They're at it again!

Stampin' Up!, that is.  They are messing around with their color families.  The good news, in my opinion, is that they are bringing back a bunch of In Colors such as old favorites, Soft Sky and Bermuda Bay.  They are also turning some current In Colors such as Pool Party and Wisteria Wonder in to regular colors.  That's the good news.

The bad news is that they have to retire colors to make room and some of my favorites are going:  Riding Hood Red, Not Quite Navy, Certainly Celery and get ready for this, Baja Breeze!  Baja is my favorite color of all time and it is going away!!!

One other tiny bit of good news is this is free shipping weekend at Stampin' Up! (through Monday the 8th) I've never known them to do this.  When I heard about the free shipping a couple of days ago, I was going to order some Pool Party paper.  Now I don't need to as it will soon become a regular colors.  However, I'd better check stock on a bunch of these retiring colors.

I have not given you a complete list.  The full story is over at Mary Fish's blog Stampin' Pretty.  Click on her name to get today's blog post which contains the color change PDF so you can see how your favorites are fairing in the change up.

Hope you are having a good weekend.

One Month, Two Pages

All through the month of March, I kept clicking photos.  Confession:  I missed a day here and there but made it up with multiple photos on other days.  So here are my 31 photos on one 2 page spread!

For this layout, I used Photoshop Elements to crop and arrange my photos with 6 2" squares on each 4x6 print.  Then I cut them in strips and arranged over my typed journaling.

For the rest of the layout I used some Simple Stories Summer Fresh collection to add circles and strips of pattern paper.

The clock faces are mistables from Prima.  One challenge was the mist colors.  In yesterday's post, I shared my new  mist storage so you can tell I have a lot of mists.  Yet most are neutrals or fairly bright colors.  Deep reds and navy aren't any more popular in mists than they are in paper.  I did some combining as you will see in the video and I think the blue one came out fine.  The red one ended up a bit rust - so now I know how to get rust.  I just haven't figured out dark red yet.








Watch at YouTube



Here's the PDF with the sketch and some tips on using PSE to crop and arrange the photos for printing.

For April, I'll go back to doing Project Life every week or two.

Thanks for visiting!

Mister Storage

After a healthy splurge on Heidi Swapp Color Shine mists, my mist collection had definitely outgrown its recycled strawberry basket storage.  It was tough to find the colors I wanted in the basket anyway when all I could really see were the lids.

Here's the before:

Here's my after:

To get there...

I looked at the dollar store and at Walmart (really our only choices in a small town) for a spice rack to hold the bottles.  I didn't find one and decided to make my own.  I used styrofoam, some shelf liner I had on hand and lots and lots of hot glue.  The Cricut came in handy as well for decorating.

The 18" long piece of florist styrofoam was the perfect length.  The chest of drawers this sits on top of is exactly 18" deep.  I cut the foam into 3 - 2 1/4" strips.  I googled how to best cut and found a suggestion to run my steak knife over the side of candle to wax it. That did help.  I could have probably been fine with 2" wide cuts.

I glued two pieces on top of each other and a 3rd on the front to create the stair steps.  Originally, I was going to cover all this with fabric and then glue the shelf liner on each 'shelf,' but just cut out the middle man and glued the shelf liner over the styrofoam leaving out the fabric.

I let the shelf liner come out from the front about 2 inches so the bottles in front of the bottom step wouldn't turn over easily.

For the ends, I cut some cardstock to fit and then used the Cricut and the Storybook cartridge for a decorative corner misted with Heidi Swapp Bronze mist.

It isn't fancy but certainly does the job.  I've arranged the bottles by manufacturer and color with the neutrals on the end as I use those the most.

I'd love to hear how you store your mists.  Thanks for stopping by today!

Watercolor Block Background

Note:  Later in the week, I'll have a Project Life/Project 365 page and video for the entire month of March.  For now I have this extra page and video...

I've had so much fun with watercolors in Art class that I wanted to play some more so the other day I decided to use them to make my own background.    These are not class techniques just my own experiments.  I cut 25 2" squares and then just started painting, stamping, misting and some other techniques to get this cheery background for my favorite photo of me from 2012.

The title is terribly cliche yet it is so perfect for where I was on this trip.  I was so worried about everything before we left and it all went just fine.  And for the first time that year I was just truly happy and unconcerned.

I also got to use some of my favorite trims and a little Washi.  There is no pattern paper on this layout something rare for me.  The word 'be' is painted raw chipboard misted with some Heidi Swapp Peach color shine.  I'm becoming seriously addicted to her mists.










So here's the process video to watch at YouTube or here.


I didn't do a sketch for this one.  If you don't have or want to play with watercolors, you could create a similar effect with pattern papers, particularly 6x6 pads.

Thanks for watching!

Peach and Blue

Has your favorite color always been your favorite color or has it changed over the years?

When I was younger, my favorite was pink which I guess is pretty typical for a little girl.  In junior high, my mother allowed me to redecorate my room.  Well, she did the redecorating but I got to pick out my wall paper.  The only provision was that it had to have matching fabric so everything could be coordinated.  My parents sold wallpaper in their business so I had lots to choose from. I picked a beautiful blue and yellow floral paper with birds on it and thus began my blue and yellow years.

