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 designed to fit ov

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