Thankful for you!

We are so, SO thankful for each and every one of you! Your comments and emails always put a smile on our faces and make us feel so blessed to be able to create and make things for you. And your support over the years has been amazing - we love you!

Last year we made some thankful for tags and thought we should do the same thing for you, again this year as a little "Thank You" present! You can download the above tag designs, for free, at our Project page - there are four different fall colors and they have that fun vintage look we love :) We hope you enjoy them!

You can use them on your scrapbook layouts, or as seating cards for around the table: write the person's name in the center and the card reads "Thankful for Jan". Or print out a bunch and make a mini book out of them! You could ask everyone that comes over for Thanksgiving dinner to write on one what they are thankful for... There's lots of different ways to use them!

We wish everyone a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving!
xo, Elle

Gingerbread house time!

This weekend was one of the best weekends... ever! We had the entire family making gingerbread houses and it was too much fun! I'll admit... they are a ton of work, but it's totally worth it! Here's how mine turned out:
M&M roof, pretzel fence, rock candy walkway, lamppost... and Christmas lights!!
And, here are some photos of my sisters house:
She did a little snowman, too! And, her roof looked amazing... plus those little gingerbread men peeking out of the window! Too cute!!
So much fun! It's a family tradition that we've been doing since we were little, but last year we didn't get a chance, so this year we made up for it! The houses were actually from kits we bought at Target, for $8! It was a steal and definitely the way I recommend doing them! We did them one year from scratch and it was HARD! So this kit definitely made it easier :)

Thanks for letting me share these with you today!
xo, Elle

p.s. We've been getting a lot of emails about black Friday and cyber Monday... All I can say is that we will be doing a little something to celebrate, so make sure you're on the newsletter list!

p.p.s. We are still narrowing down through the list of Design Team applicants! Thank you all SO much for applying! We plan to announce the first six Design Team Members the week after Thanksgiving :)

Winners!!!!!!!!

We have some winners to announce this afternoon from our post below! Each winner will get their choice of one of our four new digital downloads for Christmas!

The winners are:
blog comments: Candace H on November 18, 2009 8:21 PM
facebook: Melissa Darnall
twitter: kimsacks

Please contact me via email with your choice of digital download and we'll get those to you asap!

Thank you all so much for your comments you've left here, on facebook and twitter, we really appreciate them - they just make our day! We had so much fun reading about all your traditions! And, thank you all for becoming fans of our facebook page! We have lots of fun planned for the future for our facebook page, can't wait!!

Tomorrow I'll be working on my traditional Gingerbread House! This year I'm using a kit, plus some other candy I bought to go along with it... I'll post some pics soon :)

Love you all and happy creating!
xo, Elle

Our Merry Christmas Banner + giveaway

Here's a little how-to post on how we put together our Merry Christmas banner! My mom and I spent the afternoon cutting, glittering, stringing and drinking cocoa and tea - it was a blast!

The supplies you will need, besides one of our digital download banner files (Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Peace Love Joy) are paper to print it out on (cardstock is recommended, but not necessary), scissors, glue, hole punch and string - glitter, pop dots, bells and other embellishments are optional.

After we printed out the letters and papers on white cardstock, we picked out our colors of letter shapes and patterned papers and started cutting.
We decided mixing red and green letters would be fun, so we laid them out as we went.Laying them out helped with picking the patterned paper that we were putting behind the letters. We decided to use all four papers in the set and alternate them all.
Once we had them all laid out, we were ready to start glittering. Martha Stewart Tinsel Glitter is to die for - seriously! It looks amazing, I want all the colors now, LOL! My mom glued the tinsel glitter around the shape the letters are on, following the brown border.
While she glittered, I punched holes into the papers, keeping them in order!
We used this amazing chunky yarn, plus a red ribbon, for the string. The yarn had a strand of gold in it, which turned out beautiful - we are really happy with the results!
Tip! If you're using multiple ribbons and yarns, tape the ends together so you have a point to push through your holes you've punched. Makes it so much easier and you won't have any unraveling!
Then we strung the papers onto our yarn/ribbon. It helps if you find the middle and work from the middle out.
And, I had these bells left over from another project... We knew we had to use them...
We tied little bows and then tied the bells to the ends between every other paper :) It added the perfect touch!
We tied larger bows for both ends and between Merry and Christmas with some vintage seam binding.
After that, we were ready to add the glittered shapes with letters to our papers. We doubled up the pop dots to give the shapes extra height.
TIP: We ran out of pop dots half way through and I panicked because I didn't want to have to run to town! Then I realized that after you've used up all the dots, you could just go back and cut squares out of the left overs! No one will ever see them, either, so it's a great way to get the most out of your supplies! Ta da! That's it, we were finished! Here's what it looked like:
And hung on our window at night, next to our silver tree :)
We love it! It was so much fun making it that we were like, who can we make one for now? Grandma and my sister are next on our list :)

