Scrappin' Saturday.

A simple thank you that took me about 20 minutes to do (I made 4, otherwise it probably would have taken closer to 5ish total).  A 4x6 card with a chalkboard label & a cute flower - the labels are actually ones I had ordered from a GroopDealz a long time ago and never used.  I thought this would be a perfect and easy embellishment for the card. 

 
I used my Simply Sweet cartridge to cut the dark pink flower at 2" and then the shadow feature for the light pink at 1", layering the middle of the dark pink flower on top and then a big fat glue dot to raise it slightly.

This is (clearly) another thank you card I sent out (we've been getting a lot of meal deliveries from my mommy group since Matthew arrived - lots of little thank you's to send out!).  This is another 4x6" card.  The interior scallops are cut using the Storybrook cartridge.  The brown is cut at 5" and the white is 4 & 1/2".  The "thanks" is from my SCAL using font Digs My Hart (free to download here). 

I love the glitter detail on this plaid paper!

This one took longer to make (I made 6 + there's a ton of cutting for the card, the white mat, the plaid mat, the brown scallop & the white scallop, so it uses a lot of paper, too), maybe an hour or two.

This is the kind of thing I'm considering making to sell on Etsy.  Embellishments, cards, premade scrapbook layouts, etc.  I know there's a lot of shops with this kind of stuff already out there, which is one of the reasons I haven't moved on this idea yet....

Scrappin' Saturday.

Here's another layout from the mini book I'm making for Ben.  This book is 8.5" by 8.5" which is some times a challenge to fill up each page - there's often more I want to do but I don't have space for.

Some times, though, it works out just perfect.  I had a few pictures from fall that I wanted to share - I only ended up taking one photo of Ben's first Thanksgiving and I wish I'd had more - I didn't realize at the time it would be the only Thanksgiving Ben would get to celebrate with my mom (she passed the following January).

I love those pictures of Ben crawling through the leaves in our front yard.  I remember that day - he soon lost interest in the leaves and started to try to crawl away.  He made it all the way down the driveway 3 times (after being picked up and set back on the grass) before we finally went back inside.  :)

I had the basket of leaves forEVER without knowing what to do with it.  I found it online last year (here) and pretty much copied it, step by step as a card.  I didn't want to part with it because I put so much work into it and I loved the way it turned out.  When I was searching for some way to make that one Thanksgiving photo pop out, I remembered that card.  I separated the pieces making it a card and just mounted the photo on front (I actually hand cut the photo into that shape - I just traced the shape onto the back of the photo and then cut with scissors).

Looking at this page in the book makes me incredibly happy every time.  And makes me wish for fall!

(Cartridges used in this layout: Designers Calendar for the "give thanks" cut on the left side and Doodlecharms for the basket & leaves on the right side)

Gallery Wall.

Last weekend I revamped the one big wall in our living room/great room.  For the longest time ever, three things graced this wall: a stick broom thingie, a big picture of Ben & a brown barn star.

That.  Was.  It.

Since the arrival of Matthew, we had some beautiful photos done by Kim Valadez Photography and then I bought a great canvas deal from Canvas People through Plum District.  Once that bad boy showed up, I got busy redoing that wall.

I laid everything out on the floor in a nice, tidy, square pattern and made Nick hang it up.  I immediately hated it.  It didn't look good at all.  After he & Ben left for the evening, I start playing around with the arrangement.  I didn't think to take a picture of the wall before or during, so I search through a zillion photos on my computer and this is the best "before" I could come up with:

So, in addition to the boring, mostly bare wall, we had a lovely toddler sized kitchen to deal with + a toy box.  A few days prior to the gallery wall change up, I moved the kitchen out to our front room (it's gradually coming together as a play/craft space for the boys & I to share). 

With out further ado, the new wall:

Awhile back, I pinned this idea from 365 Days of Pinterest Creations (original idea found here) where she showed a simple art project using important dates in your family.  I recreated that for our wall to balance out the light colored sign on the left:

 

I love our new gallery wall.  It makes me smile every time I see it.  :)

Scrappin' Saturday

I'm nearly finished with the mini album I'm making of Ben's first year.  Mainly I'm doing one 2-page layout per month of his first year.  There are a few extra pages for specials events.

