Merry Christmas

MERRY CHRISTMAS

to you and your loved ones

dear friends!

Thank you for stopping by my blog all the year round and leaving so many wonderful comments! I’m very happy to be connected with so many sweet people around the world!

I’m sharing some more gifts I had the pleasure to find in MARIE’s beautiful advent calendar packages. I love that adorable charm she made for me and the little glass jar filled with buttons.

A tiny pair of pink shoes. They are only 7/8” long. Aren’t they cute? I would like to use them to make a piece of jewelry next year.

All kinds of great treasures to use in my creations. What fun :-)!

Thanks again, dear MARIE !

I’m off now to the kitchen to prepare a gingerbread cream as dessert for tonight. Yummy!

T T T T T T T

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

and

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR

to all of you!

Enjoy the time with your family and friends!

I wish you love, good health, luck and happiness for 2011!

Thank you for making this year such a wonderful year of blogging for me!

Sending you Christmas hugs and love,

Julia

T T T T T T T

An Advent Calendar

I’m very sorry if you couldn’t see the pictures of my last post. I don’t know what happened to them. First they were there, then there were gone and could only be seen if you had clicked into the picture’s frame. When I first tried to fix it by deleting and downloading the pictures again, it didn’t work. Today, after downloading and using another  internet browser to solve a problem I had with my blogger dashboard, I gave  it another try and this time it worked, YIPEE! So if you missed the pictures of my wonderful swap with TINA, please check out my last post again. Thank you :-)!

♥ – ♥ – ♥

My dear friend MARIE of Lost Bird Studio and I had arranged to swap an advent calendar. After discussing a couple of times what kind of calendar we would like, we finally decided to send each other a decorated box, filled with differently shaped and designed packages, using paper, fabric, laces, images etc. While it was a lot of fun, it had been quite some work and we both were kind of drained after creating 24 wrappings. It was worth the effort though and now we both enjoy not only looking at a lot of beautiful packages but also have the joy to unwrap one each day until Christmas.

These are the packages I received from Marie. Aren’t they just pure eye-candy and almost too pretty to open?

 That’s the inside of the lovely box Marie had made for me.

Here are some of the gifts I already had the pleasure to unwrap.

A couple of packages were made to hang and so they found a place in the Christmas tree, like number 4.

Thank you so much, dear MARIE! I’m having so much fun with all the pretty packages and gifts!

Now this is the box I decorated for Marie

and here are the gifts.

I have closed this vintage pudding mold with a round shape, cut from an old book page. So there is a gift hiding inside number 15 too.

I’m sure you can imagine how much fun we both are having each morning and we still have 12 packages to open :-). You might wonder why we swapped 24 instead of 25 packages. The reason is that in Germany the Christmas gifts are getting exchanged in the afternoon or evening of the 24th.

For the last week or so I hadn’t been much on the computer and missed quite some of your posts. So I’m off to do some blog hopping now and hope you have a wonderful Sunday!

HUGS to you,

Julia

SANTA CLAUS was HERE

You don’t believe me?

Then please take a look at all these gifts and this picture doesn’t even show everything I have received!

 

OK, I admit, it wasn’t Santa who brought me a all these wonderful gifts but our mail lady, delivering a swap package from the sweet bear maker and mixed media artist

TINA from Denmark.

I can assure you though that unwrapping everything felt like Christmas.

Tina spoiled me big time with a beautiful papier mâché tussie mussie, a wall pocket, laces, frozen charlottes, sheet music, vintage bobbins and so much more. This is a gorgeous tag book, she had created with lots of laces and beautiful images.

 Isn’t this girl on a swing just cute? She went straight on the Christmas tree and makes such a wonderful ornament there along with some of Tina’s beautiful tags.

One of the tags I used to embellish a silver plated bell.

 

Besides the large frozen Charlotte there was this tiny one. Tina had also sent me a vintage cookie mold and a very pretty altered optometry lens.

  

I love this beautiful wall pocket Tina had made for me. For now I have included it in the Christmas decoration. After the holidays it will go into the studio to hold all kinds of ephemera.

Then there was this Danish lady for my collection of adopted ancestors, a vintage powder box, a heart ornament and vintage bobbins.

Receiving all those awesome gifts, wouldn’t you have felt like Christmas too?

Dear TINA, I can’t thank you enough!!! I love including your gifts in my Christmas decoration and will have lots of fun using the goodies :-).

Please visit Tina at her lovely blog TinyBear where she shows her sweet bears and her mixed media creations!

♥ – ♥ –♥

Here you can see my swap gifts for Tina. The middle picture shows a Santa wall hanging and then there are fabric ornaments, an embellished tin, paper trees, laces, buttons, vintage stencils with her initials and other things she can play with :-).

Next time I have to show you the wonderful advent calendar swap I had with my dear friend MARIE over at Lost Bird Studio. Receiving her 24 beautifully wrapped packages felt again like Christmas.

Here is the number 1 as a little sneak peak. Doesn’t it look very pretty?

The snow outside is adding to the Christmas feeling. We got about 4” over the last days. If you have snow too, I wish you save travels and hope you stay warm.

XOXO,

JULIA