Covered in Glitter and Screaming

Mystery gifts are my way of thanking some of the donors to a fundraiser I did a few years ago. I ask for a theme, and then I make a thing in as much secrecy as I can manage and send it to them. This particular theme was "dragons, dinosaurs, or dump trucks" because that's what was relevant to the child's interests. I went with dragons, because that is also relevant to my interests. THE HEAD I wanted to build the head around a baseball cap to avoid problems with sizing, since I am not physically near the recipient. I got hat and jacket sizes from a parent and crossed my fingers that I could get it all together before he outgrew those sizes. I saved myself a ton of time by starting with a  Wintercroft  mask template for the head. You do not have to be a pro artist to be able to assemble them, and they look amazing! Check them out. I knew I liked  this dragon head , but I also knew that I needed to make it smaller because they are designe...

My cards for 2019 were not just Happy Holidays cards, but also Goodbye cards. Right after Christmas, my husband and I moved from Boston back to Tokyo. I usually write something for my holiday cards. One year I wrote a poem that drew a parallel between holiday shopping/expectations and living under an overbearing regime, another year I modeled a piece after The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe (2016 was a tough holiday season), and one was a Rickroll. For 2019, I put my Cricut to use and designed a card with a wheel-based mechanic with Godzilla as the central idea. And I wrote a haiku, because it fit the Japan theme with minimal word-writing. I put this all together in the Cricut interface. I have some qualms with Design Space (can't rename layers, for example), but that's how it turned out. Next time I do something similar I'll use a different program. The blue rectangle is the open card, the vertical dashed line is the score line for the center fold, and the yellow sha...