How much do I love you?

Is it this much:

or this much:

This was Mr Corgi's Christmas card, although I think it would work as a Valentine as well by changing the papers.  It starts off as a 4 1/2 x 8 1/2 card, then expands to be 11 1/2 inches long (hence the difficulty of getting a good picture). I designed it in the Silhouette Studio using the Print and Cut feature, which made it easy to make sure everything would line up and to get nice straight cut lines.  Then I used steps 6 & 7 from the Splitcoast Slider Tutorial to make the slider portion.  I used small glue dots cut into thirds to hold down the loops of the twine, making sure I had a loop at the slider cut since I thought that would give me a bit more wiggle room for matching up the twine on the slider portion (and it worked!). 

I know there is someone out there who'd like to win a Silhouette vinyl hook just for trying out one of my Silhouette files, so I'm going to extend the giveaway on this post until next Sunday, January 8th.

And now it's time for my final book reviews of 2011:

Book #50:  The Buddha in the Attic is a book Amazon kept recommending for me, so I finally downloaded it from the library.  It is a short book about Japanese women who come to America as mail order brides for Japanese-American men.  It is beautifully written in the first person plural, which I'm not sure would work for a longer book, but is wonderful here. 

Book #51: Next to Love was another Amazon recommendation, but they didn't hit it out of the park with this one.  The story of three friends from WWII to 1965 and how the war affected their lives throughout that time.  I started off being intrigued by the three separate stories, but at the end it had the effect of making me not care about any of them very much at all.  It does have quite a lot of good reviews on Amazon, so maybe I'm just an outlier.

Book #52: Daring Young Men was loaned to us by my dad for the drive home from Thanksgiving.  It is the story of the Berlin Airlift, of which I knew absolutely zero.  The first half was a thrilling tale of these daring young men joining together to keep West Berlin alive, the second half was a not-so-thrilling tale of the politics of keeping it afloat.  If you know a history buff (or are one yourself), I would recommend it.

Book #53: I'd been struggling to find a really, really good book to read over vacation and when the local librarian declared The Language of Flowers as her favorite book of the year, I thought I should give it a try, and it was exactly the book I was looking for.  About a foster child named Victoria, it tells the story of her transition out of foster care at 18, with alternating chapters of her life with her foster mother at 10.  Oh, and also throws in using flowers to communicate.  Recommended!

There you have it, a book for each week of the year, plus one to grow on.  Here's another year of good reads and fun crafts!