With 82 days until Christmas, it is time to start thinking about gifts you may want to create and is also a great time to start shopping. Afte all Amazon and Target are having BIG sales this week and purchasing now helps spread out some of the cost of the holidays. Today we are going to share five different products that make good gifts and also can be used to create gifts! I am going to share some different ideas but first a quick story of my inspiration. One of my friends has been working on a nook in her house. She found some photo for inspiration and was buying things for it. She was looking for the right size pillow for it and some wall art. Everything had to be blue or blue and ivory. We went shopping last weekend and were looking at pillows and pictures. Then I came home and started playing with these products to create the pictures for her. I bought some frames from Dollar Tree and painted two of them blue. So those two pictures she was looking for are the inspiration for much of this post! Let's start out with a product that makes a good gift (and I wouldn't use to craft until next year). It is the Colonial Williamsburg Blue and White American Style Wall Calendar 2027 by Workman Calendars and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
A year of timeless blue and white beauty from Colonial Williamsburg.
- HISTORIC BEAUTY: Discover why designers and decorators have loved the blue and white color palette since the 18th century with a year of gorgeous photos and artifacts.
- FROM THE COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG FOUNDATION: Each month features an image from the Foundation’s vast collection of textiles, ceramics, prints, paintings, books, and more.
- GORGEOUS GIFT: Perfect for art lovers, American history fans, and everyone with an appreciation for timeless design.
- NOW PLASTIC-FREE!: Workman wall calendars are completely plastic-free. Now printed with an extended paper flap closed with a fully recyclable seal—no more shrink-wrap!
From Me:
Now I have always loved blue and white quilts and blue and white things. My mother's good china was blue and white growing up. We used our good china and sterling silver silverware for dinner every night. Blue tends to be a favorite color for many people, and it pairs so nicely with white or ivory. This calendar is full of blue and white items from Colonial Williamsburg times. It includes blue and white tiles, portraits, quilts, fabric and so much more. One each page is an explanation about what is pictured. The calendar has good sized boxes for each day so there is room to make notes of appointments, birthdays, etc. It also is labeled with just about every holiday, cultural month, etc. that I know of (and some I had not heard of). It is the perfect gift for the history buff, American history teacher or someone who just loves blue and white! It is a high-quality calendar and will be a great gift this holiday season. Of course, in 2028, I would use the pictures for different things like dollhouse art (the back of the calendar with the small pictures are usually a perfect size) and this one has the pages like the tiles and portraits that add even more sizes and dimension. Many of the months also include a small picture in one of the boxes which is great for dollhouse scale. My husband also has a habit of framing the photos of the calendar that he enjoys to keep as wall art and this calendar is good for that as well. I know we get so many calendars from charities every year, but I always enjoy a good quality one like this more than the free ones and love getting them as gifts.
Now the rest of our products I have combined to make different gifts and artwork. So, we are going to introduce all of them with their descriptions and then review them all together. The first is the Colonial Williamsburg Blue and White American Style Wrapping Paper Book by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Now these pages can be used to wrap gifts as that is the purpose they are made, however, there are many other things that can be done with them.
Product Description:
This set of high-quality wrapping papers and matching gift labels is adorned with patterns from the Foundation’s collection of 18th century textiles, ceramics, and more, all in a classic blue and white color palette.
Each wrapping paper sheet detaches easily and unfolds to 18 7/8” by 25 ¾”. Simply detach the paper from the book, cut to size, wrap your gift, add a label, and gift!
From Me: Now before I share the next product, I want to share the tags where the bottom row makes amazing dollhouse paintings as do some of the pages of wrapping paper with the smaller pictures! And, of course, in the past we have made many crafts from wrapping paper including paper beads, bows, and more!
Now since the tags shared above are stickers we will go straight to the sticker books. The first one is Cynthia Hart's Virtoriana Garden Delights: The Sticker Book by Cynthia Hart.
Product Description:
The experience of nurturing and watching things grow fosters a special kind of happiness, one cherished by the Victorians with their love of all things beautiful. A fascinating collection of more than 825 stickers, Cynthia Hart’s Victoriana Garden Delights features butterflies and blossoms, seed catalog covers and vintage garden views, vegetable people and flower fairies—a whimsical marriage of realistic and fanciful images that evoke the splendor, elegance, and joy of Victorian-era gardening.
From Me: This sticker book is full of stickers that can be used for dollhouses or 18" (American Girl) dolls. For example, in the sample pages above the small seed packet stickers are the perfect size for the 18" dolls. One could easily create a paper envelope and put them on the front for their dolls to create a garden! Below show some of the pictures (and some even have frames in the picture) that are a good size for dollhouses. Plus, anyone wanting to add butterflies, plants and more to the outside of a book nook could use just about any of the smaller stickers! I also loved the back of the sticker pages and in fact used them in some of my art. I wish they were in blue and ivory instead of green and ivory for my project but still they are amazing!!
The next sticker book is The Susan Alexandra Sticker Book by Susan Korn. Many of these stickers are beaded art or beads! I didn't use these in my art crafts but easily could have. It just didn't fit the vibe I was going for.
