We are on our way..........



Addie will be 7 on Sunday and gets to celebrate at Disney World! What a birthday!

This is her card. I am so short on time, I will post details later!






Enjoy!


j.

15+ years.......wow.





Yep, that's how long I have held onto this little gem. It measures 5" wide by 8 1/2" tall, so it is a very large tag. I just absolutely love it. I have debated coloring it with markers, watercolor, tea staining it. You name it and the thought has probably ran through my mind. But here's the deal, I only have one and if I mess it up, I would be so sad. I don't have a clue what article of clothing this came off of and as you know if you have recently bought clothing.....they don't put tags like this on them anymore. This was an 80's thing. Tags were sooo cool then. In fact I was a "tag collector". Some kids collected baseball cards, others collected those little plastic charms...not me, I collected the artistic tags off of clothes. Weird, I know. But some of them were so cool and believe it or not, I have since used some of them on cards for customers.

What would you do with it? Scrap the story and leave it alone....color it....keep it in it's current home? (which was a basket on the shelf) Tell me!

j.

A few more views from the studio................




























I am soooooo lucky to have a great hubby that builds things for me! John has hung all of my shelves, counter top, hauled in the awesome pantry cabinet and even made my ribbon rack. He is so good to me.


Each picture has some ID tags so you can tell what your looking at. These pics were taken about a week ago, after some major sorting and cleaning. I tend to want to keep memorabilia type things. Thinking that "oh, that would be cute" on a page. Then I put them in baskets, buckets, trays and bowls and there they sit...sometimes several years! :) Ah, the life of a scrapper.

Later I will post one piece of memorabilia that has been with me for probably 15 years....I'm still looking for the perfect page to put it on.

j.

Sneak Peek & a Birthday Card





Here's a recent b-day card I made. Finished size is 4 1/4 x 5 1/2.

Cut pink CS 4 1/4 x 5 1/2, cut patterned paper 4x5 1/4. Layer 2 flowers with green fuzzy brad. Cut strip of pink 3/4", cut strip of cream 1/2". Stamp "Happy Birthday" with Close to my Heart stamp set "From me to You"(D1247).

Inside is stamped with Close to my Heart's "Curly Sentiments" stamp set.

This next pic is a sneak peek at my scrappin' area. I have been trying to sort through things, clean out and better organize my supplies. Most of the time when I make something, I end up pulling out every supply I own and making a huge mess! So I decided that maybe I am one of those people that needs their supplies right out in the open, in open containers like this.....we will see. So far it worked, I made a card and only pulled out a couple of things. Clean up was a breeze!





The wooden crate was made by my dad. He had a pile of barn wood and made one several months back, since then I have requested as many as he can make! I now have 4 large ones and 2 or 3 small ones. He also made a couple for a friend of mine!

The jelly jars in the crate were actually bought at Dollar General so that I could make several batches of black berry jelly.......ummm......yeah, guess I will have to buy more jars! I will be posting several more pictures of my area later.


j.

This last weekend I was asked to make 35 invitations for my cousin Catherine's rehearsal dinner. Here's the catch.....she needed them...like yesterday! Well I have a new personal record, 35 complete invitations in 2 1/2 hours!







This is a picture of Catherine and I at her father's retirement party last summer.









And this is the invitation......a layer of black cardstock, a layer of pink cardstock, the printing is on a piece of 110 lb white cardstock. I then embossed a 1/2" strip of pink and layered it onto a 3/4" piece of black cardstock. For the monogram at the top I cut out 35 black squares with my cricut, then cut out 35 white shadow squares. The "N" is handstamped and embossed with white embossing powder. The embossing was the most time consuming by far.






Congrats Catherine and Justin! Can't wait for September!



j.

Registrations are arriving daily!



I am soooo excited, I have received several registration forms and deposits in the mail. This is the first retreat that we have hosted and we are just tickled pink that it is taking off!

In case you are on the fence about going, I am posting several pictures of the facility and the top 5 reasons to attend the Creative Hearts Retreat.......

5. Learn new techniques in our optional classes.

4. Lots of other scrapbookers sharing their ideas!

3. NO COOKING! All your meals are catered!

2. You can scrap in your jammies if you want!

1. 72 Hours of Scrapbooking!
(if you stay Thursday night)

Lodge Kitchen Area where we will prepare all of your meals.

Exterior of the lodge. All the bedrooms are on the the main floor with the kitchen& dining area.

