Butterflies

The Stampin' Up! hostess set "God's Beauty" is used here to make these two lovely cards. The thank you on the left was one of the cards at our All Occasion Stamp-a-Stack on Monday night. We cut the butterfly out completely and then drew in the antennae with a brown pen. It is much easier and nicer looking than trying to cut around the antennae. Also we stamped the butterfly on colored cardstock so we didn't have to color it in - a little quicker way to work with this image.

"Beauty is in God's handwriting" is the stamped message on the Kiwi Kiss card on the right. I used some Raspberry Tart designer paper to accent this card. This month, designer paper and 12x12 textured paper packs are buy 3 get one free!

When I cropped this photo, I just had to leave that bit of pink peony peeking in at the top. My dear husband dug up some of the plants my Mother didn't want, divided them and planted in our flower garden last fall. We are getting a marvelous showing this spring of both white and that dark fushia pink.

Ingredients: All products are Stampin' Up! Stamp set: God's Beauty. Spring Solitude for the Thank You message
Paper: Bashful Blue, Certainly Celery, Kiwi Kiss, Rose Red
DSP: Raspberry Tart
Ribbons: Certainly Celery from SAB 09 and Kiwi Kiss/Vanilla

TIPsy Tuesday - Glazed Chipboard

On the recent scrapbook layout I posted a few days ago, there was a Stampin’ Up! chipboard tag. Creating the glazed antiquey look was very easy.

If your chipboard is a small piece, use tweezers to press the chipboard face down into a Very Vanilla Craft Stamp pad. If you have a larger piece, lay it on scrap paper and press the stamp pad onto the chipboard. Get a good sponged coverage but leave a few gaps of raw chipboard showing through.

Sprinkle with clear embossing powder, tap away as much excess as you can, and emboss.

This is a simple, inexpensive way to turn plain chipboard into a classy embellishment.

Ingredients: Stampin' Up! Very Vanilla Craft Ink and clear embossing powder.

Chipboard - Stampin' Up!

Brad - Oriental Trading

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all Mothers, Grandmothers, Step-Mom's and all ladies who care for children, young and old.

I made this card months ago for my Mother based on a card in a magazine. "M" is her first initial. The chipboard is Stampin' Up! and inked in Close to Cocoa. The paper is My Mind's Eye. I'm not sure the source for the ribbon or the M. I think I inked the M in Baja Breeze and stamped whisper white on then embossed. It's been awhile and I've forgotten the specifics. The only thing important is that she loved her card and I love her much more.

Scrapbooking Now

My favorite scrapbooking magazine is going away. Simple Scrapbooks published their last issue this month; ironic being in May - National Scrapbooking Month. I loved their magazine because the layouts were all approachable. Some were more detailed than others but nothing was beyond doing. They also recognized that scrapbookers like to tell a story and often with numerous photographs. And they recognized that many of us want to scrapbook about our husbands, our friends, our hobbies, our work, our travels and not just our children. I didn't discover this jewel among craft magazines until a couple of years ago, but I've really enjoyed it. Supposedly it will roll back into Creating Keepsakes magazine.

It was an article in the last issue of Simple Scrapbooks that inspired the layout above where I captured what is important to me in page design right now. I'm going for layouts where all the elements are grouped and there is more 'white' space. This is a particular challenge to me as I tend to cram as many photos on a page as possible. When I go through magazines or back through my own layouts, I find that I can size the photos much smaller, crop tighter, and still tell the story. I'm also choosing simplier papers but playing up embellishments with lots of variety grouped together on one area of the page. My scrapbooking tastes change frequently so this would be a fun topic to revisit in a couple of years - when I'm caught up. Ha!

Ingredients: Designer Paper and chipboard tag - Stampin' Up!
Brad - Oriental Trading
Chipboad letters - some from Basic Grey, others I'm not sure. Stickers from Basic Grey

National Scrapbooking Month

May is National Scrapbooking Month. This is a wonderful time to start or continue on a scrapbooking project. Do you have a pile of photos you want to preserve but don’t know how to get started? Contact me, I’d be happy to help you.

I got started in papercrafts by creating my first scrapbook for my husband on the anniversary of our first date. He was thrilled and I continued to do these annual pages for many years. Now I still do either an annual book or sometimes I combine years. The books not only capture our memories but serve as our family almanac. When we can’t remember the name of that cute little town in Canada we visited or when such and such event took place, we just browse the scrapbooks. I could never seem to keep straight how old our cat Casey was since we got her as an adult. I just had to look at the scrapbook to find out.

