Christmas Gift Idea #3: Coffee Cup Card

Eight-six days until Christmas! :D

Christmas Gift Idea #3: Coffee Cup Card

This is a cute little card, but what's great about it is the fact that you can pull the lid out, see the "coffee" inside, and place a gift card for the recipient of this gift. It's perfect for Starbucks' cards or other gift cards. It adds a little something extra for the recipient instead of just getting a small little envelope. 

It's personal, it's cute, and it is cost-effective to make. I have posted the video for how to make this down below. This idea was created by another Stampin' Up demonstrator who happily shared it with her viewers and customers. You'll notice my card looks a bit different than hers. I used the materials I had available. Feel free to do the same thing! If you have paper you need to use, grab it and get to crafting! Then, all you have to do is go purchase the gift card that goes inside of this card—at whatever cost you wish the gift card to be. 

TIP: If you don't have a crimper to use for the coffee cup hugger (the brown piece of paper the ribbon is wrapped around), fold it back and forth like you would a paper fan and you will get the same effect as the one in the video. 

If you do like the stamps I used, you can find them posted on my Stampin' Up website where you can order them for yourself. These stamps are apart of the Chalk Talk set: http://www.stampinup.com/ECWeb/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=130631. Also, I used the black Staz On ink for this—http://www.stampinup.com/ECWeb/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=101406—but feel free to use whatever ink and color you would like for this. 

This is a fun and easy craft that I believe your friends and family will really love! 

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Not much of a crafter? Need something simpler? You got it! 

Another twist to this gift idea—if you don't want to make a card—is to get the Starbucks (or whatever kind of gift card you think your family member or friend or coworker would like) and purchase a cute little mug from Walmart or another store. You can even include some little candy canes or hot chocolate mix to go in the coffee mug. You'll see in the picture to the left, I've included one hot chocolate packet, one candy cane, a small little bag of marshmallows, and the Starbucks' gift card. 

It's cute, it's fun, and it's under $10 if you want it to be—all depending on how much you spend on the gift card! 

Christmas Gift Idea #2: Wood-Burned Décor

It's time for Christmas Gift Idea #2. This is what I like to call Wood-Burned Décor. You can make really cute stuff for less than $10 (once you get through the upfront costs).

I learned this in college. One of my friends was an architecture major. He showed his girlfriend—also one of my friends and my roommate at the time—how to wood burn. Once she learned it, she taught it to myself and our other roommate. We all got really into it! You can only imagine how our room smelled during finals week! :) We were making a lot of these little projects during study breaks. We even started dressing the items up more to make them even cuter. Here are a few examples:

My roommate at the time, Brittany, made this one for me for Christmas:

Brooke, my other roommate at the time, made this one for me:

I made these next two recently:

This allows for a lot of creativity and can be a lot of fun! I have posted a video below giving anyone interested in learning how to wood burn the instructions and direction on how to do this. I hope you enjoy it! Following the video, I have also posted the cost for each item. Please let me know if you have any questions about this project! I would be happy to help! :) 

Upfront Cost (Keep in mind that these are the original prices. I found all of these things at Hobby Lobby which always has 40-percent-off coupons available online or on their mobile app): 

$14.99 Wood Burner 

$7.99 Modge Podge

$4.99 Glue gun

$1.00 Sponge brush pack (15)

Stapler (Optional)

Individual Project Cost (Again, these are the original prices):

$1.00-$4.00 Wood piece

$1.00-$2.00 Paint (Optional)

$1.00-$2.00 Ribbon (Optional)

$2.99 Gemstones (Optional)

Understanding Anger

Right now at church we are going through a study called Recovering Redemption. It has been very enlightening so far! I'm really enjoying this series and learning a lot. This week's lesson is on anger and abuse. This is one of my greatest struggles—anger. I hope you enjoy my reflections on this topic and that they might possibly help you if you struggle with anger too.

At church we are learning not to just look at these struggles and say, "Okay, how can I make this behave and not express anger?" By simply working on the surface level of issues, you are never really able to overcome the problem entirely. We are to look at sin, find the root of the problem, and put that sin to death.

I am tired, personally, of simply brushing over the surface of this issue in my life so that I don't have to be embarrassed about it. It hasn't worked and it won't work until I allow God to show me the root of the problem.

Why am I angry? Why do I get angry?

Usually, for me, it's because something hasn't gone my way or the way I think it should have gone. That's a really tough one to admit right there, but it's true. And why should I feel entitled to have things go my way? I shouldn't.

