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.