Here's one of my very favorite pages from this book - it's one showing a few images of spring and I just adore it.

I  made the "spring" banner from my April Showers cartridge and the flowers on each side are from Cindy Loo.  I love Cindy Loo but I find I don't use it that much - it's a tad feminine for my all boy.

I love how different he looks in that picture on the bottom right - he looks like a completely different kid than the rest - he looks like a tiny tubbo even though he totally wasn't!

Paint.

Oh, Ben, we had a good time this morning. We took a break from our Mama Vs. The Bink War (more on that in another post) and had some fun painting. On Saturday I stopped at Hobby Lobby and picked up a good sized canvas and some acrylic paints. I chose red, blue & green paints. Yesterday afternoon, I worked out how I wanted the phrasing to be cut with my Cricut and after you went to bed, I cut it out on some vinyl. Daddy helped me get it transferred over to the canvas and this morning we painted!

Mama found the inspiration (Katie at Explanation Required) for this project on Pinterest and I marked it as something to do later. As I said before, I picked out red, blue & green paints but when we got out the paints this morning, I chose 3 different blues and a green. I didn't realize just how similar our painting looked to the inspiration painting until just now, when I re-visited the blog so I could link to our inspiration. Oops. Imitation is the best form of flattery? Ha ha.

I set out the canvas for you on some old ads and squirted some paint onto a paper plate. You very delicately dipped one finger in the paint and smeared it on the ads, rather than the canvas. I got you to start making marks on the canvas but it was slow going. I decided to ditch the finger paint route and got out a sponge brush for you to use - you really liked that. You also liked it when I painted your hand (I guess it tickled, ha ha) to leave your hand print on the canvas as well.

I love the work you created! Mama only helped a very little bit. While you were washing your hands in the sink, I peeled off the vinyl lettering to reveal the white spaces beneath. I love it! I can't wait to hang it in your room. :)

Love,

Mama

Fall Wreath.

Ahhh my beautiful front door {sarcastic font} - it desperately needs repainting {and you can see from my paint chips that I've been considering a red - those have been up for over a year. I'm leaning more towards a nice apple green now...} So our front door always is in need of sprucing up until we decide what color to paint it and actually get it painted.

I made a grapevine wreath last year out of some of my neighbors vines that trailed over our side of the fence. As I was trimming them back, I thought I'd keep the vines and make a wreath. I'd never done so before and it was a bit of a learning process.

This year, we made another wreath. Actually, my husband did the same thing I did. He got bored of cutting back the vines and took a break to make a wreath. Gotta love a guy who will stop and be crafty all on his own! After looking at his and looking at mine, I realized they'd look so much better if they were combined to make one beefier wreath. We cut more vines, twisted them all together and stuffed it in the garage to dry out.

Yesterday I dragged it out of the garage and set to making it pretty. I raided my closet and pulled out two tee shirts that I never wear anymore - a brown and an orange one - and set to cutting them into different length strips to make rosettes. Then I raided my very tiny fabric stash and found some nice fall fabric with acorns & pumpkins and made a few rosettes out of that as well.
I knew I wanted to be able to remove the decorations from season to season to re-use later, so they're actually attached with some left over floral wire I had laying around. They're not on there super sturdy, so I'll have to play with it more and see if I can't get them on just a bit tighter - they're a little loosey goosey right now.

Next I found some nice fall paper and cut out some triangles with my Cricut. I hot glued them to a piece of twine and tied it on the branches.

Total cost? Free. My favorite amount.

Happily Ever After.

This is an oldie but a goodie. I made this frame after being inspired by Lisa at Moore Minutes (inspiration here). I took a plain dollar store pine frame and sprayed it with Oil Rubbed Bronze. After that dried, I went over it in plain white. I sanded the edges (perhaps a bit early, my sanding is some what smudgy, but I like the way it looks). I removed the glass and covered the back with scrapbook paper.

