Punky Sprouts Christmas Display

I made this cute display for Punky Sprouts. I inked the edges of a sheet of Punky Playground for the base and layered inked Echo Park Christmas papers on the center of it. I used some heavy duty glue dots to adhere the clip to the top of the board.

I sprayed the Lil' Blossoms-Lacy with red and two colors of green Lindy's mists to get the right color. I used that same combo of greens on the Lil' Stem-Lacy and added some of the new Lil' Seeds.

I used the coordinating stickers from Echo Park to embellish the project as well as some enamel dots from Basic Grey and My Mind's Eye.

This board could be used to display your most recent Christmas cards, your favorite holiday photo or you could even turn it into a fun Christmas countdown!

Thanks for stopping by!

Supplies Used: 

Punky Sprouts

Punky Playground, Lil' Blossoms-Lacy, Lil' blossoms-Parchment, Funky Punky Fiber Pack-Canvas, Lil Seeds, Lil' Stems-Lacey

Lindy's Stamp Gang

Starburst Mists-Rudolph's Nose Red, Cathedral Pines Green, Gator Gumbo Olive

Other

Paper-Echo Park, Stickers-Echo Park, Ink-Ranger, Enamel Dots-Basic Grey, My Mind's Eye, Bulldog Clip

Moxie Fab Thanks Blog Hop

Today I'm taking part in a wonderful blog hop to celebrate someone who's put so much time and effort into this crafty world of ours. She created a phrase that turned into a blog that became a community.

 Today we celebrate Cath Edvalson, creator of the Moxie Fab World blog. This blog has been a part of my blog reading list for 5 years. The challenges and inspiration and crafters that I discovered through her blog posts have really helped me grow as a crafter. But the part of Moxie Fab World I'll miss the most are her "Oh My Moxie Fab!" posts. Those quick little images with a few clever words provided me not only with creative inspiration but also gave me a little bit of her in my day. 

I created this card based on the blog hop header. I just loved the colors and I thought that instead of goodbye, it would be nice to tell Cath how much I love this. I love this blog, this gal and this community she created. This community who is so going to miss her that they organized what has got to be the biggest blog hop ever! 

Thank you so much, Cath, for your years of passion and for celebrating crafters everywhere. I've discovered so many great card makers and paper crafters through the Moxie Fab blog. I can't wait to see what the future holds for you!

Mickey's Harry Potter Birthday!

We went with a Harry Potter theme for this year's birthday party for Mickey. He wants to be Harry Potter for Halloween and we wound up being able to fit his birthday present into the theme!

Here's the invitation I made for him. I found the font on Dafont.com and then changed the layer style in Photoshop to make it 3D and red.

Last month we were at a neighbor's garage sale and found this awesome ping-pong table! The kids and I tried to talk Andrew into it to no avail. It wasn't until I suggested that it be Mickey's birthday present that he agreed. :) On our walk back to pick it up, Mickey and I were talking and came up with Quidditch-pong as a fun game to play at his birthday party. He loved the idea!

Since the weather was so nice, we were able to set it up outside. I taped some dollar store tablecloths in Hogwart's house colors over the garage door. The kiddos helped me tape coins to the bottom edge of the cloth so that they wouldn't fly all over the place. :) The original idea was to have a Quidditch-pong tournament but then I realized that as 6-7 year olds, they'd have way more fun just whacking the ball back and forth.

After the party we gave the kiddos goodie bags with broomstick pens, a chocolate candy that looks like the Golden Snitch, a pair of Harry Potter glasses and their very own copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

We gave them used copies to keep costs down and wound up traipsing all over to find them. It probably would have been cheaper to buy new and avoid all the temptations at Goodwill and used book stores. ;) 

Mickey wrote a little note to each of his guests and we glued it to the inside front cover of the books. I really hope the kids loved them!

Here's a little look at the treat table with the Sorting Hat, the wands, the cake and all the treats.

The cake was just purchased from Safeway and the wonderful gal behind the counter actually saves all the old decorations so she still had Harry Potter ones from when the movies came out! Bless her! 

The Sorting Hat was just a witches hat spray painted brown and I used some binder clips to make the eye and mouth wrinkles.

And here are some close ups of the treats. I had most of the treat jars from our wedding. 

I cut the labels out of black vinyl with my Cuttlebug. I used a few sizes of the same Spellbinders die.

Then, I just wrote the names on the labels with chalk. Super easy! The only food I made was the Cockroach Clusters. They are Chow Mein noodles covered with melted milk chocolate chips.

The wands were so fun to make! I bought chopsticks, made designs on them with hot glue guns and some beads. Then, just paint them with the same spray paint I used on the Sorting Hat. They were a huge hit with the kids!

We had some other non sugary foods. The veggies were labeled as Hagrid's Veggies, the chips were Dragon Scales and some garlic cheese bread from Papa Murphy's was Weasley Cheesey Bread. 

