I love most holidays, but I’m not a big fan of Halloween. Costumes and jack o’ lanterns are fun, but witches and skeletons and cobwebs just aren’t my thing. But last night I was craving a quick creative outlet, and came up with this happy little Halloween-themed card. I just cut out the word BOO from orange card stock, glued the letters and two wiggle eyes onto a black card, and taped a white insert to the inside for writing a little note.

BOO!

Since August of last year, I’ve been one of the leaders of the Girls’ Club at our church, which means I plan monthly activities for a fun group of third, fourth, and fifth grade girls. This school year, I’m sending birthday cards to each of the girls when their big day rolls around. I already sent the first card a few weeks ago, and then I created a bunch more last week so that my cards are all ready to be personalized and written in throughout the year.

I cut the balloon shapes from textured polka dot paper made by Bazzill Basics (on sale at Michaels).

I glued each balloon to a piece of white cardstock that I had already cut and scored for folding.

Next I punched a tiny hole on each side of the “knot” part of the balloon and slipped a piece of bakers twine through the holes. (The twine is from The Twinery.) I still haven’t learned how to tie a bow that really looks right, but I fiddled with each of these until they looked good enough.

All stacked up and ready to be personalized!

Madelyn’s birthday is next!

My bow-tying needs a little help, doesn’t it? Can you tie a perfect bow? If so, please tell me how it’s done!

When my husband hit the big four-oh a few weeks ago, I presented him with a little gift that combined two things I’m obsessed with: the man himself… and paper.

I created a 40-page mini-book for Tim called “40 Things I Love About You.” I cut the pages from white cardstock (3×4″), rounded the corners, punched a couple grommets in the cover, and held it all together with two metal book rings. Then I got out a pen and filled the pages with things I love about Tim.

It was easy.

One of the best things I did to get ready for our week of vacation this summer was make vacation journals. The night before we left, I decided that we should have a way to record our memories throughout the week, so I made journals for each of the kids — and then made one more for myself.

I printed our destination and the year on a sheet of cardstock and stapled it together with six sheets of white paper. Then I folded it in half and called it done. It wasn’t fancy… but it was the night before we left.

The kids and I had a great time writing in our journals during the week — and they also enjoyed drawing pictures of some of our activities, like eating ice cream at Mister Whippy.

We wrote about the places we went, the food we ate, and how we felt about being on vacation — from the first day…

… to the last.

And while I was looking through our vacation photos to find these pictures, I decided to finally print out a bunch of photos from our trip to put in a big collage frame in the hallway. Great vacations are worth remembering often!