With our digital downloads you only purchase the file once and then print as many as you'd like - these would make great Thanksgiving, House Warming, Holiday Party or Christmas presents!

Now for the giveaway! We wanted to do a giveaway with our new digital downloads today because we are just so thankful for our readers! We really enjoy and appreciate all the comments you leave here on our blog, on our facebook and twitter. We feel so blessed :) So today we are doing a giveaway with THREE chances to win!

You can enter our giveaway by (you can do all three if you'd like, too!):
1. Leaving a comment here (if you can't you can always email us your comment) We'd love to hear about your favorite holiday tradition!
2. Tweeting about our giveaway or blog! Make sure you include #ellesstudio in your tweet so we can find your tweet later
3. Become a facebook fan of ours! All fans will be automatically entered into our giveaway!

We'll pick one winner from each of the three places (blog comments, twitter and facebook fans). The three winners will get their choice of one of our new Christmas Digital Downloads!! Winners will be announced on Friday!

Thank you so much for letting us share our banner project with you and good luck everyone :)
xo, Elle

Cards for Heroes - Operation Write Home Contest Winners!

We just got the numbers in for our Cards for Heroes contest and... WOW! You guys are AMAZING! Together, you all sent in a total of...............

348 cards!

We were beyond thrilled and so excited that that many people could participated in our contest! Thank you all so, SO much!! We know the cards will be greatly appreciated by the person sending and the loved ones receiving them. You have touched many lives :)

We have some winners to announce!! But first, we feel like everyone who participated deserves to win something, so everyone who sent in cards will be receiving an email from us soon with a little "Thank You" present! This might take us awhile, but we promise to have them all out this week!

The winners of the gift certificates are:
$75: Greta Baksa
$50: Nicole Maki
$25: Kim Massey

We'll be emailing you today with your gift certificate info!

Thank you all so, SO much for making so many cards and sending them in - we feel so blessed to have you as friends and readers here :)
xo, Elle
P.S. We were missing one email address: Cynthia Harley please email us!
P.P.S. We'll delay our banner posting until tomorrow so this can be at the top of our posts a little longer :)

Christmas Digital Downloads are here!

We are excited to announce that the digital downloads for the holidays are now in the shop! We've made three different banners and some holiday bags, too!
This is how the holiday bags look after they have been printed, folded and glued. The digital kit includes a pdf file that look like this when printed out:
You can print all the designs or just a couple and print as many as you need! Whether you need 5 or 100, you only pay for the file once!

Use the holiday bags to hold small gifts for school, work, stocking stuffers, gift cards, special Christmas cookies or chex mix, etc! Each bag measures about 4.6 x 6 inches put together and has a very fun vintage look.

Our banners were created so you can mix and match and create your own one-of-a-kind banner!

Each banner kit includes these four 4 x 6 inch paper designs that you can use to go behind each letter/shape:
And, all the letters you need to create your banner in both red and green so you can use either one color or alternate between both!

Merry Christmas:
Happy Holidays:Peace Love Joy:We've also made some easy to follow instructions for downloading and printing for those who might be a little nervous to try - it's easy, I promise :)

Tomorrow we'll show you how we put our Merry Christmas banner together this weekend, it was so much fun!!
xo, Elle

Magnetic Christmas Countdown!

We are so excited to share this project with you in detail! We came across Kerry Lynn's Halloween Countdown Calendar and fell in love - it was exactly how we imagined our cut out numbers could be used!
We were super thrilled that this project received a ton of good feedback at CKC Seattle and we promised everyone that we'd be doing a full detail posting on the Advent/Countdown Calendar. This post is FULL of photos, tips and product listings to help you create your own!

