Project 365

After a super busy weekend I think I am finally getting caught up on all the house chores and piles of laundry! Here are a few photos of last week and a peek at my next project.

The dogwoods are blooming.

A 1st and 2nd place win at State Competitions!

Starting some seeds. Hopefully they survive after this point.

Some birthday decorations for the table.

Out to eat at the birthday girl's favorite spot.

A little peek at what I am working on for tomorrow.....

Have a great day!

Hair Bling

As I was finishing up some hair barrettes for the competition this weekend

I thought I might as well whip up a few more for us here at home. With three girls we always need things for the hair accessory drawer. They always seem to mysteriously disappear for a while and then I find them in the Barbie bins! I just used some plain hair clips I purchased at the craft store.

With a little ribbon, gems, flowers and a button they are perfect for my almost 4year old (eek!). These would be great just with pretty ribbon for little babies.

I also found some plain hair pins at the craft store that I added only gems to for the older girls.

These are so pretty in person. This was a quick and inexpensive hair accessory that would be great for prom or even a wedding. These only took me 5 minutes to make with the help of some E6000 glue!

Thanks for stopping by today!

Supplies
Hair pins, clips: Hobby Lobby
Glue: E6000
Crystal Gems: Jolee’s Jewels
Ribbon: American Crafts
Button, Flower, Large Gem: Unknown

Use Up Those Rub-on’s Part 2

I came up with a few more ways to use up my rub-on’s. Granted none of these ideas are new, but it is nice to be reminded of some more ways to make use of my stash. The first thing I did with lots of help was to alter a basic $0.49 pot. My youngest daughter loves all things panda and that includes bamboo. She picked out a rather tall bamboo shoot and simple little pot that begged to be embellished.

See that bamboo is so tall I could not even fit it all in the photo lol! My daughter helped rub on the floral accent on both sides of the pot. I got to use up two large rub-on’s, make a cute accessories for my daughters room and spend some creative time with her as well. Seems like a good deal to me!

This is just a simple tag for my embellishment stash all ready to go.

These are buttons I embellished with rub-on’s, gems and glitter.

The two bottom glitter buttons turned out to be a lot of fun to make. I used those clear buttons again and applied the rub-on to the back and added a layer of Diamond Glaze. After that I just dipped them into a little mound of glitter. It was so fun in fact I made two more just with glitter.

The vintage silver glitter made for a very elegant button. After they were dry I did seal the backs with another thin layer of Diamond Glaze just to make sure the glitter wasn’t coming off on anything else.

The last of my adventures with rub-on's was to use a whole strip on some ribbon and make a very quick and simple card.

I am tempted to gather a bunch of ribbon and use up all of my sentiments this way and just keep them in the stash for cards and adding to scrapbooks.

Well I am off to embellish a bunch of barrettes for the competition this weekend with lots of tiny gems. Thanks for stopping by!

Supplies
Buttons: Clear-Autumn Leaves, Other-unknown
Glitter: White, Turquoise-Stampendous, Vintage Silver-Martha Stewart Rub-on’s: American Crafts
Cardstock: Kraft-Papertrey Ink, Turquoise-unknown scrap
Ribbon: Lemon Tart-Papertrey Ink
Embossing Folder: Cuttlebug
Brads: The Paper Studio

Other: Diamond Glaze

White Pot: Ikea

Project 365

Is it Friday yet?? It was a very busy weekend and this is going to be a very busy week. I feel like I have not had a moment to rest since Monday of last week. The girls are heading to state competitions this Sunday so we have several extra practices this week. My little one is also celebrating a birthday next Tuesday and I need to go shopping and prepare for that. I wish I could hit the pause button on life for a few hours!

Well it is nearing the end of the fourth month of this Project 365. At first I was really good about printing my photos and doing the journaling each night. As life has become busy I only seem to print them out once a month. Either way this has been a nice project to capture the little daily things in our life. Any one else playing along? Here are a few shots from this past week.

Monday’s lunch.

It has to be easy enough on Mondays that I can do it in my sleep. PB&J falls into that category!

The yummiest cantaloupe I have had in ages! It was so good we were fighting over it and it only lasted a couple hours.

Afternoon Tea anyone?

One reason for my lack of blogging last week.

We had boxes and boxes of Swedish goodness to put together!

Peanut Butter Toast! This has become a staple at breakfast for my girls.

Well that is it for me today. I have so much to get done before the school bus arrives! Thanks for stopping by.

Use Up Those Rub-on’s!

Well I have a couple things to share today. My hubby ran off with the camera before I got to download all the photos so I will have to share the others later on. My goal of using up all my stash is coming along pretty well. The next on the list to tackle was rubon’s. I adore rubon’s especially the ones by American Crafts. The problem I have is that they are in those little books and I don’t SEE them and forget to use them. This first project was inspired by Jen Mohler and her class at Big Picture Scrapbooking. I used the negative from a sheet of chipboard letters to make these clips.

After I painted them white and glued a paperclip to it I went to town covering as much as I could with rubon’s. These turned out so cute!

I also wanted to use some rubon’s to make some paper. Again I used a book of American Crafts rubon’s and some Cuttlebug embossing folders to create this shabby chic paper.

A little out of my style element, but I love the way it looks!

Hopefully I will get the rest of those photos tonight and upload some more of my projects to share with you! Have a great day!

Project 365

I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend. Ours was happy, fun and restful all rolled into one. I did not intend to be away from the blog for this long. I have some more paper to share with you, but my body had other ideas. So the time I usually spend blogging I was resting. Now I am feeling better and ready to share what I have been doing. Today I thought I would ease back into things with a few photos from my 365 project.

Some nest cookies I made for the kids.