My second realization really hit home for me though. Most of my life I have been called out as being too sensitive as if this is a negative attribute that needs to be overcome. "You're just too sensitive, Natasha." "Maybe she didn't want to talk to you about it because you're too sensitive."

This is where those fits of rage surface the most. Yes, I am sensitive. However, being sensitive isn't entirely a bad thing. I need to stop responding in anger when people accuse me of this. Sensitivity is a two-sided coin. There are two very different definitions of this word: sensitive: easily upset by the things that people think or say about them and likely to cause people to become upset; and aware of and understanding the feelings of other people. 

Now the first part of this definition is where I need help from the Lord. It's how I respond to things that displays my sinful nature. I should be practicing patience and self-control. I should respond to others calmly, rationally, and in love, and I shouldn't take offense. They aren't saying what they are saying to hurt me or anyone else—usually.

The second part of this definition is where I see my strength. Being sensitive has allowed me to put myself in another person's shoes to understand where they are coming from. Why are they upset? Why are they hurt? Why do they feel misunderstood or rejected? In a lot of ways, I believe being sensitive is a gift God has given me to help me be more compassionate toward others and sensitive to the things I say and how I say them. (Now, am I the best at this? No. I'm human; I make mistakes just like everyone else, but I believe it is one of my strengths).

So in a lot of ways when I respond in anger, I'm usually responding because I'm sensitive—not just for myself but for others' sake as well. Yet, this is still an area I need to be aware of. I am sensitive and I don't think that's a bad thing (on one side of the coin anyway). However, the way I typically respond to others when I feel they aren't being very sensitive to my feelings or another person's feelings isn't right.

I hope this makes sense to those of you reading this. This is an important lesson I am learning this week and I wanted to share it with you. I have studied ways to overcome anger for years, but I haven't really dove into the root of the issue so I haven't been able to successfully put this sin to death. Hopefully with this new perspective on anger and what the root cause of anger is in my life, and with the help of the Lord, this is an area that will no longer be a struggle for me.

I also wanted to share the verses I hope to reflect on and help me in this area of my life.

"'In your anger do not sin': Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry and do not give the devil a foothold."

Ephesians 4:26-27 (NIV)

"May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O God, my Rock and my Redeemer."

Psalms 19:14 (NLT)

"Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent and praiseworthy—think about such things."

Philippians 4:4-8 (NIV)

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law."

Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV)

I heard a great insight the other day in home group pertaining to this last verse (Galatians 5:22-23) concerning the Spirit. Usually when we look at this verse we have our eyes fixed on attaining the fruit of the Spirit. We should first desire the Spirit and then the fruit will follow. 

Christmas Gift Idea #1: Card Box

Exactly 100 days until Christmas! :D Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year.

What do I love about Christmas?

• Getting to celebrate Christ's birth with family and friends! I love watching The Nativity Story every year around Christmas. 
• Baking Christmas cookies. (Although this year I might be making some Andes mint brownies. So delicious!)
• Exchanging gifts with family and friends. 
• The holiday cheer! :)
• Singing and listening to Christmas carols. 
• Seeing Christmas lights adorn the houses in town. 
• Watching Christmas movies. I love How the Grinch Stole Christmas, White Christmas, and The Holiday. 
• Drinking peppermint hot chocolate. 
• Eating great Christmas food. 

It's a great time. :)

Until then, especially as fall approaches, I like to get ready for the holiday by thinking about some fun and creative gifts I can make to give my family and friends.

Christmas Gift Idea #1: Card Box. 

  

A great personal gift you can give to family or friends this Christmas is a card box.

You can purchase a cute, decorative box at Michael's, Hobby Lobby, or other craft stores. I purchased this decorative box at Michael's. It was 40 percent off and I had a 15 percent off coupon for my entire purchase. Originally this box was $5.00 so I was able to buy it for under $3.00. Keep an eye out on the sale ads and you can find some great deals!

After getting your card box, you can get started on making the cards for the box. You can fill this box with about 10 to 12 cards (or however many you want), with envelopes, that you have made that the receiver can then give to others as occasions come about.

For instance, say you give this box to your grandmother for Christmas. Your grandmother knows that her niece's birthday is coming up but she doesn't have a card to give to her. Well, she can go look in her card box and find just that!

Be creative! Make a variety of cards that you know that person will enjoy having so they can then give those cards to friends or family for birthdays or weddings or Christmas, or other special occasions.

