Cheers to 2014!

Hello! I'm a little late, but wanted to wish you a very happy, healthy & creative New Year! New Years Day marks the anniversary of my blog...with I started on January 1st 2007. I cannot believe I've been blogging regularly for a full seven years! WOW! Where has the time gone? With that said...I've been pretty much MIA since before Christmas as far as my blog is concerned. We were without power here for several days right before Christmas so that made finishing up all the last minute Christmas details a real challenge!

I was in the middle of painting a dozen wine glasses for some wine themed gifts and was limited to painting near a window during daylight hours, same goes for wrapping gifts. Hopefully I learned my lesson as far as waiting until the last minute! (but I kinda doubt it!) I had purchased all the supplies I needed to paint the wine glasses way back in October, but I just had to wait until December 21st to get started!

We also had family from out of state staying with us for this past week after Christmas. (thankfully we had power by then!) We had a lot of fun, but no time for stamping.

Despite the challenges I faced, my first attempt at painting wine glasses turned out fairly well, and everyone who received them liked them.

This was the first design I painted...and I learned real quick that I was going to need SEVERAL coats of paint to make the design even remotely opaque. Red is always one of the hardest colors to work with, and the glass paints were no exception.

I paired the "all lit up" glasses with the "gettin' blitzened" glasses which had this cute reindeer with the lights tangled in his antlers. If I were to do these again, I would have written the "all lit up" phrase on the base like I did on the "gettin' blitzened" glasses, and I would have only painted one reindeer on the front of the glass instead of front & back...because they took so long to paint and I could have finished double the glasses in the same time...duh! Here's what i mean...

I only ended up making 2 each of the above glasses...those went to my nieces and their hubbys along with a good bottle of wine and homemade candies wrapped inside of each glass. I didn't get a photo of these finished with the candy. :-( All these photos are not that great, BUT...they were taken during the power outage with only the light of a sunless Michigan winters day...so I guess I should be happy I managed to get any photos at all.

 I did get some final shots with the snowmen glasses showing the candy wrapped inside.

The snowmen turned out to be fairly quick and easy to paint, so I made a lot more of them than the first two designs. I painted the snowman faces all around and the full snowman just on the front (see...I learned from the reindeer glasses!) and then filled in with snowflakes.

They turned out pretty cute I think...maybe someday I'll paint some for myself.

I didn't do as much baking as I planned since no power means no oven! But prior to the outage I went to my annual cookie exchange. I had cute gift bags in which to put my cookies, but first they had to go into ziplocks to keep fresh. Plain old naked ziplocks are kind of boring right? So, I got out my White Stazon and my Festive Flurry stamp set and fixed that problem.

That was a quick and easy fix and they look much more festive!

With our power back on, our house guests back in North Carolina, and my hubby back at work after a week long vacation I finally have time to get into my stamp room and play with some new stuff!!!

Thanks for visiting me today, especially to those who have been visiting me since 2007! Lets make 2014 a GREAT year!