NT / Benzie Design Collaboration Day 3

Hi there! Welcome back for day 3 of our collaboration with Benzie Design!  Benzie specializes in felt, with 90 colors available in their house wool blend and 36 colors of homemade felt pom poms, but they have lots more to share including various 'felt-fetti' die cut shapes, kits, felt notions/tools and more.  This week (Monday - Thursday) we'll be sharing some projects featuring Benzie products.

There are also giveaways!  We'll be picking one lucky commenter to win the Carnation Collection felt pack and Atomic Pom Poms pictured below.  Be sure to also stop by the Benzie blog as they'll be posting on Monday and Tuesday and will select one lucky commenter to win a $25 credit to the N&T store.  Winners will be announced over the weekend.

Today we have both Elena and Miriam with us.  Up first, Elena is sharing with us a quick and easy holiday packaging idea:

When I saw the Felt-Fetti Holly kit in their store, I knew I could whip up some very festive Christmas packages!

I used a trio of red and white striped gift bags that I had on hand, the Felt-Fetti Holly shapes, the Neat and Tangled Merry and Bright die, and our Classic Tag 2 shape.

If you don't enjoy hand-stitching you could easily used a hot glue gun to put it all together, but I think it added so much cuteness to the simple tag!

I adhered it to the top of the tag, added the beautifully handlettered Merry and Bright sentiment, and finished off the tag with a strip of green paper to balance out the green holly leaves.

To attach the tag to the bag, I opted for a really homespun look: I folded the bag and clipped it closed with a tiny red clothespin. I love that look.

Next up is Miriam:

Hey everyone!  I had so much fun creating with Benzie felt.  I created two cards today, for the first card, I selectively cut the large flower from the Succulent Cover Plate from three shades of green.  Before I die cut the pieces, I backed them with white cardstock.  This adds reinforcement and allows you to adhere the pieces easily to your card.



I also cut the flower from cardstock and used the webbing as a guide to get my pattern started.  Once I had the first few pieces in though, I just eyeballed the space between the pieces.



Even though the cardstock does add a lot of reinforcement, the tiny pieces can still be a bit tricky, so you need a die that has large enough pieces, the petals for the succulent were a perfect size.  The only tricky bits were those teeny tiny pieces in the center.  I just needed to be very careful with those and used craft tweezers to adhere them.

The sentiment is from the Gardenia Blooms Journaling Card set and it was stamped on one of the banners from the Scalloped Dies set.



My next card features the Maple Thanks and Oak Leaf Dies.  I cut the solid shapes from felt and the webbing/detail dies from cardstock and woodgrain paper.

The solid felt shapes were stitched to the card itself along the center line.  Then I used spray adhesive to attach the webbed pieces.



The sentiment, also from the Gardenia Blooms set was stamped on one of the skinny tags from the Classic Tag 2 die set and was then trimmed down and stitched on as well.

I thought it would be fun to dress these cards up a bit, so I cut a Doily Envelope wrap from felt for each of them.



Caveat, this is beautiful, but these doily pieces are very delicate in some sections and so you have to be very careful with them or you'll get some tears.  The felt cuts well, but I think because of static cling the pieces need a little help coming out.  I used a largish needle to just poke the pieces out and that worked pretty well.



I love how pretty the details look in felt!



OK, be sure to leave a comment to be entered to win the Benzie prize and then head over to the Benzie blog where you can leave a comment to be entered to win a $25 store credit to Neat & Tangled.  Come back tomorrow for our final collaboration day!