Camping

Well this has been a busy week. We had a great time camping with my son and friends last weekend and of course I have lots of photos to scrap now. My grandchildren came back with us to visit for three weeks and we've been busy going to the lake and the ocean beaches. I did manage to get a scrap page done in between all of our running around.

I had this really cute paper from Imaginisce's "Happy Camper" collection that I thought would go perfect  with these photos of my grandson making and eating smores. I was finally able to use my Cricut cartridge "Camp Out" to cut out the cute camp fire for this layout. I also used a couple of my graphics from my "Great  Outdoors" digital scrapbook kit, the campsite "This Way" sign and the "outhouse" which I popped up with foam for a 3D look. I used one of  my Prima vines and some Prima flowers to finish the layout.

Now I'm off to print of some more of my camping photos so I can hopefully squeeze in some more "me" time to scrap. Thanks for popping by and I hope you all have a great weekend!

 

Going MIA for a few days

We're off tomorrow morning to meet up with my son and grandchildren and his girlfriend and her two little ones and my sons friend and his wife and little one to camp for the weekend. Where we are going to is only about 40 minutes away at a place called Miracle Beach which has a beautiful long sandy beach.

I'm very excited as this is going to be my son's first real visit up here since we moved to Vancouver Island 5 years ago. He use to come up this way when making deliveries for Ikea, but that was usually arriving late in the evening and crashing for the night and then taking off the next morning to make all his deliveries down the island. I always have my grandchildren up here for three or four weeks in the summer but my son's usually to busy working (being a single Dad can be tough sometimes). We come home on Sunday and the grand kids will come back with us. So I'm pretty sure I'll have lots of photos to scrap when I get home. Have a great weekend everyone!

Another great tutorial

I don't know what it is but I always seem to go in spurts of making different things. Sometimes I'll doing nothing but layouts and the next thing I'm doing nothing but cards. Oh well, as long as I'm keeping busy, that's all that counts, lol. I made this card following another of my friend, Paulien's great tutorials. Paulien's tutorials are always great to follow as she has tons of pictures and very detailed directions so that even a beginner paper crafter can follow them! You can find this tutorial at Swirlydoos here: http://www.swirlydoos.com/sd_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?106343

The paper I've used here is from the May 2011 kit from My creative Scrapbook which just happened to be the same papers that Paulien used from one of the Swirlydoos kits - how convenient is that, lol! I did have to do a little but of substitution on the flowers and instead of using the Rock Candy Crackle paint I used Stickles glitter as I thought the Stickles showed up better on the small butterfly than the crackle paint. Now all I have to do is make an envelope to fit the card and I'm all set! I do hope you pop over to Swirlydoos and check this great tutorial out. TFL and have a great day!

Swing card

So I decided to try making one of these cute little swing cards that I found a tutorial for on Split Coast Stampers. I think this one turned out pretty good. I love the look of them when they are standing up. The only thing with these cards is that you don't have a lot of room for writing your own little message on them but I suppose you could do that on the very back of the card. It is nice to be able to send someone something different instead of your usual type card.

I used this pretty paper again from Stampin Up,  I love this paper - I may have to go back and pick up a couple of more sheets of it. I used one of my Martha Stewart punches for the edge papers. I cut out the "Love" and butterfly on my Cricut machine and added a bit of ribbon and a bow to finish it off. Thanks for taking a look and I hope everyone has a great week!

Another step card

Okay so I think I'm going to get addicted to making these step cards, I just really think they turn out so cute. Although this is only the second one I've made, I can see many more of these in my future, lol. I made this one for some friends who were so nice to lend me one of their trucks the other week while mine was in getting fixed. I think that's why I love living here in a small town compared to living in Vancouver/Richmond on the mainland. Here everyone is always there to help you out no matter what it is you're doing, you don't even have to ask them. We only moved here almost six years ago and we have made so many wonderful friends - love, love, love the small town atmosphere!

