if i have one more failed project, i'm going to puke

just kidding.

about the puke, not the failed projects.

grrrrrrr.

it's that time of year and i've been trying to tackle cards and presents, as well as home crafts and baby gifts.

first, my embroidery failed. i tried to do something as simple as a "D" on a little white fluffy winter vest, for mr. baby dash. the fluffy part threw me off. it would require much more work than i anticipated in order to have the letter thick enough to see amongst all of that fluff! so. much. fluff! the outfit included little white sweatpants and socks, a treasure of a little thing that i bought from baby gap and had stored in the future baby box. once dash was born, i gave up the project and decided it was too late because the size of the outfit was newborn. in retrospect, i might have possibly been able to finish because little dash is working to gain some birth weight back and then some. however, the frustration overruled and i had procrastinated too long to save it in the end.

then, i started work on my christmas card envelopes. the hand stamp project was simple, but in order to find the tiniest font to address our 3.5 x 5 envelopes, i decided to use one of martha stewart's raised stamp kits. for raised stamps, you place each individual letter on the stamp mount and then tap the ink, place paper, and press--much like a letter press, which is why it appealed to me in the first place. IT TOOK 45 MINUTES FOR DAN AND I WORKING AS A TEAM TO ADDRESS ONE ENVELOPE and the result was NOT what i wanted. the letters turned out to be too big, with too large of a space in between. in the end, it looked too "scrapbooky" for me and filled the space of the envelope so thoroughly that i was worried the post office would call me in the middle of the night and harass me. and then i would have to call martha stewart in the middle of the night and harass her. so unpleasant.

we also designed a photo collage to insert in our christmas cards (which we have tried to do every year), but we don't have color ink and decided to use dan's printer at work. first dan bought inkjet paper and that won't work on a laser printer. then we bought laser paper and the printer scoffed and refused to print more than one page at a time. even at one page at a time, with the print settings set to photo paper, 600 dpi, and best image quality, the collages were printing speckled and blurry. ONE PAGE printed correctly. wtf? so, i scrapped photo collages. sorry to those of you who can't wait to get yours in the mail so you can put it on your fridge and gaze at our smiling faces every morning when you get the milk out for your cereal.

with several projects still to do, i am afraid. will anything work? are the do-it-yourself gods trying to tell me something???

what do you have to do yet before christmas? are you shopping or creating or both? how are your projects going? i sincerely hope better than mine. share, please. and i will let you know as soon as something goes right. I WILL SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS.

xoxo