When I went back to our first scrapbook to take these photos, I was surprised to be reminded of our first trip together to Missouri. I didn't remember going that first year we dated. I thought it was later on. Also, I had forgotten about taking Lenny's Mother on an outting from the nursing home to each of her children's homes. My journaling contains my first impressions of Bertha and of Lenny's brother and sister. The photo above is a of Lenny's sister, Velma.

These other pages are from 1993 and 1994. Look carefully at right and you'll see the 'pink' bathroom I just finished redoing! Our house was a huge topic in 1993. Travel has always been a big part of our lives and our scrapbooks.

Often I've thought about redoing these books with current papers and embellishments - like I would actually have the time! But my real reason for not doing it, is the books themselves preserve not only memories but how my hobby evolved. Early on, I relied on my computer for journaling and eventually clipart. After the first year I started doing themes. I took few photos so I did a lot of journaling. It is our history and my hobbies' history, too.

Currently, I’m working on 2008. The page from yesterday was part of that book. And I’m trying something new this year, I’m doing 2009 month-by-month as we go. I’m also doing these pages digitally using Photoshop Elements (if I have no hair left at the end of the year, this software will be the reason why!). I really like the results; I’ll share them in a later post.

The biggest change to my scrapbooking process is having multiple scrapbook projects going on at once. When I started in 1991, I did several pages for a year at once over a couple of weeks. Usually now I give myself a deadline like finishing before Lenny's birthday or Valentines' day. Now I'm working on what pages I want to when I want. The tortouise method rather than the hare. I won't let it go on forever; I love the freedom though.

TIPsy Tuesday - Afterthoughts

Have you ever finished a project and wished you had stamped just one more image? Sometimes you can remove the paper you want to stamp on, stamp and put it back. Most of the time though, the adhesive has set and you and your project are stuck. Well, there are a couple of things you can do…

1. Consider a rub-on instead. I really meant to stamp some flowers on the photos and journaling of this scrapbook page before I put it all together; I even left some space in the lower right corner of the journaling block. But I forgot until I had it adhered to the filler page with a very dimensional page on the back. There was no way to lay it flat enough to stamp.

Then I remembered I had some rub-on’s in Old Olive that would work. Rub-on’s don’t require a flat surface. They worked perfectly!

2. When I finished the notebook cover in the blog entry (Notebook) below, I thought the tag looked empty. I had distressed the edges but there was this empty upper right corner. I really wished I had stamped something there. So I did. I masked the area around the card with scrap paper (or you can use post-its), made sure the cover was laying as flat as possible and then stamped. After removing the scrap paper, you would have never know it wasn’t done before assembling everything.

The other key besides masking and trying to achieve a flat surface is to have a backup plan. If I had messed up, I could always stamp a flower, cut it out and glue onto that corner to cover up any mistakes.

So don’t be afraid to add a little something extra to your scrapbook page, card or other paper project. If you are in doubt on how it will look, stamp first on scrap paper, cut it out – even a rough cut will do – and lay it on your page to see how it looks first.

Ingredients for Scrapbook Page: Green Tea Designer Paper from Stampin' Up!, Other paper cutouts from DCWV and Imagine That

Stamps: Big Flowers, So Many Scallops

Rub-ons: From SAB '08

Button: Button Bouquet from Stampin' Up!

Chipboard Letters: Basic Gray

Bloom!

"where you are planted." is the inside message. A common phrase now it really does have a lot of meaning. It works for this card because I'm working with what I had to make it.

The flowers here probably look familiar because they are the leftovers from making Jaime's Frame in the post below. I stamped several images in different colors to see what I really wanted to do with the frame. I still have just a few more I can use on yet another card.

.

There are some cute flower pot cards showing up on Splitcoaststampers.com. They don't have the backing that this one does. I think I need larger flowers or more of them and a larger pot so I'll try that again another time.

Local Paradise

Lenny asked me recently if wisteria bloomed all summer here. I told him that was only on Wisteria Lane on the Housewives. Here we go from vines that look like dead weeds to lavendar blooms in only a couple of weeks. A few days and the vines are just greenery. In the meantime we get one of the prettiest and most Southern rites of Spring.

My uncle built this pergola for my Mother in her backyard about 6 years ago. She planted the wisteria at each post. This year it is just gorgeous and so inviting. Wouldn't you like to sit in that chair all day with a good book? She wanted to sweep up the lavendar blooms scattered on the rock floor but I wouldn't let her. They just make it all the more charming.


Her flower gardening has become her passion in retirement. I'm so proud of her for all she accomplishes in bringing more beauty into the world. It is amazing how she has transformed their ordinary yard into such a beautiful spot both front and back. These are just a few of the yards of pansies edging the front of the house.