 Anyways, back to my card, lol. The little hedgehog on here I drew  myself in my Paint Shop Pro program. He's my version of the Penny Black hedgehog stamps. I couldn't afford to buy all these stamps so I decided I would just draw my own and I think he turned out kind of cute. I think these papers that I've used are from Stamp-in-Up, I really liked the colors in them when I saw them. I used my Spellbinders Nestabilities to cut and emboss the ovals with my Big Shot. I used one of my Martha Stewart punches for my side pieces and the "Thanks" I cut out on my Cricut machine. Oh and the little flower is one of Prima's. Well thanks so much for taking a peek!

Getting published

I just received an email from Scrapbook News and Review to let me know that they are publishing two more of my cards in their issue that comes out on Sunday. I'm very excited, this will be my fourth time published in their online magazine, which is so cool. It's very exciting when you're a crafter of any sort and find that people really like what you have made, it just makes it all worth while. The cards are my "Once Upon a Springtime" fairy card and my "Fun in the Sun" paper piecing card, which for some reason I forgot to post that one here on my blog. After the August issue comes out I can re-post both of the cards here on my blog.

I'm also very happy to report that my DH liked his card and his new motorcycle helmet that I got for him - Yeah! My in-laws were in town so the four of us all went out to this really nice Chinese smorgasbord  that we have here in town, which is one of my DH's favorite places to go to. Of course after all that food all we could do is come home and flake out in front of the TV, lol. Well I'm off to bed - have a great weekend all!

A new card

It's my husbands birthday tomorrow (the big 47 - I can't even remember 47 it was so long ago, lol) so I have been racking my brain, trying to get some inspiration for a card for him. I was surfing through Split Coast Stampers website and came across a tutorial on making a step card. I really like these type of cards, I just think they look really cool when they are opened. So now I had the type of card decided on and just needed to find some masculine type paper and I came across some really nice ones from "Crate Paper". One was from their Static collection called "gravity" and the other from their Taylor collection called "Play Time". Although they were from different collections their colors matched perfectly.

The next thing I wanted to do was something a little more than just your standard "Happy Birthday" and since I had bought him a new helmet for his Harley I kind of wanted to somehow base it around motorcycles. I was trying to find some kind of saying like "Harley riders don't get old they just...." but I couldn't think of anything to finish the sentence off. After poking around the internet I found someone talking about how some people think they are to old to ride a motorcycle but this person thought they got old because they quit riding. I thought that would be perfect, I just switched the wording around to suit what I wanted and so I came up with "Harley riders don't get to old to ride, they get old because they quit riding!" For my sentiment on the inside of the card I said "To someone I know who will never grow old - Happy Birthday Sexy!"

For the motorcycle on the front of the card I went searching the internet for a silhouette of one. I finally found one I liked except that it had a girl riding it, so I took it into my Paint Shop Pro program and cut the girl out of it and then I saved it as a .png file which I then took into my "Inkscape" program and turned it into an .svg file and cut it out on my Cricut Machine and attached it to the front of the card with foam to pop it up for a 3D look. I think it turned out not to bad, so I hope he likes it and his new helmet! I've posted a photo below, if you click on the image it will show you a larger picture, then just hit your back button to return to this page. Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

Happy Tuesday

Well I've been busy recovering my in-laws cushions from their trailer. The people who owned it before must have really been into cows because all of the cushions were covered in this black & white cow pattern fleece. They even had the lamp shades in the same material - not really my in-laws style - can't say as I blame them, lol. Anyway I decided after breaking numerous finger nails trying to get the new covers on the very dense foam I should take a break and have some "me" time.

I decided to follow along with my friend Paulien's new July tag that she has up on her blog, which you can find here: http://paulienvandenbosch.blogspot.com/
I had to do a bit of substituting as I didn't have all of the needed items, such as a chandelier stamp, script stamp and I used one of my pretty Prima butterflies rather than make my own (I know lazy).