Every year for Easter my husband buys me flowers for the table. This year it was pale yellow tulips.

The cute sign the girls made to hang on their door.

Daffodils coming up in the yard. Hopefully nothing eats them again this year.

Starting to read Hamlet again and finding it hard to concentrate with a three year old constantly asking why there are so many words and no pictures in the book.

A colorful bunch of eggs. Unfortunately that was not the only thing that ended up with a dye job! Thankfully Mr. Magic Eraser works wonders on tables and floors.

Tomorrow I will post some more paper I have created and some fun with rubons! Thanks for stopping by!

Pattern Paper Remix

One of the processes I go through creatively is what I call the hunting and gathering stage. Its usually happens a couple times a year where I hunt and gather inspiration, ideas and products to play with. Since I have decided to not purchase anymore supplies until I reduce my stash that puts a kink in my product gathering stage. As I was thinking about this and feeling a little sad that I could not go shopping I had the idea to make over some pattern paper. This just happens to be the largest stash to reduce. I gathered a few sheets of paper that were feeling old and outdated to me.

The first paper I chose was a sheet from SEI and decided to do some heat embossing on it. Embossed and flocked papers are still so hot right now that I thought this would curb my craving for them, use up my stash and save some money in the process.

The original is on the left and my altered version on the right. I thought the damask stamp really made this bright and casual pattern from SEI and turned it into a very elegant paper.

For the next paper I decided to go with a more subtle stamped pattern on another old sheet of SEI.

Again the original version is on the left and my altered version on the right. It turned out to be a nice pattern which is actually a little darker than the photo shows.

I have several sheets of lined paper from Karen Foster. Cute paper, but I wanted to give it some more interest. I dug out three sets of flourish stamps and some Me & My Big Ideas glittered rubons and ended up with this fun sheet.

Quite a change don’t you think? I used almost the whole package of rubons leaving just a few for accents when I create a page.

My next paper was another SEI oldie. I’m not sure why the majority of the papers I picked were SEI?? I love the pattern on this paper, but I really wanted to change up the colors. I cut out all the circles and layered it onto a sheet of scrolled paper by DaisyD’s. It looked cute, but was missing something. After some thought and surprisingly finding pink thread in my sewing stash I decided to sew around each circle.

Now I knew if I took my time on this it would look too perfect and I really wanted a loose casual look. So it was petal to the metal and I sewed at full speed which was quite entertaining. The girls were in the room with me and cracking up at how fast I was going and how much it was causing the table to shake. This caused me to start laughing and those circles really got wacky! I loved it anyway and every time I look at that paper I will smile and remember my girls big belly laughs and rolling all over the floor! So fun! So its time to save some money and remake some of that old pattern paper in your stash. Give it a try and let me know I would love to check it out! Thanks for stopping by!

Supplies
Pattern Paper: SEI, Karen Foster, DaisyD’s,
Stamps: Floral Frenzy, Polka Dot Basic-Papertrey Ink, Flourishes, Swirls-Autumn Leaves Bold Damask, Dot Flourishes-Inkadinkado
Ink: Fresh Snow, True Black-Papertrey Ink, Versamark
Embossing Powder: Ranger
Rubons: Me & My Big Ideas

A Beloved Pet Mini Album

*warning this is a sad story*

Once upon a time we had a cat. His name was Zebulon Pierre *AKA* Zepi. Yeah I know what a crazy name for a cat! We could not have a “normal” pet name in my house.

He was a very feisty cat and not a lap cat at all! He was funny and always caught attention from anyone who stopped by or anyone at the Vet’s office. About two years ago (March 17, 2007) Zepi died just before his 4th birthday. It was extremely sudden and very, very sad. He developed some stones and we had taken him to the animal hospital on Friday night. Even while waiting for the doctor to come in he was like a little kitten investigating everything and so curious almost as if nothing was wrong with him. We were told it was no big deal that they would perform the surgery and we could take him home in a few days. I will never forget the midnight phone call from the Vet. By this time I was expecting the phone call that the surgery was complete and he was resting comfortably. That was not to be. The Vet said she had removed several stones and there was a large one that she could not reach and wanted approval to open him up more to retrieve it. She was convinced that after the removal that would be the end of it. By 2am the phone rang and I once again picked up to hear a crying Vet on the phone. Not good! He was full of stones and had be under anesthesia for 4 hours by this point and at there was not much that could be done and no guarantees that he would survive. I had to make the decision to put him asleep and console the Vet at the same time. No one could have foreseen how this would all end up. There was very little warning as to what was going on inside his body and everyone felt that he would soon be back to normal. Having to tell my girls that their furry friend was gone after reassuring him that it was a normal procedure and the Vet said he would be fine was a horrible experience.

Every April 1st when Zepi was alive and every one since he died we celebrate his birthday with a little chocolate cake and ice cream. Yesterday while eating our cake we celebrated and reminisced about our furry little friend and flipped through our mini albums we created about him. Each of my girls created their own album and my husband and I created one together. Here are a few of the pages he created for the album.

This page my husband created just cracks me up. Zepi always loved to lounge on the floor with his back paws crossed. My husband turned this photo of him into a Super Hero coming in to rest. The journaling is hilarious!

Another funny quirk about our cat was that he loved to be vacuumed instead of brushed. He hated the sound of the vacuum, but if we used the brush attachment on him he didn’t care. I love my husbands hand drawn Dyson. We did not have any photos of him getting “brushed” so he used an old die cut to create the page.

The only photo is a little slice from another photo of our couch which he added to the cardstock version. Pretty clever!

And here are few of the pages I created.

And a look at the closing page in our album.

And if you have read this far thanks for taking the time to stop by today and letting me share Zepi with you.