New Stuff for the New Year

Happy New Year all!  Hope everyone enjoyed their New Year's holiday.  Ours was low-key, just hung out at home and watched movies.  It has been sooooo nice being off work for a couple of weeks, and it is going to be sooooo hard to go back to work tomorrow!

I have a couple of new things to share today.  First are a couple of new bookmarks I just listed in my shop.  One is a new design, and one is an old favorite, but both of them have a new twist- they are double-sided bookmarks!  First up is the new one:

These are crysanthemums, aka daisies.  They're a lot different from the ones I usually use, which are smaller and more uniformly colored.  I really like these because they are so different.  These are natural, not dyed- aren't they gorgeous?!  Only thing about these is they are pretty large.  These were the smallest ones in the package I got, and they just barely fit on the background.  I just love that rich purple color in the flowers.  It made it very easy to pick border and background colors!

This is the reverse side:

I used a funky patterned paper in purple and gold.  It's hard to tell from the picture, but the gold pattern has a sparkly, glittery finish.  This paper came from the same paper pad as the papers I used for my mom's and my friend E's birthday cards.

Here is the other bookmark.  This was one of my first designs, the sparkly snowflake:

And the reverse side:

I used a snowflake patterned paper that matches the border color pretty well- love this bright blue!  I'm not sure why I didn't think of adding patterned paper to the back of the bookmarks before now...it seems so obvious!  I think it adds a little something special.  You can't see in these pics, but my shop label is still on the bottom of the reverse side.

Also, I have finally listed custom bookmark gift envelopes in my shop, which I have been planning to do now for awhile and just didn't get around to it.  I am curious to see how much interest there might be in these- I know that the people I've done them for previously really liked them and gave me great feedback, so I hope that means that they are something that will be of interest to future customers who buy my bookmarks as gifts.

Crazy to think, but Valentine's Day is only a few weeks away!  Michael's already has the Christmas stuff out and the Valentine's stuff in.  I went yesterday and picked up some papers with Valentine designs and colors, and am experimenting with never-ending Valentine cards.  I have one done so far, and like it- I just have to figure out how to put sentiments on/in it.  The way they get folded in different ways, any sentiments will be upside-down in some views, so I have to work on how to do that.  My other dilemma is that I don't have envelopes that a never-ending card can fit into.  They are 6x6 inches, and the square envelopes I found awhile back at JoAnn's are 5.5x5.5.  Arrghh!  Guess I will have to search online.

One other piece of news I wanted to share, and it affects this blog somewhat.  Occasionally I post a Kitchen Creation here, an original recipe that I want to share, and I will no longer be doing that.  I have decided to branch out and create a new blog, just for my cooking stuff.  I have thought about doing this for years- even longer than I have had this blog, and decided that the new year was a good time to finally make it happen!  My new cooking blog is called Common Sense Cooking, and I hope you will check it out!  I thought up the name for this blog years ago, and wish now that I had reserved the blog domain for commonsensecooking then, because by the time I wanted to register it, it was taken by someone else.  So please make sure that if you type in the address, you put in the dashes- it should be "common-sense-cooking".  I already have my first two recipes up, so read and enjoy!  I will, of course, continue with this blog- it's not going anywhere!

Hopefully next time I will have some never-ending Valentine cards to share.  I might also attempt some regular Valentine cards, as I'd really like to start stocking my shop with more cards.  See you then!