Here are some of the cards I made for this box:

 

If you don't have any materials for making cards, you can find stamps and ribbon and paper at your local craft stores or through Stampin' Up. My website is listed here: http://www.stampinup.net/esuite/home/ngayle

I really love this gift idea because I know it is a gift that will be used by the recipients. My mother gave me a box of cards at one point in time and it was so handy to have, especially when my friends' birthdays came around. :)

I hope you enjoyed this post. Next week, I will be continuing my Christmas Gift Idea series with another fun and creative gift you can make for the holidays! :)

Christmas Gift Idea Series

This will be a relatively short post today, but I wanted to let you all know about a series of posts I will be writing over the next several months. This is not to say that this is all I will be writing about, but I hope to make this a consistent series that I will share with you every Monday until Christmas.

While I know we are just getting into the autumn season, I believe when it comes to Christmas gifts—especially if you are wanting to save money and add a personal touch by making those Christmas gifts—it is best to start a bit early so you don't find yourself stressed as the holiday approaches.

There are fifteen weeks until Christmas! :D Starting this Monday, September 16th, I will begin my "Christmas Gift Idea" series. Every Monday I will post a cheap, cute, personal Christmas gift idea for the holidays. (Note that these gifts could also be used for other occasions, but I'm going to focus specifically on Christmas).

These gifts will cost no more than $15. However, for some of these crafts there might be an upfront cost you would need to pay for the tools needed, but once you purchase this the gift itself would cost under $15 to make every time you were to make it. For example, you would need to purchase the knitting loom if you wanted to knit blankets or scarves as gifts. The scarves themselves would only cost you $4 or $5 to make and you would be able to continue to make these gifts because you have the tool you need! I will give you the pricing for all of the items you will need for each gift, as well as some helpful tips on how you can find these items at a discounted price.

The series will end the Monday before Christmas. On this last day of the series, I will post a simple gift that is cheap and easy to put together since it will be so close to Christmas by then.

If you are like me, I love to give gifts but there are so many people I want to give gifts to—family and friends—that it can get pretty expensive. By using some of these ideas, you can keep the cost down but still make cute, usable, personal, and special gifts for your loved ones.

Stay tuned...and let the crafting begin!

P.S. If anyone in my family or extended family is reading these posts and decides to use one of these gift ideas for Christmas—and I hope you will use these ideas if you like them!—please message me to let me know if you are making one of these gifts for someone in our family so we don't make the same gift for the same person. Ha ha :)

Tulsa Weekend: Birthday Celebrations

Forgive me for lagging behind on my blog posts. This weekend was especially busy! Friday and Saturday, we had some friends come stay with us. It was really great seeing them and getting to catch up and hang out, even if it was only for a short while. Then, Saturday evening, Aaron and I headed off to Tulsa to visit my family. We had a lot of birthdays to celebrate!

We arrived Saturday night—after a long, long, long trip through the boonies of Oklahoma. Hooray! :D We did have an interesting time the closer we got to Tulsa though. We were driving behind an ambulance for quite some time. They didn't have their lights on, but we saw a person laying on a gurney in the back. Aaron and I wondered if the person had already passed away, or what was happening. You would think if they had someone on a gurney in the back, they would be booking it to the hospital. Not so. However, the farther we went, we did see the person on the gurney sit up and start to move around—that was a good sign to us since we thought the person had already died.

Back on track.

We arrived in Tulsa and got to talk with my family for a bit before we all decided to retire to bed, which was difficult to do because Harry Potter was playing on TV! :D However, as I told my dad I would, I turned off the television and made it to bed.

Sunday morning we went to church and then we took lunch over to my grandparents' house. Funny story. We went to bring them barbecue. We stopped at this barbecue place in downtown Tulsa called Back Alley Blues—normally a really great place that I do recommend—but when we stopped there on Sunday, we were looking over the menus trying to decide what we wanted when the waitress stopped by to inform us that the ribs weren't ready yet (mind you, it was already 12:30 at this point). I was really disappointed because I'm a ribs' girl myself, but I decided I could/would find something else to order. Then we decided, as a group, that we would order the smoked chicken and brisket, to which the waitress responded, "Oh, we're also out of chicken right now." Haha. Well, that decided it for us. We headed over to Rib Crib instead (and they gave us FREE ice cream! Another benefit of switching restaurants). The whole situation was more comical to us than frustrating. We had some good laughs over the barbecue place not having ribs or smoked chicken. (I'm not saying this to bad-talk Back Alley Blues, because I still highly recommend it. I just hope you go on a day when they have ribs and smoked chicken!)

After a short visit with the grandparents, we went over to my other grandparents' house to begin the birthday celebrations! On the way there, I snapped this lovely picture:

This is my little brother (not so little anymore), Karsten. Let me just let you all know that just about every car ride we take, whether it be a ten-minute drive or a super long road trip, my brother ALWAYS, without fail, falls asleep in the car. I believe when I posted this picture on Facebook the other day, I captioned it: "Almost sixteen years old but some things never change. He always falls asleep in the car no matter how short the trip."

