Craftiness Ahead

I sent out four cards this week. Here's one, using colored chalks to color the card. I love the watercolor effect they create. I have a serious ribbon collection/hoarding/addiction, whatever you want to call it, thus most cards I make have to have a piece somewhere. As the colors were muted for the background I thought a brighter ribbon would draw the eye to the center where the design and sentiment are.

MyGirl is breaking out the knitting needles again for more dish cloths. They are the perfect weight and absorbency. Lucky the recipient who receives these!

The last block of my quilt is not going well, so I took a break this week to scrapbook some 2011 activities. Here is our October pic of the farm. All the photos I think I've posted before, but notice how this has a flipflap on the left side.

This is how the page looks at first, so you can see how easy it is to use the flipflaps to hide more photos. I recently started this with two friends who came over to see how interactive pages work. They were excited at the possibilities. The Close To My Heart "Magic" how-to book teaches how to make lots of these kinds of layouts, but its being discontinued soon. In fact as soon as they sell out they're gone. If you're interested, I've included a shopping link on the right side of my blog. Just click and it should take you right there. If not, then go to sumscrapbook.myctmh.com for the website. Go to "Shop Online," create a fast account, and you're ready. The best part, though, if you go to the bottom of the shopping area, it will have a section called While Supplies Last. There you can find items up to 80% off the retail price!! They're only there until they sell out as well, so check it out if you're interested in crafting bargains!

When I typed up the journaling it was the same size as the background. I'm going to go back and cut a larger background space for that, but today, this is just laying on top.

Here is Thanksgiving. Notice the large floral spaces and then the layout of the pictures. Because the photos move you from left to right, at a downhill slope your eye notices the flowers, but doesn't get stuck there. Darker colors fade while brighter colors pop out.

Thus, the title is set in the white space to draw your attention to it, accented with buttons. If I don't use ribbon, you can be sure I'm using buttons. Those are my "go to" embellishments. 

I like to have photos in order of events when I put them in rows, thus the beginning of the clean-up is followed by food to be put away, the kitchen when it is cleaned and the games that were played afterwards. Telling the story is really the point of scrapbooking, and I like things chronologically organized.

This is my birthday. As MyGirl doesn't like her picture taken often, there isn't a lot of use of pink around here, so this was fun to make. I kept it very simple.

I wanted to remember most how my sweet mother made this day special for me, so I accented our photo, which is isolated,  together with a mat around it, and kept the rest of the pictures lined up in a row.

For the title, I started adding a little bling, then more  and pretty soon it was just surrounded. Oh well, it is my birthday. I also stamped on my pages, which doesn't happen a lot, but here I used number stamps to create the look of a button, with my age on it. Sad to see how big that number is getting.

Here I stamped in chocolate ink then used colored pencils to fill in the cake with the colors that coordinate with the rest of the page. The balloon and string are also inked, the balloon using Tulip ink.

Now for an update. Over five years ago I created this canvas wall hanging for our family picture. With our newest family photos in, I swapped out the photo. So glad I had used repositionable adhesive (Hermafix Dotto brand) and it was easy to replace. This photo's colors were perfect. The "family" letters on top are chipboard, with just a little Desert Sand ink sponged on a few and also adhered using respositionable glue.  I left off the quote tag on the bottom. I can't decide if its going back on or not.

And, I finally got a large sized family photo. This is 18 x 24. My photographer came over yesterday to bring it by. The 8 x 10 picture above has better smiles, but I just loved this red barn background, and the large branch overhead. The photographer and I had talked about how this would make a great background and it did. Our family doesn't take fantastic photos, as a rule, and I've made peace with that. However, I wanted to remember this time when it was cold and we were getting ready to send our boy to Brazil. Its the last full day we were all together, so its a precious memory for me, and I absolutely love it and actually I think this is a pretty good picture of us all. I think this weekend would be a good time to get it hung up in the dining room, don't you?