{creative chick headquarters}: {crafty advice} from melissa o

Hey there, {creative chicks}! Melissa O. here, ready to share a little bit of creative juice with you this morning. I was inspired by a purchase made by a customer the other day, and immediately knew I wanted to try making a little something using the felt pockets from the Creative Cafe. I went home with a few sheets of paper, tags, and felt pockets and immediately got to "work".

I cut a few strips of patterned paper by October Afternoon and stitched them together with my sewing machine (for you non-sewers out there, you could skip this step, or perhaps hand-stitch or ink the edges of papers to add detail). I then used a few pieces of red-line tape along the back of the paper to adhere the strip to my felt pocket. I also stitched the paper strip to the felt pocket using my sewing machine, making sure the red-line tape was in the center of the paper, away from where the needle would be running so as not to damage the machine.

I used Marvy punches to punch a large scalloped circle out of orange cardstock, and a regular circle out of cream cardstock. I inked the edges of the papers and stitched a border around the inner circle. I adhered a chipboard accent and some paper flowers to the circle element before adhering the whole embellishment to the felt pocket, again using red-line tape. I finished off the project using a variety of alphabet stickers (I ran out of the letter "e" in the smaller alphas, so substituted upside-down number "3" instead!) to create a title for my project.

The whole project took about a half hour, cost under $5 and turned out really sweet! I also created a second project using similar materials. This one included a few tags that I embellished with left over paper scraps and a few pieces of ribbon. I think these little pocket-minis would make terriffic birthday gifts (attach a gift card to a tag and you're all set!) or fun projects to do with the kiddos. Make sure to check out the felt pockets/tags/papers at the Creative Cafe and bring a few home to re-create this easy project. Oh, and you KNOW that I love to see what you've been working on, so bring in the project you created that was inspired by this tutorial for me to check out!!!

Happy Crafting!!! <3 MelissA