The Lodge basement is where all the scrapbooking tables will be set up. Do not worry about it being the basement because these basements feature a drive up back door where you can unload all your scrapbooking supplies ....very nice!

If you are still unsure or have questions please do not hesitate to contact any one of the three hostesses. Click the link to the right of this post and you will be redirected to our retreat homepage.




Also, here is an invitation I made for a special little girls birthday party back in June. She wanted a Build-A-Bear party with a princess cake. So I covered all the bases and added some pink ribbon, pink paper and of course some glitter. Nothing is complete without ribbon or glitter! :)


Last but not least, to show my other side...I can cook.....I just choose not to most of the time! Now the only real reason I don't like to cook is because when you cook, you have to clean up after and that's the part that I hate. If I could cook and then someone else clean up after, I would probably cook all day! So here is one of my favorite things to make, homemade black-raspberry pie. The crust is even made from scratch. My dad picked the berries, my mom froze them, and I made the pie...Now that's team work!

















j.

This was a project a friend hired me to make for her sister-in-law and brother for their baby shower. It's their first baby and they are so lucky they are having TWO! A boy AND a girl!

My friend needed a card, and gift/table decoration. Her idea was for me to decorate a frame and in the frame would be a poem that she had chosen. The frame would grace the table at the shower as a table decoration and then it could be hung in the babies room. The color theme was primary colors and building blocks.

First I will start with the card. This is a 5x7 card, first I layer a piece of sweet leaf green 4x7, added about an inch of wild print paper at the bottom and used my corner rounder to make the scallop border. I then cut a piece of polka-dot vellum 9x7, creased it at 5" and layered it on top of the green paper. (It wraps clear around the card....the 5" is on the back, the 4" is on the front. The scallop border is exposed)

I then cut out two carriages from the "New Arrivals" Cricut Cart., one in pink and one in blue. I then cut out the "extra" accent pieces in a lighter shade of pink and blue and paper pieced it all together. Where the canopy hinge would be I placed a die cut flower, then a paper flower, then a sugar brad. It really makes it look real.

I finished it off with a piece of baby white wide ribbon and mounted the entire piece to a 5x7 card base. My envelopes have to decorated too, so this one needed to reflect the shower theme. I cut an umbrella out with the same Cricut Cart. I also paper pieced this with two different papers, the wild print and the baby blue. I then glued several little hearts that had been covered in prisma glitter. I also took the clear glue pen and made little dots above the umbrella and added prisma glitter, which gave the rain effect.


I wanted the frame to be very special, because it will hang in these little babies room for quite a while and I wanted it to look really nice for them. The theme again was building blocks and primary colors, so I really did my take on that. We could have used real wooden blocks, but my thing is paper and so I wanted to take on the challenge of making building blocks out of paper by hand!

I used the cricut to cut the box shapes,out of white paper, then folded and glued each little box. The numbers, letters and little colored frames around each block were also cut with the cricut out of WHITE paper. After all pieces were cut out I colored each number, letter and tiny frame with Prisma markers in Red, Blue and Green. I then used a Versamark marker to go over each letter, number and frame and set each one in clear embossing powder. After I set the embossing powder each little item was nice and thick and shiny.

I mounted the letters, numbers and frames to each little box and then set everything into the shadow box. The poem was printed out of my computer on white card stock, then mounted on green card stock with a full 1/4" around all sides, then in blue the same way. Finally I mounted that piece to the red card stock added 4 fuzzy red brads for stability and tied in 2 yellow knots with gross grain ribbon. (Yellow isn't really a primary color but it looks really good on there and adds a little color pop.)

If you have read this entire tutorial I really hope it made sense to you, my brain hurts now, I am going to go make some rehearsal dinner invitations!

j.

Project complete...........

These are the final layouts for this customer. I absolutely love the birthday, Elmo and the Halloween layouts! Sometimes layouts jut fall together without a hitch and these were all this way.

All of these layouts are 8 1/2" x 11", which I have never scrapped with that size, but I found it very easy. It was a nice change from 12x12. It didn't take as much time and it took less material to complete a page. Sometimes I find myself wanting to "fill" the 12x12 page and then it's just too busy. It also helps when you have great pictures to work with and these were beautiful.

The other thing that made this project so much fun was the fact that there was absolutely no pink or purple involved! Now don't get me wrong, I love scrapping with pink and purple but it seems with two daughters that's the only color card stock I buy, so it was a lot of fun to break away and use bright green, red, blue and even yellow.


j.