Colored Pencil card

I colored this image today. I'll bet it has been at least 4 years since I used my Prismacolor pencils! This is for my dear friend, Martha. Her husband, Russell, passed away earlier this week. Whenever I think of Russell I think about his easy smile and wonderful sense of humor. Mostly I remember the way he looked at Martha. He adored her! In his eyes you could see how he worshipped her.

Martha and I met and became friends from shopping and taking classes at a local stamp store, when I lived in Charlotte, NC. Our birthdays are only one day a part (and 35 years), so we are both Libras :) It was Martha who got me interested in scrapbooking. I remember we (a group of 7 ladies...we all met and became friends through stamping and started our own club. We got together monthly for luncheons and called ourselves "The Supremes" because our first official meeting convened on the same day as the Supreme Court) were having a luncheon at my house and Martha said she was thinking of crossing over into scrapbooking. Imagine our shock and horror! This sounded like blasphemy! But Martha, Kaye, and I met a few days later at the Memories store in Matthews/Mint Hill, NC (just outside Charlotte). After seeing their sample scrapbook pages, I too was hooked! It was like making cards on a larger scale, with photos as your image(s) rather than a stamped image. It may have been around this time that Martha did a nice re-organization of her craft room. I am guessing she had at least $10, 000 in ink pads, embossing powders, stamps, cs, etc. You know, the "essentials". Martha always removed her price tags off of her stamps. It was about this time when Russell went into Martha's craft room and said, "You must have $100 worth of stuff in here." Men usually have no idea what a small piece of wood and rubber can cost :) God Bless, you, Russell. You were a wonderful husband, father, and grandfather.

3 Thank You cards

I had just 3 thank you notes to write this month, and I have been procrasting a bit. I finally sat down and made these yesterday morning. The green one is Bazzill cs, the pink ones are DCWV. All dp is Cosmo Cricket, and the cs circle (chocolate chip) and the "Thank you" circle stamp are SU! I designed a card like this once before (with AC dps), and I really liked it. It is a great way to use scraps!

"10 Things I Love About You" star mini book

I did not design this. I CASEd it, but I don't remember who the SU! consultant was that I bought the papers and directions from. She was at the Get Croppin' crop in Dulles,VA in Feb. 2007. If you know her, please comment so I can give her credit :) These are last year's SU! Valentine's papers. I personally don't care for the color combo, but my younger card buying customers love it. (I have made and sold 3 cards from the scraps from this project!) And sometimes I just like to make something that I didn't have to think about the design. Just mindlessly copying. I get the joy of sense of creating and accomplishing without any agony over color, design, or layout. Happy Valentine's Day!

Paper Piercing Template Techniques

I am teaching Paper Piercing Template Techniques today at Ashburn Family Scrapbook Center (AFSC). Kely asked me to use the new BBP templates and the new line of Cosmo Cricket papers (the XO paper is My Mind's Eye). I was thrilled! I love paper piercing and stitching on cards and LOs. And I've never seen a Cosmo Cricket paper I didn't LOVE.

Technique #1 (left card): I paper pierced and stitched the flower stem with green floss.

Technique #2 (right card): I paper pierced and faux stitched on the tent topper card (connect the dots with a white gel pen.)

Technique #3 (right page of LO): I paper pierced scallops down the right side (difficult to see in picture.)

Technically the left page of the LO is not part of the class. I just like 2-page LOs. And I was dying to use my Thickers (vinyl alphabet stickers)! They were virginal until I designed this page.

Do you remember last August when I decided to try to get caught up on my own scrapbook of my girls? I scrapbooked 2004 that month and then developed my pics to start on 2005. I started planning out some of the pages, but burned out. I couldn't find papers in my stash to coordinate for July, August, October, and December. (The whole year is in a project box the next time I get motivated to start again.) So I pulled out just the pics from those months to see if they would work with the CC papers for this class. The LO is of October 2005. I also used BBP flowers, SEI buttons, and MM buttons from my personal stash. I never thought I would put aqua/teal and orange together (personally I think the Miami Dolphins uniforms are ugly!), but I like it here :)

8x8 scrapbook- Christmas Day

The fanciest part of this LO is the "puzzle" technique used on the right hand page. (Translation for non-scrappers: cutting a corner out of one picture and placing the corner of another picture in that space a la pieces of a puzzle fitting together.) On to 2007...

