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A Farewell to Christmas – leftover candy canes & paper gift packets

January is a bleak time of year. Christmas is over, New Year’s is past and it’s a looooooong wait until Easter. (Fortunately, in BC this year we finally got an official holiday added in February – a long weekend called Family Day. But there’s still all of January to get through.)

It usually takes me a while to let go of Christmas (our tree is still up), and it also takes Christmas a while to let go of me. As in, there are gifts still to put away (currently sitting under the tree that’s still up) and chocolates still to be eaten (we may never get through all this chocolate) and leftovers still to be used.  Leftovers such as candy canes. I bought a package of 100 mini candy canes because it was the only way I could find to get mini candy canes, which I needed about 25 of. So now I have 75 of the darn things left. Well, Christmas is a time for bringing people together and helping one another. So why not extend that into January! And my friends are going to help me whether they like it or not, by ingesting some of these leftovers.

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by on January 12, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Edibles, Holiday/seasonal, Wrappings & containers
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Posted by Tally on January 12, 2013

http://tallystreasury.com/2013/01/a-farewell-to-christmas-leftover-candy-canes-paper-gift-packets/

thank you cards… and an engagement!

Well hello everyone, and happy 2013! As you may have noticed, the blog went on a little unplanned hiatus. (Which sounds like the name of an exotic flower, doesn’t it? I think we’ll need to have a post later on about crafting hiatus blossoms.)

Many things happened, from having surprise houseguests to being behind on Christmas crafting to getting engaged, and in the mad rush of it all I sensibly decided to give up on the blogging for a couple of weeks and start fresh in the new year. I’m sure you all were probably very busy wrapping gifts & Pinteresting your hearts out anyway.

Now that the Christmas holiday is over, I (and I imagine many of you) have a lot of thank you cards to write. And while thank you cards do not have to be handmade, I do like creating my own. Especially because I failed utterly to send out Christmas cards this year, so these cards are sort of doing double duty. It’s often a struggle to come up with cards that are cute/pretty/elegant/generally pleasing to the eye and easy to make lots of in a short time. I’ll show you some of the cards I came up with this year that meet (I think) all these requirements, and use up some little scraps of paper from my rarely-decreasing stash.

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by on January 6, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Cards, Events, Paper Goods
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Posted by Tally on January 6, 2013

http://tallystreasury.com/2013/01/thank-you-cards-and-an-engagement/

fingerless fleece monster gloves

It’s taken me a long time to write this particular tutorial, so let me be brief with my introduction. Monsters are awesome, monsters are cute, I like monsters, so let’s make a few. Burma shave.

These are simple, adorable fleece gloves that will keep you warm and amused. And while they’re great for kids, they’re also great for everyone. I made myself a pair that I wear all the time, and I’m a very serious adult. Ok, I’m an adult. Forget the very serious part – I lied. But these are seriously awesome to wear.

And they might be the perfect thing for some last minute, handmade Christmas gifts. So let’s get tutorialing here!

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by on December 14, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Sewing, Wearable
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Posted by Tally on December 14, 2012

http://tallystreasury.com/2012/12/fingerless-fleece-monster-gloves/

Child’s Play charity dinner dress and Piranha Plant bouquet

In just under an hour I’ll be headed to the Child’s Play Charity annual dinner, a fancy-dress event that my friends and I go to every year. It’s become a tradition of mine that every year for this dinner, I make my own dress. And it’s also a personal tradition that every year I swear I will not leave this dressmaking till the last minute, and every year I do, in fact, leave the dressmaking till the last minute.

This year, I had a piece of orange and gold silk to work with, a piece juuuust barely big enough for a dress. I’ve never sewn with silk before, and had no idea what I was doing.

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by on December 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Events, Felt, Flowers, Geeky Goodness, Jewelry & accessories, Wearable
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Posted by Tally on December 7, 2012

http://tallystreasury.com/2012/12/childs-play-charity-dinner-dress-and-piranha-plant-bouquet/

Advent calendar plus fake mantelpiece!

So, I’m sorry about the total lack of blog post last week. To be fair, I was a little busy. Desert Bus for Hope ran for 152 hours and raised over $443,000, and it sort of kind of looked a bit like this:

That’s the incredible Desert Bus 6 poster created by official Desert Bus artist Mike Lunsford, the tireless artist behind Supernormalstep.com and a ton of other cool stuff.
Desert Bus requires some recovery time, and I’m still working on that. Once the craziness began wearing down, it suddenly hit me that Christmas is less than a month away. It’s a mixed blessing that every year, Desert Bus prevents me from going Christmas crazy before the beginning of December. Less time to be crazy, but less time to make gifts and get ready. Usually December passes in a world of frantic preparation, and there’s not so much time to just sit back and enjoy what has traditionally been my very favourite holiday season.

So I decided to make an Advent calendar.

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by on November 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Edibles, Events, Holiday/seasonal, Wrappings & containers
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Posted by Tally on November 29, 2012

http://tallystreasury.com/2012/11/advent-calendar-plus-fake-mantelpiece/

Desert Bus 6 Craft-Along!

So, I’ve been a little busy. Just a wee bit. There’s this thing called Desert Bus for Hope – it’s an online fundraiser that runs 24/7 for a week, and me and some pals have been doing a bit of work preparing for it. Y’know, just a bit. And when I say a bit, I mean

MOUNTAINS OF WORK, OH MY GOSH, SO MUCH TO DO, HOW WILL WE DO IT ALL, SOMEONE PLEASE BRING US ALL THE COFFEE AND AN IV.

We all do many different things, but my main role in all this is to run the Craft-Along. It’s a thing where artists and crafters from around the world send us beautiful, amazing handmade things, and we auction and give out those things in order to raise more money. All the money we raise goes to Child’s Play, a Seattle-base charity that donates toys and games to children’s hospitals worldwide.

And that was it for the wordy, explanatory bit of this week’s post. Fair warning: there will very probably not be a post at all next week. I tried to get several posts written ahead of time, but between a full-time job and OH MY GOSH DESERT BUS, it just didn’t happen. I guarantee you though that if you need entertainment next Thursday you can find plenty of it by tuning in to Desert Bus.

For this week, I encourage you very very muchly to go look at all the incredible Craft-Along and corporate auctions and prizes we have posted on the Desert Bus site (live auctions, silent auctions, giveaways), and to check out the page of contributing crafters and the links to all their other nifty sites and stores and projects. And below, in order to get a little visual stimulation going in this post, I’ve posted some photos of the items I am contributing to the Craft-Along this year. It’s a picture post! Enjoy. And watch Desert Bus! Read the full post »

6 Comments
by on November 16, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Events, Felt, Plushies, Sewing
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Posted by Tally on November 16, 2012

http://tallystreasury.com/2012/11/desert-bus-craft-along/

Garruk’s Companion plush

I’ve come a fair ways from simple (but adorable) baby Myr, and thank goodness, because if I’d been asked even a year ago if I could make a Garruk’s Companion plush, I probably would have laughed despairingly, wishing to be capable of such a thing, yet knowing it was not so. But practice, boys and girls, makes perfect. Or at least it makes a Garruk’s Companion plushie.

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by on November 8, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Felt, Geeky Goodness, Plushies
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Posted by Tally on November 8, 2012

http://tallystreasury.com/2012/11/garruks-companion-plush/

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