Printable Baby Gift Tags and Notecard

With the Dragonboat Festival coming up, I thought I'd do a Chinese-inspired freebie for download. 

This is a little illustration I did years ago, before my twins were born and have used this on their birth announcement card. I thought I'd take this out of the 'vault' and share with you as gift tags and a little notecard. The colour scheme is a bit Shanghai Tang style, modern chic.

Grab it from here.

Dragonboat Festival

Dragonboat Festival
Originally uploaded by arlyna.

Our 4-day weekend is coming up. Shops have started selling traditional Chinese crafts in time for the Dragonboat Festival or Duan Wu Jie. The nearby traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy near where we work has set up a stall outside dedicated to selling these hangings filled with mugwort and calamus, which are said to ward off diseases and evil spirits.

For me Dragonboat Festival signals the start of summer and eating zhong zi. When  used to live in Taiwan, it was usually the hottest day and and you can truly feel that summer is here. Then there were the Dragonboat Festival races I used to go to. Here in Shanghai it has just started to come back again with expats trying to organize some races.

Read more about this tradition here.

Handmade Gifts for a Baby

We had quite a productive weekend, esp. me. Finally managed to finish a lot of projects and a lump of them were for some handmade gifts for our neighbour's new baby. 

To wrap up the gifts, I made these wrappers which are free to download from here. An extra page is available in case you need to increase the length of the wrapper. Download, print, and cut the wrapper. Add a bit of double-sided tape on the edge of the wrapper. Write in your dedication and then wrap it around the gift.


For the gifts, knitted a blanket from Erika Knight's book Simple Knits For Cherished Babies with the baby's surname initial in the middle. Sewn in a little cotton/linen tag that says 'handmade' on the very edge/corner of the blanket. You can find the labels at aCloset.com.

At the last minute, decided to also crochet a little toy/blankie bunny, which I couldn't resist when I saw the pattern. For the latter, I improvised quite a lot. Did not use 2 strands to crochet, made the bunny head slightly bigger, used a contrasting colour for the edging and did a  lot of changes to the size of the blankie. If you want to do this, I would highly recommend adding more chains to the 'arms' because it was quite a challenge tying the knots. I've already added about 4 chains plus the edgings but because the yarn is quite thick it still was not easy tying the knot. Overall, the toy is quite easy to do.

Put all the stuff in a diaper bag that I did some time ago. You can find a few left on aCloset.com, too.

New Downloads from aCloset

Just finished the latest freebies for aCloset. Excited with this series of paper and tags and hope you can use this. Click on the preview pictures above to download.

Twitter is back

So happy that my Twitter account is now back and my tweets are in tact. Whew!

Tweets Lost!

Over the weekend, been occupied with kids and a lot of documenting and tidying up so never got a chance to go online.

Yesterday I logged in to Twitter. And alas! I found that ALL my tweets (posts) except for the very first one I posted when I signed up are ALL GONE! I cannot believe it! Even submitting a report cannot get me to the support page properly... I am very very very down at the moment and I've still not gotten any support and all my tweets are not back online. I hesitate to post any new updates as this may cause more problems recovering my previous posts. Ugh!

The thing is, Twitter has been a helpful tool for me since I signed up; actually took my time to sign-up as I wasn't sure how useful this is. Anyway, I found it useful for documenting bits and bobs which I otherwise don't get round to writing down in my notebook or journal.

I just wish this will get resolved soon...

Printable Journal Strips

Here's another version of the Journal Strips. This version is print-ready PDF so you just need to download, print, and cut.

Click here to go to the download page.

Enjoy.

Giveaways at {A}

Hurry! Checkout Ali Edwards' blog now for some giveaways. My 'baby' aCloset.com is featured in one of the giveaways...

Journal Strips Freebie

So excited with this small set of journal strips that I've just finished. These are now available for download from aCloset.com. Or by clicking on each preview.

I'm still working on a few more stuff like tags, paper packs and knitting patterns. So be sure to check aCloset.com for new additions.

Lotus Paper Pack for Download

Made my first 2 sets of paper pack free for download. Check out aCloset.com for more info. Or directly click on the pictures to go directly to the download pages. Hope you like these and let me know what pages you made with these.