I had just purchased my Cricut and all I had was the George & Basic Shapes cartridge, but it was perfect for this craft. I cut a tag at 2 1/2" on some pale peach cardstock and then tea-stained it a deeper color. Once that was completely dry, I carefully taped the tag on a piece of printer paper and ran it through my printer (the font is Larger Mime, found free here).

Once that was finished, I measured out my brown ribbon and fiddled with the placing of the tag. As you can see, the tag itself isn't centered, but the tag + ribbon is. Then I dug through my button stash and found several cute little buttons that matched the colors in the scrapbook paper and added those to the corner of the tag to pull it all together.

The frame sits on a faux shuttered window in our master bedroom and when life starts to get really hard, I look at that frame and remind myself that it could be a lot worse.

Scrappin' Saturday.

Here's a layout I made recently. I actually made eight copies of this layout; I'm attending a scrap-swap at the end of the month. As you can see, I haven't added photos yet, but I have quite a few picked out. Some of Ben's favorite things that I'll be documenting are: trucks, dip (like ranch for his nuggets), grapes, his sand & water table, and Elmo.


Aside from the ribbon and the accent pieces, I used my Cricut entirely for this craft. Using my SCAL2 software, I cut the bracket frame journaling tags (free .svg file found here). I also used SCAL2 for the lettering, using sf Natalie font (found free here ).

I did a three part layer on the ribbon. The base ribbon is a stretchy blue gingham ruffle ribbon that I centered a plain green grosgrain ribbon on top of and then a sunny yellow rickrack ribbon on top of that. I glue dotted each layer together and cross stapled at the ends.

I found these fun ribbon embellished paperclips in the scrapbook accessories aisle at Hobby Lobby. I loved how they picked up on the polka dot theme of the background paper and tied in to the whole color scheme.

The paper mats are actually from way outside the scrapbook aisles. As I was making my layouts, I realized I didn't have enough of any one color card stock to make all the mats for eight layouts. I started doing multi color - I had enough card stock to do each of the five mats per layout a different color.... I just didn't like the way it looked. By the time I changed my mind, Hobby Lobby was closed but I was too impatient to wait. I went to Target and wasn't impressed with their card stock options. I was inspired to match the mats to the lettering background - which happened to look like kraft paper (it's actually card stock). Well, Target ended up being sold out of their rolls of kraft paper. I thought "lunch bags!" and off I went only to discover Target's lunch bags are not, in fact, brown - they're blue & red. As I was headed dejectedly away, a stack of yard leaf bags caught my eye....

I brought them home, trimmed 'em to size and they look perfect.

*updated with pictures:

Customized Travel Bottles.

The hubs, bubs & I are getting ready to fly out to Chicago towards the end of the month for a 2 week-most-expenses-paid-extravaganza. Hubs has started a new job locally, but their HQ is in Chicago, so the bubs & I get to go along for the training ride.

Anyway, I've been making lists & checking them twice about what to bring with us on our trip. Packing for 2 weeks for 2 adults is daunting enough, add packing for a toddler in to that mix and you have a heck of a long list.

For our shower necessities, I wanted to jazz up the bottles a bit. I started out with some clear plastic travel bottles like so:

Using my SCAL2 program, I typed up the words I wanted for each bottle: shampoo, condition {I would have put "conditioner" but the surface space I'm working with is small and taking those extra two letters off the end made a big difference}, his & hers {for each of our body washes}. I could have used one of my cartridges, but I liked the clean lines of the Arial font for this project:

I had those cut to a left over piece of black vinyl I had laying around from a previous project:

As you can see, I had to cut "shampoo" and "conditioner" more than once - the blade messed up on one of the "o's" in "shampoo" and "conditioner" didn't look right, so I changed it to "condition" and recut.

Once cut, I layered on some transfer tape and burnished the finished words onto my plastic bottles - viola!

I have no idea how the vinyl will hold up to water - let's hope my 20 minute craft project doesn't run down the drain with my shampoo suds in Chicago!

Clothes Pin Wreath.