I always get a kick out of it though and I'm always amazed that he can sleep sitting straight up like this. However, I will say this is one of the more believable positions. I wish I had a picture to show you, but he usually sleeps in the car with his head bent all the way over on top of his shoulder. It makes you cringe just looking at him when he does that. You can't imagine that that can be comfortable, but it is to Karsten!

Anyway, we made it over to my grandparents' house after our short trip in the car—though a surprisingly restful trip for Karsten. It was great to see my grandparents. My grandpa had just recently come home from the rehabilitation center after he took a pretty bad fall. He was really excited to be home!

While we were there, I introduced everyone to these cookies that I make for Aaron sometimes. They are a friend's recipe. They all loved them! My great uncle had to have had at least five cookies—it was really funny to watch him sneaking them behind my great aunt's back. Haha. And then my grandpa had two of them, which he usually isn't allowed to have because he is a diabetic, but my grandma allowed it since it was his birthday, after all! :)

Then came the presents! I wish I had a picture of the gift I gave my dad. (His birthday was August 30th so this was the first time we saw him since then). My dad is a huge Star Wars fan so I got him this little book called, Darth Vader and Son. He seemed to really enjoy it! And it needed a little something else with it so I threw in a Darth Vader bobble head I came across at the store a few weeks ago.

My brother's birthday is tomorrow actually so we wanted to celebrate with him while we were there. My brother is an avid reader so I thought a book would be right up his alley. I got him the Collectible Edition of Sherlock Holmes.

Have you all seen these at Barnes and Noble? They are so cool! They have several different classical works that they have rebound and made into collectible editions. I'm hoping to collect some for myself at some point.

I wasn't so sure of what to get my grandpa so I just gave him a Stampin' Up card I had made for him for his birthday. I think he really loved it though!

After some good quality time with family, my parents, my brother, Aaron, and I headed off to have our own little family celebration. So after some indecisive deliberation, we decided to go to Dave and Busters. It was so much fun! We had dinner and got to play games for several hours! They even had a four-person air hockey table! It was crazy!!

My mom and I got really excited when we saw they had Frogger. Does anyone remember that game?! So much fun, right? Well, this was NOT the same thing. It was really bizarre. So if you ever go to Dave and Busters, don't be fooled! It is NOT the Frogger you remember. Trust me on that.

Learning to be Resourceful

Before I start my post on "Learning to be Resourceful," I would just like to let you all know that I finally made Aaron his hat!

I think I'm finally getting the hang of crocheting! :)

Labor Day Crafting and Movies!

Talk about a fun Labor Day! I had an entire day making fun, fall crafts! :D And then my husband came home and we watched two movies that I had never seen before but know I probably should have seen a long time ago. Oh well, problem solved—I have officially seen The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles.

Since Michaels was having such a big sale today, I ventured out, got some supplies, and then came back home to start my crafts. Anyone else as ready for fall as I am? :) Well, now I have my wreath made and ready.

I have to say, I am pretty proud of it! I do have it hung up a bit early, but we're close enough to fall now, right?

I was looking at several fall wreath examples on Pinterest for ideas, but it all just came together today when I was shopping around Michaels. I love hay bales, but what in the world am I going to do with a hay bale at an apartment?! Well, I found this hay wreath at Michaels and thought it would be perfect! So happy with it and the fall flowers and leaves I found.

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Another important craft I was able to make today was a gift bag for my dad's birthday present.

Since I started selling Stampin' Up, I thought it would be fun to make my own gift bags using my stamps. I usually go to Hobby Lobby and buy a bundle of 12 plain brown bags, decorate the outside with scrapbook paper, and then decorate the scrapbook paper with stamps. I've been really pleased with the results. If you would like to see some of the other gift bags I've made, check out my Etsy shop, http://www.etsy.com/shop/CraftsbyNatasha?ref=search_shop_redirect.

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All I have for fall decorations right now is a wreath, so I tried out some other fall craft ideas.

These would make fun candy bags for Halloween. I have some other favor bags like this on my Etsy shop you can check out.

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I've always wanted to make one of these flower fans so I worked on this today too.

Isn't the little bat stamp super cute? "Happy Hallow-Wing!" :D

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I still need to finish this last craft. I saw this idea on Pinterest and thought it would make a cute banner.
You can check it out here: http://pinterest.com/pin/161496336611255961/