8x8 scrapbook- Thanksgiving & Christmas Eve

More super simple pages...no photo mats, no ribbon, no brads, no silk flowers, no paper piercing, no buttons, or any of my favorite embellishments. I'm still using that DCWV stack & stickers and a tiny bit of stamping. The red stickers (MM) are actually left over from the early days when Memories put a package in your kit for titling. The scalloped ring I used on the right page is a scrap from some Christmas cards I recently made. It was sitting on my table already stamped and punched, and I used it here :) Don't you love when that happens? I pulled out my Hero Arts alpha set and stamped "DEC 24".

8x8 scrapbook- Halloween

Here are my two Cinderella princesses. I used the stickers that come in the DCWV stack, but realized I had miscalculated the number of "e"s in yellow & orange, so I ended up criss crossing the words and "Hallows Eve" vs. "Halloween". I stamped a small pumpkin on a few of the orange circles, as well as "trick or treat" (click on pic to enlarge.) Once again there is a particularly nice picture of Julia (bottom left)...this is one of my favorite pictures of her :) IRL the picture shows how blue her eyes are and the flash is not in the pic (that was from my picture taking to post on blog). Notice that Kathryn added necklaces to her attire. My girls do not believe that one can over-accesessorize.

8x8 scrapbook- September/October

Yep, I skipped some months. We are bad parents...no pics of our girls at all in that time July and August of 2006! I particularly like the top left picture of Julia (left page). She looks especially cute. On the right page is Kathryn wearing a Pull-Up as a hat :)

When I was scrapping these pictures I had forgotten the stage when Kathryn would completely empty the dresser and pile all the clothing, underwear, and pajamas to create a tower with the bunny slippers on top. It was a pain to clean up every day, but she only did this for a week or so, thank goodness!

8x8 scrapbook- Month of June

I neglected to mention that I had gotten behind on my pages for f-i-l's scrapbook, so this year I bought an 8x8 DCWV pack of paper in "Birthday" theme. I know, I know, I wanted to stop buying "new" and use what I have, but time is money and this is easier than cutting down sheets of 8.5x11 or 12x12 to get the base pages. Plus the album will flow better if I can use papers all from this stack. This particular pack had cs and dps and stickers and vellum quotes. ***Tangent: you may recall I have posted 4-5 birthday cards made with birthday paper from this pack.***I am going to try to use that entire pack of dps and cs to try to get this album up-to-date. I am keeping the pages very simple whilst (I used that word for Jean & Lauren...my friends with extensive vocab!) ensuring the colors in the pictures (i.e. the girls' outfits) match as much as possible.

The left page is of the girls playing with their classmates (this was age 3 going on 4 pre-school) and the right page is the girls in cheerleader outfits their Granny bought for them. This outfit was a big favorite of Kathryn's. She wanted to wear it EVERY DAY; even in winter. And Julia, of course, always wants to wear EXACTLY what Kathryn wears or at least coordinating in color scheme :)

8x8 scrapbook

Every year I give my father-in-law 8x8 scrapbook pages of his favorite girls for his birthday which is May1st. So the pages run from May of the previous year to April of the current year, sort of like a calendar. The girls are getting bigger now, so the scrapbook may skip a month, but I will have more pages of "events".

These pics are of Doug & I at a Nats vs. Os game (I am wearing my Cal Ripkin, Jr. tee). The 5 middle pictures are the annual fundraiser at our local fire department here in Leesburg. We went with my in-laws (you can see "Granny" holding Julia in one pic). The girls enjoyed the fire pole, touring the ambulance, and especially the moon bounce. We won Ledo pizza and Moe's gift certificates in the silent auction. My uncle was a fireman, so wherever we live, we have always supported our local fire department. On the far right is Miss Independent (aka Julia Houck) enjoying watermelon and Kathryn being a flower (a "hat" she made with a paper plate and construction paper.)

Please stop by after January 19th, 2008

We are going to Disney World! We are all so excited to go see Mickey and the princesses and Cinderalla's castle, ...
We leave first thing tomorrow morning. I have all the girls' kindergarten homework assignments packed to do at the hotel each day. Now to pack our bathing suits, shorts, and other fun stuff!
I will have lots of blogs to read when I get back. I will miss checking out my favorite blogs. See you later :)

And then there was one...

I bought these Bazzill cs stickers and coordinating chips last spring. 20 stickers come on a sheet, and I purchased the coordinating chips. I painted all the chips white back then and adhered the stickers on top. I gave one to Tracy (http://smallsmackerels.blogspot.com/) and one to Mary (no blog). I pull them out and make about four or five cards at a time with DCWV cards purchased at Michael's or ACMoore. There is just one left in the bag now that I could not find coordinating cs for :)