STRIP QUILT

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, my husband and I were wandering around in Michael's and JoAnn's looking for some Christmas decorating ideas. As he perused the outdoor decor options, I, of course, perused the papercrafting aisles. 

Being a devout Stampin' Up! afficionado, I tend to not have too much fun in these stores anymore. 

But, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't help but get caught up in all the beautiful options for Christmas crafting. 

Besides purchasing a few ornament/decoration/necklace kits to make over the Thanksgiving break with my granddaughter, Stella, and her mom and aunt, I also made a purchase of a little 6" x 6" pad of Christmas paper. The quality of the paper was exquisite and the color palette was scrumptious. I couldn't resist. I mean, it actually had MY NAME on it. Well, not really. But you know what I mean!

When I got home, I was flipping through the pages again when I encountered a few pages that were simply a composite of small strip samples of all the papers in the pad. I looked at these strange pages, wondering what in the world I could do with them.

Aha! LIGHT BULB MOMENT!

I could actually cut these strips apart, and use them separately in making little paper quilts -- Christmas style!

I could have made a few  more with the strips I had (I had never cut up the pieces I showed in the previous photo), but following are the little "quilts" I came up with using this paper.

I fell in love -- ONCE AGAIN. These are so much fun to make! And I dragged out a few other non-Stampin' Up! papers I had in my stash, and cut them into 1/4" strips. And went to work on some more quilts:

Soon I was obsessed with "sewing" these "quilts". And kept grabbing more and more paper. I had to simply force myself to stop. STOP! I had lots of other Christmas tasks that were waiting to be done. And I was starting to stress about not getting finished with everything on time.

Not needing any more of my handcrafted Christmas cards, I STILL wanted to use these darling little paper quilts on some cards. Darn. I can be stubborn. No. DETERMINED. 

I thought little homey touches could be added to the paper quilts with bows crafted from some of the Venetian Crochet Trim. I love this stuff. It is super easy to work with, and looks wonderful. So, I proceeded to make 15 teeny bows.

Initially, when the Paper Seedling to create Christmas cards with these quilts was planted, I immediately thought of the new stamp set, Cozy Christmas (page 9 of the Holiday Catalog). I mean, COZY!!?? What better descriptive word could you come up with for a QUILT. Quilt = Cozy. Synonymous.

I really planned on using the "Have a cozy Christmas" sentiment on my cards. 

But, in my brain, I couldn't come up with a good way to use this in conjunction with my quilts. So, since the "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" stamp has a retro, cozy feel, and was easier to incorporate into my vision of a design, I decided to go with that.

And, this is a sampling of some of the cards I came up with, putting my little quilts to good, cozy use:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas!

Cozy

Smiles.