New Years Eve!

Wow the last day of 2011 - can you believe how fast the year has gone by! I arrived back home yesterday afternoon after having a wonderful Christmas with my kids and grandchildren. It's always so much fun to watch the young ones open up all of their gifts - and boy did they have a lot of gifts to open. I think they had about 4 Christmas's in one day. First the grandchildren were at their Mum's house Christmas Eve to open up presents Christmas morning. Then they were off to  my son's (their Dad) to open up presents there. After that my daughter picked them up to bring them to her house to open presents with us and then we dropped them back off at  my son's to open presents with their Grandad and his wife when they came over for dinner! I don't ever remember having that many gift openings when were kids, lol.

My daughter and her Dad and I went to my sisters place for a very yummy Christmas dinner of ham and all the fixings - I love it when someone else does the cooking, it always taste's better then mine, even if it had been just a piece of toast, lol.

On Dec 27th we had everyone to my daughters place for a huge turkey dinner and lots of yummy desserts. I think there was about 16 of us and my daughter did all the cooking, even making a couple of yummy pies with the crusts right from scratch - she definitely doesn't get that from me, lol! It was so great to visit with friends and family, some that I hadn't seen in over 6 years!

Tonight my DH and I are off to our friends place for a house party - hopefully we will last to actually ring in the New Year - it's funny how priorities change as we get older. I hope that everyone has an awesome and safe New Years Eve and a wonderful 2012!

Happy New Years Everyone!! 

Merry Christmas!!

Well here we are, Christmas Eve 2011 - where does the time go!! When you're a kid the time just seems to go by so slowly, but boy when you become older it just flies by! I've come down to the mainland to have Christmas with my kids. I'm looking forward to watching them all opening their gifts as I didn't get to spend Christmas with them last year.

Last night we got together with old friends for their annual Christmas get together. It was so great seeing everyone. We've all being doing this since all of our kids were little ones and now all our kids are grown and it's so great that all the kids still come to the party. Usually at their age they all have their own friends and things to do. It was so nice to hear from one of our friends son (who is now 6'5") that he looks forward to this get together every year. We managed to get a big group shot of everyone together so it will be great to scrapbook that photo.

I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas filled with lots of love and happiness and spending time with family and friends and a healthy and happy New Year to all! I hope Santa is good to everyone!! 

Enjoy your holidays!!

Four more sleeps!!

Wow can you believe it's only 4 more days until Christmas - well I guess that's technically 3 days since it's the 21st of December already, lol. I'm off this afternoon to fly down to visit with my kids over the holidays which I'm really looking forward to. I'll be doing a lot of visiting with friends while I'm down there so that will be fun as I haven't seen some of them for a few years.

I did manage to get one more quick layout done the other day to take down with me of  my friends cute little granddaughter with Santa Claus. I used some of Websters "Sweet Season" line of Christmas papers from last year mixed with some from this years "Waiting For" line. I cut the Christmas balls out from one of the papers to spell out the Santa title and popped them up with foam and added some gold ribbon and bows to them. Also died some more of the white flowers I have with Rangers ink, in cranberry, and then when I put them all together I outlined the petals again like I did for the other layout with Stickles glitter and some white puffy paint for the center. Thanks so much for stopping by and I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas!!

 

Cute Christmas village

I just love this cute little village I made using my Cricut machine and an SVG file I bought from SVG Cuts. You can see the village  on their website here: Gingerbread Chalet  It's suppose to be made with brown papers etc to look like gingerbread but I wanted to make it with this yummy winter paper from Bo Bunny's line last year, "Snowy Serenade". You can cut this out on your Cricut machine using the "Make the Cut" program or "Sure Cuts a Lot" and it's really very easy to put together. You can take the roof off of the houses if you get those little electric/battery operated tea light candles and put them inside they look adorable all lit up. Anyway here is how it turned out - don't you just love the blues in this paper! TFL & I hope you'll check this out on SVG Cuts website, they have lots of really cute files to purchase.

More Websters

Had to play some more with the goodies in my Websters "Home for the Holidays" kit! There is so much stuff in this great kit, I  think I'll have winter and Christmas layouts coming out of my ears, lol. The layout I've done below is using another photo of my friends cute little granddaughter. The main paper is Websters "waiting for: reindeer cottage". I took a duplicate piece of paper and cut out the corner "cottage" and "Santa" in the air balloon and popped them up with foam. On the right bottom corner I cut out another piece from a different paper and popped that up with foam and cut out the deer from one of the  other papers and popped that up with another piece of foam. I did some distressing and punch work on the layers under the photo. On the bottom of the photo I did some more fussy cutting from one of the 6 x 6 sheets of paper to get this corner piece of flowers that I popped up with foam again. For the poinsettia I had some plain white flowers and used some Ranger's ink, in cranberry, to dye the flowers. Once they had dried and I put them together I took some "crystal" stickles and out lined the petals and then used some white puffy paint for the center of the flower. For the snow on the roof of the cottage I used some of the trim from Websters Holiday Trim. It kind of had a white glittery netting with this white knit on the bottom of it so I just cut the netting away and then used it for the snow on the roof. So here is the finished product:

 I think it turned out pretty cute. Tomorrow I will be posting my little Christmas village I've been working on, it's super cute! Well I'm off to bed, I hope everyone has a great week! TFL!