The first thing I had to do was to find a .png file(a graphic with a transparent background) of a chandelier to use in place of the stamp that Paulien used. Once I found that I was able to use my Paint Shop Pro program to print the graphic onto my tag. I also didn't have a nice lacy border stamp like Paulien used but I did have one with little butterflies so I used that instead. For my script stamp I used one of my rub-ons, which doesn't look to bad. I really do need to get a script stamp as I found that doing different projects it would be really good one to have.

For my misting on the card I didn't have any of the Distress re-inkers so I used some of my Rangers "stream" ink and mixed that up with water and sprayed that onto the tag. I didn't have any of the Pearl-ex micro powder to add to the spray to give it some shimmer but I had just some Lumin Arte "Radiant Rain" shimmering mist and applied that over top of the blue mist after I had heat set it. It is hard to see how it shimmers in the photo below but if you click on the photo you are able to see a bigger photo of the tag and see how it shimmers. 

The next thing I had to do was to figure out what to use in place of silver metallic paint to mix with my iridescent medium. I remembered I had some Rangers Silver ink so I mixed that with the iridescent medium to paint on my doily. It didn't come out quite as silvery than if I had used metallic paint but it looked not bad. 

When I first started scrapping I always thought I had to use the exact same products as was in the tutorials I followed. I soon found that it could be quite expensive to keep buying things I might not ever use again. Now I realize that the idea of a tutorial is to give you the basic techniques so that you can then put your own spin on things! So I  hope by giving you some of my steps for this tag that it will get your own ideas flowing when following tutorials. Anyway here is my take on Paulien's tag, hope you like it. TFL and thanks for another great tag Paulien!

Prize Giveaway!

Yeah Friday is here!! I've got a few things to show you today. The first is news about a prize giveaway at my friend Gabi's blog, which you can find here: http://gabriellepollacco.blogspot.com/ Gabi is giving away a great prize pack full of all of her favorite scrapping goodies. A photo of the prize pack is below this post. So pop on over to Gabi's blog and leave a comment and you never know - you might be the lucky one to win this great prize!

The other thing to show you is my layout that I did for the "Pages in Time" interactive Blog Hop. I don't know if any of you followed it last week or not - it ran June 30th to July 6th. The idea of the blog hop was to go to each of the listed blogs and the girls were sharing with you different ways to spice up your scrap layouts. It was really fun seeing all the different techniques used. At the end of the hop what you had to do was follow the sketch they gave you and incorporate at least 5 of the techniques that the girls shared into your layout. So below is my take on the layout, a photo of my son taken this past weekend while he was camping with friends. The techniques/things I used in my layout were: Distressing, matting with doodling on it, scalloped border punches, my own hand made bling using stickles glitter, title "Life - Enjoy", journaling "Cultas Lake, July 2011", and flowers. Thanks for all the inspiration ladies and thank you all for stopping by my blog and having a peek. Don't forget to hop on over to Gabi's blog at a chance at winning her prize!

    

An altered project

I didn't realize that it has been so long since I updated my blog. I guess I got a little busy visiting with friends etc on our "Canada Day" (July 1st) long weekend this past weekend. This week has been so warm and sunny I wanted to spend it outside doing some yard work and soak up some of that good old vitamin D!

I did this altered toilet paper dispenser a couple of weeks ago but I forgot to take a photo of it before I sent it back to my sister so I had to wait for her to take a photo of it and send it to me. So this was a gift that my sister received from someone a number of years ago, she just had it as a decoration in her bathroom. It was getting so old that the picture on it was getting all faded and yellow looking. I decided to give it a makeover.  This is the before photo so you can see how it looked.

I painted the whole thing with white paint and after it dried I painted it with Rangers Rock Candy Distress Crackle paint, not that you can really see the crackle effect in this photo. I used Prima Flora fairy paper for the background and then used Graphic 45 "Once Upon a Springtime" collection papers cutting out the fairies and flowers etc popping them up with foam for a 3D look. I used stickles glitter on the fairies & butterflies wings. Also cut out the two butterflies with my Cricut and covered them with stickles glitter also and used pop dots down the centers so I could fold the butterflies wings up. I'm quite pleased at how it turned out. TFL!