Finally, I couldn't forget the Butter Beer! Two tablespoons of butter extract in two liters of cream soda. Pour it into their glasses and then add a little whipped cream and stir a little. The kids (and big kids) adored it!

Mickey and his friends had a great time at his party. But, I must admit that I had more fun putting the party together! 

Yes, Please Cards

I also made a few cards with those Yes, Please scraps. 

One, a masculine card for my dad's birthday. (He's a deer hunter with a mustache so both trends work awesomely for me!)

 And, a more feminine card for my mother-in-law's birthday. I love that little tree!

And, finally, just one for fun. It uses a 4x6 scalloped pad of paper from DCWV along with the little flower sheet from Yes, Please.

I had fun playing with the Yes, Please line and really liked leaving it out on my desk and working with it across a few different projects.

Have you done this with a line before? 

She Can Sleep Anywhere!

This is the second and slightly more successful attempt at using up those Yes, Please scraps. Last layout I only used pieces from two sheets and this layout uses up paper from six sheets and the background is an additional sheet. Woot!

I knew I had a bunch of these greenish pieces to use so I looked for pictures that needed something calming. These shots of Audrey, sacked out on a pile of gravel were just the thing!

I used three pieces of Bossy Joscie flair accented with some Basic Grey candy buttons to help draw your eye around the layout as all the elements are clustered in the middle of the page.

The "I {heart} THIS" actually had a little red heart there. But, it was the only piece of red on the page and it was too small to be a focal point of the layout and too distracting otherwise. So, I cut an asterisk from the Thicker set I used to create the little heart. It covered up that red just perfectly! 

I ran the title across the top of the photos because I liked how they sit up there at two crazy angles just like my Audrey sleeps wherever she ends up.

The letters I used to spell sleep are actually solid teal but I added the dots because they kind of faded into the gravel in the background and there are two other pieces of teal paper that have little white dots on them so it works really well.

I really like how this layout turned out. It's calming but still a little all over the place, if you know what I mean.

The really funny thing is (as if her sleeping on a bed of gravel isn't funny enough) is that this happened during a family function with tons of kids running around playing. She got tired, made a pillow of gravel and went to sleep in the sun. Andrew actually moved the toy kitchen to shade her.

She can truly sleep anywhere!

True Story

Well, since I had dug out and used that impulse buy of Amy Tangerine's Yes, Please line, I decided to work a bit with the leftover scraps I had. I put this pic of Lilly in our Project Life album but wanted a bit more room to tell the story.

I also used some of my new goodies from Pinkfresh Studio. The little house, the chevrons, and the heart are all from there. The chevron strips are the tearaway pieces from the Yes, Please paper pad.

I love the little wooden dogs and used this one (probably an Airedale?) because it looks the most like Lilly. She's actually half Standard Poodle, half Great Dane.

I also really wanted to use some Bossy Joscie flair and created this little sun/cloud cluster with it. 

I added Lilly's name below the dog image and put one of the hearts from Dear Lizzy's Neapolitan line there as well. The clouds are from the same die cut pack.

The journaling tells the story of how confused/upset Lilly was after I took Audrey to preschool the first day. With Mickey gone all day and now Audrey leaving, poor Lilly was missing her kids after a long summer having them with her all the time. 

I love that dog!

How I Project Life Now

     Here's a quick little break down of how I make my Project Life pages. Well, how I've been making them lately. ;)

First up, I pull up all my photos from that week in Lightroom and then quickly run through them all starring the ones I think are PL candidates.
 

Then, I select just those that I just starred by choosing "rated" under the filter section. After that I weed out a few based on how much space I have and which stories I really want to tell. I've come to realize that I don't have to put every...single...moment...that I capture in my PL album. I don't know why it took me so long to realize that. I mean, I've never felt obligated to scrap every photo before, not sure why I felt this way. 

Anyway, once I have them nice and narrowed down, it looks something like this.

Much better. I export all of these to Photoshop and then print them. The Instagram pics get printed at 3" square, two to a 6"x4" sheet, the horizontal photos from my big camera get printed at 6"x4" and the vertical big camera pics and other iPhone pics get printed at 3"x4" on a 6"x4" sheet.

I used to print them out onto regular printer paper as drafts and then get them all printed at Costco and swap them out. But, I fell behind very easily this way and I've really not been happy with the quality of the prints at Costco so now I print at home. I like it much better this way and I've started printing my regular scrapping photos at home, too.

Once I've got my photos printed out, I lay them out on two 12x12 sheets of white cardstock that I've drawn the pocket lines on. I first saw this idea on a process video by Mercy Tiara here. She does it so she doesn't have to drag out her album to work on her pages and doesn't have to keep pulling items in and out of pockets. It works sooooo well for me. 

