I’ve been having so much fun today making bears!!  The other night when I was working I came up with an idea that I thought was very clever.  Do you ever have one of those days where you just keep smiling cause you came up with something and it just makes you happy?  Today I’ve been playing again and I just have to smile ’cause I’m tickled pink with this idea.   So are you just dying to know what it is……..well the Top Note Die is the perfect size to making sleeping bags for the Build-A-Bears!  Look at this……

Look at all my bears in their little sleeping bags!!  Here is a close up of a boy and a girl bear.

I cut two Top Note dies from the Pawsitively Prints Designer Series Paper and scored one of them and folded it down.  What I did to score was line up the center points on the 1″ line and score carefully.  Then fold that over.  I used snail on the sides and bottom to put the sleeping bags together.  I added buttons (from the sizzlet die) or ribbon to each one.  I stamped one of the greetings on the bottom – I decided to use “I ‘heart’ YOU BEARY MUCH!”  and I cut a heart using the Beary Girl Sizzlets die and popped it up with a tiny piece of a Stampin’ Dimensional. I did trim the points off of the sides of the sleeping bag.  Maybe I should have done it on the bottom too – that is the only thing my boys thought was weird because their sleeping bags never had points on them…..oh well.

The bears are cut from the Bear die using Chocolate Chip, Close to Cocoa, and Creamy Carmel card stock.  I punched a 1-1/4″ circle out of Basic Black card stock and glued it with a 2-way glue pen to the back of each bear head for the facial features (this is much easier that dealing with the tiny little piece from the die).  I glued on the muzzle from a different color of card stock.

The clothes are cut from the Beary Essentials die using the Pawsitively Prints Designer Series Paper and I just mixed up the different pants and shirts.  On some of the girls I cut the bottoms of the pants off at the perforated line to make them look more liked cropped pjs.  The girls also got bows in their hair – it is on the Beary Girl Sizzlits die.  I glued on all the clothes – a few of them I added the cuffs for the shirt.  I also added the hearts on the outside of their shirts.  Then the bears were tucked into their sleeping bags.

The card is run through the Big Shot with the new Perfect Details texture plate (just the front) to give it a little texture – it looked too plain without it to me.  The card base is Old Olive since that is one of the accent colors in the designer series paper.

So I’m thinking about sending this idea in to Stampin’ Up! for one of the monthly contests.  What do you think?

I was going to plan a scrapbook page with the bears in their sleeping bags – Ryan whenever he went to visit my parents when he was little always took all of his Build-a-Bears and had a “sleep-over”.  I know I have pictures somewhere…..I just haven’t figured out where that is yet.  So my dilemma (is that spelled right?)  was what to send in for the contest – a scrapbook page or a card?

These are my swaps for the STARZ group meeting tonight.

Have a BEARY FUN WEEKEND!!

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