Product Description:
Step inside the joyful world of beloved accessory brand Susan Alexandra with this hardcover sticker book, featuring more than 700 stickers that can be used to decorate your life with a bold sense of color, humor, and play.
Susan Alexandra’s signature beaded goods and playful designs are transformed across more than two hundred pages of visual delight, filled with peel-away stickers that evoke the brand’s iconic motifs of flowers, foods, animals and critters, shoes, purses, charms, cheeky phrases, and other nostalgic ephemera.
Use the stickers to decorate notebooks, hand-written letters and cards, wrapped gifts, phone cases, water bottles and anything else the heart desires, all with a sense of that unmistakable Susan Alexandra style.
Our final product is one of the Book for Paper Lovers Series from the Editors of Flow Magazine. Playing with the papers and things in this book made me want to pull out the other books in the series that I have reviewed. Today's book is Book for Paper Lovers: World of Flowers by the Editors of Flow Magazine.
Product Description:
From the creators of wildly popular Flow magazine, the Book for Paper Lovers is a stationery enthusiast’s dream, brimming from cover to cover with beautiful paper and Flow’s signature goodies.To help brighten the world up a little, this edition of Flow’s Book for Paper Lovers is bursting with blooms. And much like a flower, paper is also something that is tactile and real—which is lovely in such an increasingly digital world.
This book doesn’t need a password: instead, it offers beautiful stationery and fold-your-own envelopes, stickers and gift wrap, notebooks and pop-ups, tags and cards, and posters and labels within its covers—all made of paper, the material we adore so much and that is 100 percent analog.
What’s included:
- Patterned paper
- Stickers
- Notebooks
- Gift tags and cards
- Wrapping paper
- Fold-your-own envelopes
- And much more!
From Me: This book has stationery, papers, cards, notepads, stickers and more. It even has the pop-up little art gallery shown above. The last picture in the collage are notebooks, cards and postcards. Below are some sample pages/pictures including ones I use in the crafts! Needless to say, this book is perfect for anyone who loves flowers, papers, stationery and crafting!
From Me:
Ok, so now onto my find for the perfect wall art. I bought two 5"x7" frames and three 8"x10" frames from Dollar Tree. I thought I could paint all of them. I painted the 5x7 ones blue. They were originally grey like one of the 8x10 frames I used. Below are simply pages or part of pages from Book for Paper Lovers: World of Flowers. The pages are about 7.4 inches by 9 inches so they are big for the 5x7 and small for the 8x10. If I was framing them in the 8x10 frames, I would create mats for them. Note the first and last picture below is the same page but with different sized frames!
The pages of the Colonial Williamsburg Blue and White American Style Wrapping Paper Book is also beautiful and could make fun art by being framed. I framed some of them below with my blue 5x7 frames. This would be a fun way to decorate a first home or make a gallery wall!
I also checked out the 5x7 frame on one of the stickers in Cynthia Hart's Virtoriana Garden Delights: The Sticker Book. Now there is a story for choosing this sticker. When my nephew was born my sister wanted to only be called Aunt Rosebud around him. It got shortened to Rosie. My other sister decided that we all needed to have flower names. She picked Lily of the Valley, and I am thinking of actually framing this sticker (probably on a different background) and putting it in her Christmas stocking. I think she would love it! She loves fairies too. Like I said, thinking about making some Christmas gifts!!
After looking for individual pages to be framed I started looking at layering. I have been checking out art all over the place online as well as stores and most have a layered look. I started with the 5x7 frames since that is what I thought my friend would want. I combined (and did this really quickly and not neatly just to see how it would look) layers of the wrapping paper, pages from the book, and stickers! All of the corner photos below are wrapping paper, a cut page from Book for Paper Lovers: World of Flowers and a picture cut from one of the pages of wrapping paper. These pictures by themselves would also be great for art in a dollhouse! The top row middle pictures are stickers from Cynthia Hart's Virtoriana Garden Delights: The Sticker Book and the bottom row middle pictures have cards from World of Flowers book.
I also wanted to try some bigger pictures, so I used one of my 8"x10" frames. It is a gold one that I bought for a different project. The top two photos ave a background of wrapping paper, a page from Book for Paper Lovers: World of Flowers, and then pages from Cynthia Hart's Virtoriana Garden Delights: The Sticker Book. The second one is actually the back of the sticker page. Each back as different sketches like this one and they are beautiful! So you can use the stickers up and then use the back for more art! If I was doing these to hang or gift, I would trim or use the sticker on a different sheet. These literally are the pages ripped out of the book.
The bottom three are a page from Book for Paper Lovers: World of Flowers, the quilt card also from World of Flowers and then the first has another card from that book, and the second has one of the pictures cut out from a page of the Colonial Williamsburg Blue and White American Style Wrapping Paper Book. If I was doing these to gift or hang, I would make a mat that actually fits the bottom paper. It is amazing to see how easy these pieces of art are to layer and create and so inexpensive compared to the ones I have seen elsewhere. However it ends up, my friend's wall is to small for pictures so she decided not to add any. Now I just need to fix her pillow since she bought one that is too big for the chair. (A crafter's life I guess.)
So, if you know someone who would love one of these you can purchase it to gift to them and if you want to make some art, cards, or other fun projects be sure to check them all out! Happy Creating!!