Sketch contest

Happy Wednesday everyone. Just a reminder that the big sketch contest is still going on over at "My Creative Scrapbook" sketch blog. Pam is again offering another awesome prize to be won filled with so  many goodies, I hope you'll all have a chance to join in. Here is a copy of this  months sketch:

Yesterday I received my "Home for the Holidays" kit from Websters Pages and couldn't wait to dive into all the Websters goodies, so I decided I'd use some of the papers etc for my entry into the big contest. The photo's I used are of my granddaughter that I took while we were helping my sister out at a craft fair last month. We decided to take a little break and go outside and do a bit of a photo shoot with all of the fall leaves that were on the ground!

These yummy papers are from Websters Your Life Beautiful "Waiting For" collection. I did some distressing on each layer using my distress tool and some Tim Holtz Distress inks in "Brushed Corduroy". The Websters "Bloomers" in green went perfect with the papers for this layout. I had some lime green chipboard letters that I used for the "Fall" in my title but I took some crumpled plastic wrap and patted it onto the distress ink pad then just sort of stamp it all over the chipboard to give a bit of a distressed look. I used some of the Websters "Story Teller" alphabet stickers that came in the kit for the rest of the title. The red and green buttons I added were from my stash. I apologize for the photo, it's a little on the blurry side. Thanks for stopping by and having a peek and I hope you get a chance to stop by and enter the contest too!

The never ending card...

The video below is just a short one to show off the cute "Never Ending" card that I made at a class at our LSS. You can find a number of tutorials on You Tube for these cards but I found that this one by Dawn seemed to be the easiest to follow. I hope you'll try it out, here's the link:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAVAzDtcdw0

Almost forgot....

I took a card class on Wednesday night at our local scrapbook store and I  just wanted to post some pics of the cards we made. I really like this first one, it was so simple but turned out really cute - you just have to bare with the fact that for some reason in my photo it looks like the white card stock is kind of dirty, but it's not in real life, so it must just be my camera. It's sort of hard to tell in the photo but the  little light bulbs are popped up with foam and underneath we've used one of those finger dobber's to dob some of the same color ink and  then kind of feathered it around to make it look like the bulb is glowing. My pen line for the lights wire is kind of not that good as my fingers being so numb from my MS they don't always go where I want them to, lol. Anyway, I think it's kind of cute, so here you go! ;-)

I really liked this second card we did using some holly die-cuts cut from different shades of green, some with glossy accents, and some with green and gold glitter. Some of the  holly I've popped up with foam. We just kind of glued the holly down in different spots around in a circle and then used some red stickles to make the berries. On the white background paper we used some Distress inks in "weathered wood" and "pine needles" and depending how much of each you used gave each card a little bit different look. I sent this one to my in-laws as I just thought it came out so pretty.

We did make another card which I'm sure some of you have heard of before - it's called the "never ending card". This card is just so cool how you can keep opening it with every flip of the paper. I'm going to try and take a video of it to show you how it opens (Not how to make it, but I will post a link to a tutorial on how to do them). I'll try and do this tomorrow if I can get my camera video to work. Well I'm off to make a few more Christmas cards and then hopefully I'll be done for this year at least. Have a great weekend everyone!

Memory Boxes all done!

Yeah, I got them all done!! I was beginning to think I wouldn't get these done in time for next Christmas, never mind this Christmas, lol. Once I got going on these I had a lot of  fun making them and am quite pleased how they turned out. This first one here is the one I did for my Grandson using the Bo Bunny "Back to Backs" paper. I thought these papers would work for a boy box. I did have plans on wanting to get like a tiny little car to glue to the top of the box but all the ones that I found were metal and I figured after opening and closing the box a few times it would probably fall off and take some of the paper along with it, so I opted for using feathers and some die cut chipboard gears instead. So here is how it turned out.

 This next pretty one is for my son's girlfriends daughter (she's a little younger than my granddaughter). For this one I used these pretty pink papers from Teresa Collins "Posh" collection of papers. I used some tiny Prima rose buds and one of Prima's pretty roses with the glassy glitter on it. The other two pink ones and the black and pink one I made myself using Gabrielle Pollacco's water distressed flowers tutorial. You will see a link to Gabi's blog under my list of fav blogs I go to if you would like to make some of these. They are really simple to make and come out looking very pretty! I did take all of the hardware off of these boxes before putting any of the paper on them, which amazingly went very well putting it back on - the usually never happens for me, lol. The boxes I picked up at our local Dollar Store for $2.00 each so this makes very cute, in-expensive gifts. So here's the last one, I hope you like it!

 I hope you liked these and maybe give you a little inspiration to make your own. Remember I love to hear any comments you have! TFL!

I'm back!

Well I actually arrived back home last Monday but I've been busy out in the yard since it hasn't been raining. I did managed to get my outside lights up and I cleaned up some of the branches and stuff that had gotten all over the yard after we had that big windstorm a couple of weeks ago. I still need to clean up the rest of the leaves that are now off the trees. Hopefully I'll get that done tomorrow.

 I've been procrastinating for a number of weeks here to do some memory boxes for my grandchildren for Christmas. Had the boxes sitting here but for some reason just couldn't get in the  mood to get started on them. So I'm happy to say I finally got started on them - yeah! I'm very pleased at how this first one turned out for my granddaughter, I think it looks so pretty. The papers I've used on this box are from Kaisercraft's "Bonjour" collection. I really like the soft colors of these papers and I really liked how my flower cluster worked out. For some reason I usually have a hard time with my flower clusters - no idea why.

I also just finished a box for my grandson tonight but I'm waiting until tomorrow to take a photo of it in the daylight. So I'll post a photo of that one tomorrow. Anyway here is my granddaughters memory box..I hope you like it!