Back in September, I was perusing Martha's site and I came across this wreath. At first I thought I could make this for free - I had clothespins and I knew my mom had some embroidery hoops that she wasn't using any more. After a first dismal attempt {Martha's guide says to use mini clothespins and I thought I could use regular ones - turns out there isn't room for very many that way and they were too heavy to stay on the hoop with wood glue and hot glue wasn't a long lasting solution}, I splurged on $2.24 worth of mini clothes pins and set out to remake it.

The result:

All in all, this project probably took me 20 minutes (and half of that was struggling with the bows - I suck at tying pretty bows) and it was practically free.

I'm planning to leave this up all year and just switch out the ribbon for the appropriate season to display birthday cards and other mailed pretties.

What sorts of methods do you use to display your holiday cards?

Personalized.

I adore personalized anything. Put my name on it, and tiny hearts light up in my eyes. Every year I tell my husband that this is the last time I'm going to buy new stockings and every year I see a new one to fall in love with and promise yet again that this is the last time. Last year I hearted the classic red & white stockings with silver initial pins. This year I'm back to loving my favorite motif - country clutter. I found some pretty great stockings {polka dots! swoon!} from Ballard Designs that you could have embroidered with your name {double swoon!} but the price tag was pretty panic-attack inducing. Since I suck at embroidery but I really wanted to do something that put our names on our stockings and I wasn't about to shell out $30 a piece for stockings, I had to get crafty.

Enter Target. Oh Target, how I love thee and thy awesome dollar bins. In a recent stroll through my Mecca, I found these super cute wooden star ornaments with a simple hook to hang. Picture a light bulb going off over my head. I grabbed up three {one for me, the hubs and the bubs} and then went off to the scrapbooking aisle for some glittery funness by way of lettering. Side note: I could have used my Cricut to cut out the letters and embellished with glitter myself - however, I'm still in my infancy of collecting cartridges and I only have one font cart and it's not my favorite. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. $4 later and I have my personalized plaques for our stockings {and the BEST part is that if I change my mind in the future, these tags go with!}

Here's your incredibly easy how-to:

1. Gather blank ornaments
2. Gather embellishments {as fancy or as plain as ya wanna get - I kept mine to just the name as the surface I was working on is quite small}
3. Adhere your letters and embellishments to the ornaments {in the picture below I show ModPodge as part of the items used - I didn't end up using it at all}
4. Hang on stockings.

Advent.

So you all know I'm a wee bit obsessed with blogs. I mainly follow crafting blogs and recently in blogland there has been an abundance of advent calendar projects (gee...I wonder why...). I really wanted to make one for Ben - I remember as a kid we often had them at our house during Christmas, that were filled with chocolates and I loved opening the little doors and getting my daily piece of candy.

For Ben, I really just wanted something simple. First, I'm not feeding my 11 month old chocolate. Call me crazy, but I'm just not doing it. Second, he doesn't really "need" 24 days worth of tinker toys, nor would he get the concept. This project is mostly for me. ha. So, I set out to craft something that I thought would be age appropriate and still fun to look at. This is what I came up with:

After I agonized and debated and thought about it for what felt like forever (really it was just like a few hours), I decided I wanted to do circles. I picked out two coordinating Christmas papers and cut out 24 three & a half in circles with my Cricut (using George & Basic Shapes). Then I cut out numbers one through 24 again with the Cricut (this is a completely Cricut project, but it doesn't have to be - I just used what I had) in both red & green cardstock. Then I glued 'em on. Then I debated and agonized and thought about it for what felt like forever (really it was just like a few hours...sound familiar?) and decided to just do simple shapes on the back. So there I went, back to the Cricut, cutting out shapes and animals and what not and gluing them to the back of each circle.

Then i needed a way to display it. I re-purposed a frame I had hanging in the hallway by removing the glass and pictures and just using the back & frame. I stuck a piece of cardboard in the back and pinned up my circles. I did it in a random pattern, so the numbers are all over the board and it'll be a small adventure (for me... ha ha) to turn them over every day.

So there ya go. My first home made advent calendar. Nothing too snazzy and I'm sure I could have done a nicer job, but those efforts will be saved for when he's older and he really does get a gift every day.

