#ChristmasLantern | Fancy for Stampin'

I’ve been gone for a while and there is no excuse! I’m not really sure what has been keeping me so busy lately, but I have been.

The peach tree in our back yard provided us with a bumper crop this year. Compared to last year’s 5-peach harvest, if peaches were dollars we’d have a million. After giving as many as we could away, eating many fresh ones, and making a cobbler and a pie, we’ve frozen about 23 quarts. We started making peach jam with them this week. As I write this, my husband is out back and is now picking a bumper crop of grapes from our grape vines. We again got very few last year. (He insists on planting these kinds of things.) He will be spending the day washing, bagging and freezing them until I can get to them for grape jelly at a later date. I pray to God the apple tree he planted a few years ago never produces fruit! 🙂 We start with strawberries from a small strawberry patch (it continues to grow) we have in June, cherries from our tree in July, August is peach month, then grapes…I don’t want apples, but…shhhhhhhhh! Please don’t tell him I said that. Oh, we can’t forget the tomatoes from the garden that make great pasta sauce! All kidding aside, there is nothing like the taste of a freshly picked piece of fruit or vegetable.

I’m getting ready for a very busy end of the year beginning with next week. I will be traveling without my husband to visit my daughter, her significant other, and my grand-daughter in Virginia Beach. I am looking forward to the adventure as I have never been there before. I mean, how could anyone not LIKE the beach! From there, my daughter and I will drive with the baby to Ohio to visit my mother and the rest of our family. We will celebrate Stella’s first birthday there. We will celebrate it again when we return to Virginia with her other grandmother who is set to arrive two days before I head back home.

Two weeks after returning to Colorado, my sister and brother-in-law will be visiting for three weeks as we plan a road trip to Yosemite National Park…or whatever is left of it after the devastating wildfires in Northern California this summer. I’m sure it will be fun! There are always wineries and Reno, Nevada and Lake Tahoe are only an hour away from where we will be staying.

November means…you guessed it…a week in Orlando, Florida with my bestie Carol for Stampin’ Up!’s 30 Anniversary Celebration at On Stage Live! Can’t wait! Can’t wait! I’ll get home and I will be very thankful that I DO NOT have to make Thanksgiving dinner this year as we have been invited elsewhere. So that means I’ll have a month to get ready for Christmas! Hopefully January will not be too much of a let down.

So this little project I am sharing today has been in the works for a while. I think I created it in July and decided to hold off awhile before sharing it. But then things started happening and I was almost afraid I wouldn’t get it posted at all. This is probably the best time for it, because it is well in advance of the Christmas holidays, which gives everyone time to react and actually make it. I had intended on doing a video, but when I started I just couldn’t seem to get my act together. Maybe it has been too long since my last one. So, I opted to do this the old-fashioned way by doing a written tutorial with a million and one photos to guide you.

The inspiration for this came one day while I browsing that web site that sucks your time away before you even realize it…what’s it called…Pintrist! 🙂 I saw this photo of a Christmas lantern and wondered why I couldn’t make one myself?!

So, one Sunday afternoon, I closeted myself into my tiny stamp room (my husband forgot about me until dinner time) with a pad of grid paper and a ream (there are 500 sheets in a ream) of cheep card stock on the desk in front of me. (I should have taken photos of my process, but I didn’t). And this is what I ended with.

There is no stamping in this project. Just a lot of measuring and cutting and gluing. I am very pleased with how it turned out. As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes I impress myself. It is amazing what we can do when we set our mind to it! And I think I realized in the creation of this lantern why I like paper crafting so much. When I was kid I didn’t do a lot of cutting and pasting, and making a big paper mess. We weren’t allowed because my mother always said it was wasting. “Don’t waste the tape!” or “Don’t waste the paper!” was what I heard. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming Mom. Times were different, money was tight. Paper was needed for homework or school. My mother grew up in Italy during World War II when you didn’t even think of coloring, or cutting, or pasting!

Any way…here are a few more photos and the link for the written tutorial.