City Sidewalks for CTMH Featured Products Blog Hop

Hello and welcome back for another installment of the Close To  My Heart Featured Products Blog Hop.  This time out we are bringing you projects featuring the City Sidewalks collection, which includes both a paper kit and an exclusive Cricut cartridge.  If you came here from Donna's blog you are in the right place but, as always, hops are circular things so you can jump in anywhere along the way and just make the rounds, plus there is a complete list of participants at the end of this post.

My project is inspired this a set of Christmas gift tags shared by the talented Annette Green, which features 5" gift tags cut using the Art Philosophy cartridge.  You cut several bases and then you cut your patterned paper in the same shape and size and cut it at designated intervals and mix and match and then embellish.  I have also sized a box and sliding cover/lid from the Artiste cartridge to use as a tag holder so that if I can get these to come out as nicely as I hope, I will offer them as a mother/daughter workshop later this month.

These are the papers I chose to work with, based on the dimensions Annette Green used.  Be careful when using the Christmas tree print, it is directional so I wasn't able to use the top of that print but I was able to turn the rectangle around and still use it.
Another help hint, these go much quicker if you have one of the Xyron adhesive machines, so I ran my tag bases through and then started layering my individual pieces to your liking.  I found I needed the piece Annette G. marked as scrap but I chose to use a zip strip in its place to add some interest, the only difference being I had about 1/16" at the end of that tag I had to manually trim down.

And here is the box and lid once assembled.  I cut the base of the box out of white CS and used Cranberry for the lid to save on my patterned paper (and keep the cost of the class as low as possible if I use these for a class).

I'm still working on my embellishments so that's all I have for now, but I plan on using a mix of stamps with both Cricut and Thin Cuts, so I will continue to post the finished tags throughout the month as I continue to play around with them.  I hope you enjoyed them and are inspired to create some of your own.  Now it's on to Lauren's blog to see what she has in store for you.  Be sure to leave some comments for my very talented fellow hoppers, especially Lauren and her husband as she is under the weather and he finished up her post so she could still participate and we could still enjoy her creativity.

Don't forget to stop back in 2 weeks on 11/16/16 when our theme will be CTMH's exclusive Cricut Cartridges.  With 4 to choose from, including the new Flower Market and City Sidewalks, there should be no shortage of inspiration!     Happy crafting!  ~~  Annette

1.  Lauren Moore

2.  Janna Gray

3.  Corinna Murphy

4.  Donna Digby

5.  Annette Clark  (here)