We've also added a little kit to the shop that is full of the Elle's Studio items we used to make our countdown, seen here below:Alright! Now for the details :)

We started with a blank sheet of sheet metal. I picked mine up from my Dad, but he suggested that people could also buy them from any home improvement store like Lowe's or Home Depot. Make sure your metal is magnetic, aluminum is NOT, so do not buy that!

The sheet metal was covered in 1 yard of fabric and we ran our tissue fringe around the edges and glued the fringe on the back side. Now you are ready to decorate the front!
In the top left hand corner we made a little collage out of our items (Christmas flashcards, Holiday Vintage Snowflakes, No Year Vintage Calendar, Cut Outs: Holiday Greetings, and Cut Outs: Vintage Holiday Labels) and a tag cut from a piece of "Jolly By Golly" Cosmo Cricket paper.

For the "Christmas Countdown" letters we dug into our stash of chipboard letters and pulled the letters we needed from three different fonts that were similar in size. We love the look of combining fonts, it gives it extra special detail. Since the chipboard letters were all different colors, we covered each letter in glue and topped them with some Martha Stewart glitter. Let them dry overnight!
For the left side we used another tag cut from a piece of "Jolly By Golly" Cosmo Cricket paper and another Holiday Vintage Snowflake tag. We also added a rhinestone in the center of the snowflake :)
For the numbers we used our Cut Out: Holiday Numbers 1 - 31. These numbers worked great and are already decorated just enough that if you wanted to, you could just cut them out and be done! They look great without extra embellishments, so if you are limited on time this Christmas season, no worries!
But, if you do want to embellish the tags, you can! Or you can do half embellished, half not. Whatever you have time for :)

For numbers 1, 8 and 24 we cut two of the same numbers out, then cut extra off of one set and added some pop dots and adhered them back to themselves. The extra depth it gave looks amazing!
Digging into your stash for this project is a must! We had some of Making Memories Vintage Finding frames that worked out perfectly with our numbers.
We also embellished some numbers with chipboard shapes! This ornament shape above came from KI Memories Good Tidings chipboard sticker set. The colors matched perfectly!
And, this chipboard and button combo came from Making Memories Mistletoe button flowers - again, the colors matched great.
If you have chipboard items that you want to use, but the colors won't match, you can always cover them in glitter! This tree was glittered before, but we wanted more so we added some sliver tinsel glitter from Martha Stewart - this was my first time using tinsel glitter and it is a must have for your vintage holiday projects.
Same here with our frame - it was a Sassafras frame from another line, so we covered it in red glitter.
Our number 5 was embellished with a ribbon, glass button and hat pins.
Alright, we know just putting the numbers up each day is fun... but we made it even more fun by making some of the days interactive! So, you'll always keep them guessing what the next day will bring! Day 2 lets you make a wish list and then tuck it back into the envelope - this will be fun to either add to your December Daily album or keep it in the envelope to look back at next year. We used the wish list tag from our Vintage Moments at Christmas set.
And, we made day nine the same way! Maybe they can write the letter and take it to Santa when they get their photos taken or mail it to him... or you can sneak it into your album :) The Dear Santa tag was also from our Vintage Moments at Christmas set.
Day 17 uses a Starbucks Gift Card holder from a couple years ago (yes, I save those things, they are just too cute to throw away).
Our Vintage Flashcards fit inside perfectly! That was a fun surprise :)
Day 21 uses a 7gypsies metal box that opens! We used some flocking powder and glued it over the number, it looks amazing in person, very vintage! Are you wondering what's inside?
That is an awesome surprise! Everyone loves an early Christmas present!
Number 25 was embellished with green felt, rhinestones and a piece of paper from our Holiday Papers.
Day 22 was lined with green paper out of our Holiday Bazzill Paper Pack and some Making Memories Vintage Finding flowers.
After each number was embellished, we turned them over and glued a magnet on the back. We used two different magnet thicknesses to give varying depth to our project. Some needed more magnet than others, it just depends on how heavily embellished your numbers are.

Now you're ready to count down the days until Christmas! This project was so much fun for me to make, and it was quite relaxing and addictive! The night I made it I couldn't put it down to get some sleep and ended up staying up until 1 am, LOL! I was so pleased with the end results and that I got to use up some supplies I had in my stash - it was the best of both worlds :)

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments and I'll try to answer them there!

Thanks so much for stopping by!
xo, Elle
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