your free time!

And that’s not all…the Printable PDF File also includes a Perpetual Birthday Calender so you can keep special dates organized and easy to access all year long.

This planner is a bit bigger than my normal PDFs – 67 pages! So I am selling it for $12.99 at Design House Digital.

Happy organizing!

I’m not sure if everyone knows about neighbor gifts, but if you haven’t been raised with this tradition, the name describes it all… small, usually hand-crafted gifts, for all your neighbors and friends. This year for some of my neighbors, I made some super yummy thumbprint shortbread cookies with jam centers (raspberry makes it extra festive) and decided to make some adorable boxes with some of my paper stash (and yes, it’s a giant stash).

Ever since I saw this adorable Christmas paper from My Mind’s Eye, I’ve been wanting to do something cute with it. I love the bright colors, especially the pink! So I grabbed 2 sheets and the matching accessory sheet. To make the box I decided to go the easy route and cut it on my shiny new Cricut.

I created a simple box form for the Cricut to cut. I use SCAL with my cricut so I can have it cut anything I want. If you’re a SCAL user I have a free download of this simple SVG file. Also I made a DXF file which should work with Craftrobo (Silhouette, wishblade, etc). If you don’t have a cutter, there is a PDF that you can print and use as a template.

I cut one at about 11″ tall for the bottom boxand then I enlarged the file slightly to make it about 11.25″ to make the top of the box. My box came out quite large, I think It would be better even smaller, so if you can only cut 8-9″ wide, this is still a great project.

After cutting the papers I just folded the edges and glued the tabs on the outside of the box.

After folding and gluing, I found some white parchment paper and lined the box and then placed in the cookies that I had made (make sure they are cool!)

Then I placed the lid on top, tied it with some ribbon, a tag from the accessory sheet and a chipboard christmas tree, and it was ready to deliver!

Super cute, super easy, affordable,  and quick enough to mass reproduce! Have a merry Christmas & happy holiday season!

click on the download button to download the cutting file/template for this box. The zip you download will have a PDF, SVG, & DXF file. Happy Crafting!

The lovely Holly Koenigsfeld created this amazing ornaments pillow. If the ornaments look familiar it’s because she printed them on fabric using my Ornament Stamps and Brushes Kit — amazing, I know!

Check out Holly’s blog for more fabulous projects! Here are her basic instructions so you can make your own:

I created a Photoshop document that was the size I wanted my pillow to be and created a layout for the pillow first, so I could know what sizes I need the ornaments to be. I erased the bows and the hangers on the stamps, because I wanted to recreate them with cording and embroidery floss. I then copied the stamps into an 8 1/2″ x 11″ document for printing. I chose to create a smaller pillow – about 5″ or 6″ x 7″ – so I could print the ornaments and the fabric for the back of my pillow all on one sheet. I had some printable fabric sheets from a project I did years ago, and I don’t think the kind I used are still in production. Avery sells these Printable Fabric Sheets, which have a heat seal backing. They would work well, but I wanted my ornaments to pop up a bit on the edges, so I would recommend these Printable Fabric Sheets from Joann’s instead. Here is another brand: EQ Printables Inkjet Fabric Sheets.

Which ever sheets you choose will have printing instructions, but for mine I just set my printer settings to “best,” and also told the printer I was printing on the thickest media available.

After you print, you’ll need to trim out the ornaments out. I left about a quarter inch edge around each of the ornaments. The fabric I used for the pillow was very tightly woven, which made embroidering very hard. I had to work really hard to get my needle through that fabric! If I make another one I will probably attach my ornaments to a different fabric, but for this pillow I just used the printable fabric for all of the pieces so they would match. Also I embroidered the ornaments onto the front cover of the pillow directly. Next time I think I’ll just embroider the fabric of the ornament and then attach it to the pillow with Heat and Bond. Hopefully not having to go through two layers of that tight fabric will make things easier.

After sewing the ornaments onto the pillow I embroidered French knots where the hangers were on the stamps. This tutorial on Purl Bee has pictures that show just how to make a French knot. I just sketched the word “Joy” on the largest bulb and embroidered over it, too. I used some silver cording to recreate the ribbon on the ornaments in the kit. Any kind of ribbon or cording would work. I did stitch those to the pillow too – I don’t think glue or Heat Bond would work as well for that part. I stitched the two fabric pieces together with my machine, left a hole in the bottom seam for stuffing, and then slip stitched the rest. (The link will take you to a great slip stitching tutorial). Voila!