American Crafts

Today Stuck?! Sketches launches our second challenge of December! Grab the sketch and play along for prizes from Creative Embellishments and Scrapbook Nerd.

The story

One of our family holiday traditions that I cherish was having Daddy select and read a Christmas story to us. He sat in a comfy chair, and we all piled near him on the couch to listen. It usually took a few nights to complete one, and he always tried to time it so the last installment fell on Christmas Eve.

Over the years we heard some delightful tales. But our favorite by far was The Melodeon by Glendon Swarthout. The description of this book on Amazon is so simple:

A youngster relates how his grandparents donated a valuable family heirloom, their melodeon, to the church in an unselfish act of giving one Christmas during the Depression when they had nothing to give each other.

The story is so beautifully told, detailed, and emotional that it made our hearts swell. We felt we were with them in the deep cold of winter during the Depression. And the feelings it evoked have stayed with me all these years.

Product/technique notes

I die cut diamonds from the Pink Paislee Snow Village 6×6 paper pad, inked the edges with iced spruce distress ink, and placed them against a background paper from the Bo Bunny Christmas Collage collection. The die cuts are from both the Snow Village and Simple Stories Classic Christmas collections. To create a cut file for the title, I found an image of the book cover and traced it in the Silhouette software.