When I graduated from college and moved out, I had a ton of stuff for starting my household courtesy of my mother starting me a 'hope chest' at a young age.  It was fantastic as I had practically everything you would want for a ktichen plus neutral sheets and towels and tons of other stuff.  Very little was color specific except for these brown, orange and gold dishes we had gotten from the bank for opening a savings account.

My friend Dana's father owned a furniture factory and she took me by one day to order my first sofa.  I was thinking I'd need something brown and gold to match the dishes.  As soon as we walked into the factory, there sat the most beautiful sofa in a peach and blue chintz.  I was in love and those dishes never sat on my kitchen table.  I ordered the exact same sofa and thus began my peach and blue years.

When I moved into the house we have now, I was plenty tired of peach and blue and had embraced aqua green as my favorite color which remains to this day.

The photo of me was taken in the early 90's.  I hid another very busy photo in the pocket underneath.  It shows a different view of my first home and how I had it decorated.

For the page, I didn't have much in peach and blue designer paper so I turned to stamps.  The floral stamps are mostly from the Soho Garden District set from American Crafts.  I also used some from a Fancy Pants set that coordinated.  Not only was I into pastel colors, but I liked flowery things as well.

For the lower part of the page, I stamped a simple image repeatedly on some Marina Mist cardstock to emulate the design from the draperies in the photo.  This type of pattern was very popular in fabric in the mid-1980's.

I'm wearing a jumper with embroidered flowers.  Lately I find myself wanting plain tops or perhaps with just a little tone-on-tone trim that I can accessorize with jewelry.  So times have changed and so have I.  

So much more interesting that way.  Thanks for stopping by!

Anxious for Spring

More butterflies.  I must be anxious for spring. It was blowing snow here on Monday and I'm still wearing sweaters.  The flowers are starting to bloom anyway and I'm hoping for some real butterflies soon.

The background of this card is from Stampin' Up!'s Elements of Style.  The butterfly was cut on the Cricut from Tempting Turquoise cardstock and again in vellum.  I stamped and embossed the vellum with Autumn Leaves flourishes and silver powder.  The pretty striped ribbon is from a semi-local stamping store - The Enchanted Cottage in Winston-Salem.  I go maybe once a year and stock up on their unique trims.

Thanks for stopping by today!  If you have time off for Easter, I hope you enjoy yourself and stay safe.

Working on the Diagonal

The photos of my kitty Jasper playing on the rug inspired the idea of going on the diagonal.  I thought I'd line up the papers with the lines in the photos.  This didn't happen quite that way.  The process from an all diagonal placement to the layout above is shown in the video.  I wasn't sure if it would work at all so I was happy to make just a few changes.

For embellishments I used an older flower punch to create layers.  I've used this punch many times but never with a large circle in the middle.  It creates a scallop edge that is more rounded than my regular scallop punch.  The little bird stamped images are from the Cheep Talk set by Stampin' Up! which has gotten a ton of use over the years.  I've used the birds on at least one page before but not in quite this way.  Most of the paper is Pyrus 6x6 paper from Basic Grey.

Watch at YouTube


Here is the PDF file -- Sketch for page with diagonal elements

I picked this 'Handsome' ticket because I think my Jasper is very handsome.  My husband thinks he is an ordinary looking cat at best.  Hmph!  Ordinary, indeed!

Jasper likes to play with his fake bird toy.  We have no worries that our bird feeder is actually feeding the cat.  Jasper is a ground kitty and doesn't care for heights at all.  Occasionally he watches the birds out the window but that is about it.  Mice and bunnies, beware, though!

Thanks for watching today!

Designer Paper Organization

Ooh, I love to get in an order of designer paper.

Over the last few years I've found myself less and less inclined to shop for clothes.  I want to find something that fits me and my wallet and get out of the store or off the website as quickly as possible.  However, I can spend HOURS on Two Peas browsing papers looking at the details, seeing both sides, adding items to my cart, finding different items, deleting choices and refining until I have just the scrapbooking goodness I want.

Saturday, I got in an order just like that.  I'd puttered on the Two Peas site off and on for three days finding just the right papers for pages I anticipate making this summer.  Our last couple of years albums revealed that I use mostly green, yellow and blue for our summer pages as a lot of the photos are outdoors and we wear a lot of green and blue.  So those are the colors in the collections I got along with just a touch of red and orange.

I videotaped my process my process for sorting the collections and storing them in 12x12 removable Sterilite drawers.  I have the 3 drawer stacks available from Walmart and Hobby Lobby at least, probably other stores, too.  I love these things!  If I had more closet space, I'd have more drawers but I don't so my first chore is always to empty a drawer or two.  I break up collections by color and a few pages go into a giveaway box.  Mostly though I really do use every scrap of paper.

This is why I love the drawers so much.  You can keep all the scraps in one place.

The video also shows a glimpse of some of the new spring collections from Pebbles, My Mind's Eye and Echo Park.  If you use blues and greens, they are worth checking out.

Watch at YouTube


This video is only my designer paper.  If you are interested in cardstock, this post shows my organization.  And the video uses my cardstock deck which is shown here.

Glitter Girl's weekly video over at Two Peas also shows sorting out an order.  She mixes papers and adds embellishments to create a kit from her order. It looks like a fun approach and another video to check out for new spring papers and paper sorting ideas.

Thanks for watching!