This week, I had so much from Audrey's first day of school that I realized I was going to need an insert. So, I cut a sheet of 12x12 white cardstock in half and made a template for my insert as well.  Here are all of my photos and memorabilia laid out on my templates. I cut down two of my 3"x4" photos to 1 1/2"x3". Mainly because I couldn't decide between the two and wanted to keep both of them. 

Next, I chose the paper line I wanted to use. I picked Yes, Please by Amy Tan. Mainly because I was lured into buying a paper pad of it when I found it on sale for $6 at Marshall's and after hearing Noell Hymann rave about it on PRT. So, I had it and I knew I darn well better use it!

After getting my papers situated, I used one of the cut apart sheets and added some flat embellishment and glued everything down.

 

Then I finally rounded all the corners. I used to do that to my photos ahead of time and would wind up moving something so that I'd need to redo it. Then, I did it at the very, very end only to realize that it messed up some embellishing. So, now I do it after gluing, before embellishing. (Probably more info than you needed here.)

The last step is to do my journaling, embellish everything and create my title card. I like to create it last so that if I need another pop of a certain color I can add it there without worrying if it goes with a photo or not.

So, here's the finished pages, all set up in their page protectors. Mickey lost another tooth, I had my first PTO meeting, and he did his first homework as a first grader. I also included a few things that Aud and I did while he was away.

Here's my big man waiting for the bus by himself for the first time, while I watched from the window.

The insert is all about Audrey starting her second year of preschool. She had her Open House on Wednesday and her first day was actually a Friday! She was glad to see the guinea pig, Callie, was still there because she switched to the am class and it's a whole new group of kids. 

 

The last page is some everyday stuff, a collage of pics from the 50th birthday we attended and just really photo heavy.

 I used part of a Nordstrom's bag as the background for this pocket. Aud and I went shopping with my mom and ran into my sister-in-law Theresa, my two nieces and their aunt from their dad's side. It was pretty funny because my mom and I always seem to run into Theresa everywhere!

So, that's my current process for Project Life. It's interesting to see how my approach has changed over time. If you are a Project Lifer, has your process changed or stayed the same?

Project Life 9/2-9/8

Just sharing another week of Project Life. 

Mickey's first week of school. He loved every minute. I missed him like crazy!

Love that little leaf that Audrey painted on with metallic watercolors. 

I some of her other painting as the background for these selfies of us.

Making my own little journaling cards. I'm enjoying that. :)

I took some pics of my process for my next week and I'll share them on Wednesday. 

Catching Up With Project Life

I've been scrapping my little tuckus off, getting caught up on my Project Life album. Oh, how I love this project! I didn't work on it at all while I was working and yet, it's sooooo easy to go back and do. Right now, I'm starting with the current week and working backwards. So, that's the way I'll share them with you. 

*This is actually two weeks ago, I just finished last weeks last night and there's no light here at 10:00 pm!

This was our last week of summer vacation before Mickey started school. We FINALLY got a new dryer and I was FINALLY able to get the kids to the beach. Heavenly!

This week also had us sorting through clothes, meeting his teacher and helping at back to school night. Oh, and some lost another tooth!!!

I used Simple Stories products for this week. I just felt inspired by them and wanted to use something other than the Project Life branded products I had on hand. This little card has two pieces of the same photo on it. I cut it up so that I could journal in between the images and so that cute little tab would show!

My first catch up week! This was the first week I did that wasn't immediately after that week ended. It really isn't that hard to do. 

I worked on my scrap room, had a sick kiddo and got my very first layout back from being pubbed in Creating Keepsakes!!! Woot!!! 

This was also Andrew's birthday week and since he was at work so much and even out of town the night before his birthday, I didn't get a single picture of him. The one of him and the one of his present from his mom were taken while I was working on this page. (Years from now, no one's going to care or even know!)

I didn't have anything to go in this space as the week was so picture light, so I made this cute little filler card. I used my beloved Project Life Core Kit in Clementine for this week.

Another catch up week. Since I was doing them pretty much one a day, I decided to use some of my scrapbooking collections. I made myself use the first set of papers/stickers that worked and didn't dig through looking for "the best" set that worked. This week, that was Lilybee's Sweet Shoppe.

This was our week right after we got home from Hawaii and boy did we keep busy! My friend Joscie and her family stayed with us Monday night and we showed them around Canby. (I snagged the Lego heads pic and the selfie of us from her Instagram feed. Thanks, Joscie!)

The last half of the week involved our county fair which is held in our hometown and I had season passes to. We also had a party at our house for Andrew's work. It was such a crazy week!

I used some super cute custom Bossy Joscie flair on my page. Hand delivered from Miss Joscie herself. (Yeah, I feel cool. Hee!)

Well, that's as far into the past as I've gotten. I should get another week or two done this week so I can share that as well.

Thanks for stopping by!