(Cartridges used for this project: George & Basic Shapes (for the numbers on the front, circles & some images on the back; New Arrival & Doodlecharms)

Give Thanks Banner.

Here's a quick little tutorial on my spiffy new mantle pennant banner that I whipped up today. It's not the grandest one out there, but it's my version and I heart it. It's pretty simple to do - here's what I used to complete the project:

• 5 pieces of 8 1/2 x 11 scrapbook paper {I decided to use a burlap print}
• Coordinating paper {can be patterned, plain, whatever your heart desires - how you choose to cut your letters will depend on how much you need. I made 4" letters on my Cricut and used 1 and 1/2 pieces of 12x12 paper}
• Paper cutter {or scissors}
• Letters {I used my Cricut to cut them out because I have one, but you could easily use stencils, your printer or sticker embellishments, etc}
• Adhesive {I used several kinds - scrapbook e-z runner adhesive, a glue pen and tape}
• Twine {or other sort of stringing material like ribbon - I considered cutting some grapevine to use but by the time I got to that part it was dark so I stuck with the twine}
• Xacto blade

First, I measured out my pennants on the 8 1/2 x 11 scrapbook paper - I used two pennants per page. I used my handy dandy husband with his super precise measuring and cutting skills for this part {a less lazy person could easily do this themselves}

While the pennants were being cut, I chose my letter paper and cut to cutting the letters out on my Cricut. Once I finally had everything ready, it was time to get to gluin'. I chose where I wanted the first letter oriented and glued it down. I then used the previous letter as a template for placement of my next letter:
After all the letters were glued to the pennants, I cut vertical slits in the top corners on each side of the pennant {I found cutting on the reverse side gave the front a cleaner look}
Once all the slits were made, I strung with twine:
And hung! Please ignore my awful mantel - I have a mini gallery ode to my son going on that I haven't quite made myself tidy up and make more presentable. I chose to do each word on it's own swag and left some extra twine on either end of the word dangle freely.

Now that I see it hung, I wish I had chosen a more bold color for the backdrop, rather than the burlap print. I love that print, but compared with the muted browns and tans of the fireplace, it almost blends right in. I still think it's incredibly festive!

Hope you enjoy!

Falling Leaves.

So I spotted a cute little gem over on Less Than Perfect Life Of Bliss not that long ago and I've been quietly lusting over it.

I finally got around to making my version of it this afternoon.

I didn't take any pictures of the creative process, as I didn't do anything that spectacular. In Julie's tutorial, she used burlap for the background, a hand drawn & cut tree and a leaf punch. I used card stock and my Cricut.

I whipped out a 50 cent frame I got from the dollar store (it was a two pack of your basic pine frame), cut a piece of sort of tannish brownish card stock to fit for the backing (no awesome burlap at my house - and that's not sarcastic, I fluffy heart burlap and it seems to be all the rage in crafting materials right now). Then using my Stretch Your Imagination cartridge, I cut the tree (it's actually in the same color card stock as the backing but I colored it with brown Sharpie - I don't have any dark brown card stock) and then the leaves out of some fallish colors. Glued on, popped in the frame, stuck on my kitchen window sill and winner winner, chicken dinner.

Heart.

Recipe Binder.

Recently I was introduced to a new blog by my friend Jamie via FB. The Dating Diva's website - it's just date ideas and other things along that theme for keeping your marriage fresh and romantic. They had a post not too long about about making a binder to store your dating ideas in which I thought looked so cute. I took that idea and spun it off into my own version for a present for my friend Susan who has recently moved into her very first apartment.

Here was my inspiration:

(original post can be found here)

Anyway, from that I took my inspiration. Following all the steps and only changing things like the color of the pages and what I chose to write on the tags, I made a cook book for Susan in a patriotic theme (since she's doing Americana decor at her apartment). I wrote up and printed out about 10 or so recipes that are tried and true and stuck them in under the categories of "sides, main dishes and desserts". I created space for her to tuck in recipes she wants to try and there's plenty of room to add in her own favorites as she tries more out.

Here's my version (my pictures didn't come out as nice as the Dating Divas one did):