Summer... it's Hot.

Haaaaappy Thursday!  How's your summer going?  Mine's flying right by and I'm trying to hang on :-)  I did get to spend a couple hours in the pool on Tuesday.  It was SO hot, it felt like bath water. But then it rained for a bit and cooled everything off and it turned out to be a gorgeous night, which we spent at the Muny. This is pretty much my only "free" week this month.  For the next two weeks I'll be out of town for two different summer camps.  One is a girls camp here in Missouri, the other is a mission trip with 8th graders in New Orleans.  I'll have about half a day break in between the two, but I think it'll be fun.  Then maybe I'll sleep for a week when I get back ;-)

I have a card to share with you today! This week at 365 Cards, we've been making collage cards.  I've said before that I tend to stay away from putting lots of "stuff" on my cards.  But then it's always fun to step outside the box and stretch a little bit.  For today's challenge, your collage card should include sponging, scallops and stitching.

There's plenty of sponging around the torn edges of the paper.  I didn't feel like lugging out my ridiculously heavy sewing machine, so I had to do the stitching by hand.  It turned out pretty good, I think.  For the scallops I used crepe paper ribbon.  There are so many possibilities with a challenge like this, so I hope you'll stop by and play along too!!

Sing it, Alice!

SchooOoooOOool's out. For. Summer!


Haha.  I don't think today really counts as the first day off since it's Saturday and we wouldn't have school anyway, but I've been doing the happy dance since we put the last preschooler into their car yesterday afternoon :-) It's gonna be a great summer, I can already tell.  My brother got into St. Louis late last night (or this morning, rather) and he'll be here at least until Monday.  Dad bought a new barbecue grill.  It's red :-)

AND (drum roll please...)  I actually got a card done!  The Shabby Tea Room has a challenge this week to create a baby-themed card. This one is for a friend of mine who's having a little girl sometime around the end of June.  I know that they're decorating the nursery with pink, brown and green, so I used that color scheme on the card.

I pieced the patterned paper together for the turtles shell from 1" scraps, then added some faux stitching.  The letters are from the "Car Decal" Cricut cartridge.  I like it.  Whaddya think?

Thanks for stopping by!

Lovely... Most of the time ;-)

Hello my friends! How are you this fine (cloudy, gray, wet) Wednesday afternoon? Hehe.

On Monday, Scrap It With a Song kicked off yet another song-inspired challenge with "Isn't She Lovely" by Stevie Wonder.  Can you believe we're on week #20 already?? It's gone by super fast and I've been so honored to be a part of the DT with a lovely group of talented ladies.  But, as I've been trying to burn into the brains of my little 4-yr-old charges, we have to share and take turns and let another fabulous group of designers take over :-) That being said, this is my last project as a member of the DT, but I think I'll definitely be playing along in the future!

After spending so much time looking through hundreds of beautiful scrapbook layouts on the Scrap It With a Song challenges, I decided to try creating my own.  I haven't made a scrapbook page in a LONG time, but this idea was in my head and I really wanted to make it! This project features my little sister, Gina Marie, as a precocious 4-year-old.  She's 16 now. Back in the day we used to call her "Gina Marie Princess."  Now we just lovingly refer to her as "turdy-head" because we're SO mature ;-) Lol.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by! Hope to see you playing along this week!!

I'm A Freakin' Clearance Ninja!

"I'm a ninja!"
"No you're not."
"Did you see that?"
"See what?"
"Exactly."

I saw that on Facebook the other day and it made me actually LOL.

But ANYWAY, I was at Michael's today and they had some really cute paper on clearance.  I got 12x12 patterned cardstock for 14 cents/sheet. It was awesome.  Plus they had some great clear stamps in the dollar bins that I totally snatched up and I had a 50% off coupon which I used on a refill for my Xyron sticker maker.  Needless to say, it was a great day. Haha.

I've got a card to share with you for Day 107 challenge at 365 Cards.  The challenge was to use an argyle pattern, but the twist was that it had to represent "fabric" on the card.  I used this rocking horse from the "Paper Doll Dress Up" cart.  The idea was for it to look like one of those plushie-type rocking horses.  I added the stitching to make it look a little more fabric-y.

I wasn't sure about the sentiment.  My little sis said it looked like something for a baby card, but I liked the pun better ;-)  But then I was thinking this could be used as a baby thank you card-- you know, like after a shower or something.

Lemme know what you think!  Thanks so much for looking :-)

Love Story

It's Monday! And that means there's a new challenge for y'all at Scrap It With a Song :-) This week's inspiration comes from Taylor Swift's "Love Story."  Our sponsor is Cassandra at the ShopHandmade.com store, Paper Mom-- The winner of this week's challenge gets 3 digital images, and each of the other Top 5 winners get 1 image.  Super fun!  Hope you guys will check it out and play along!

Here's my card:

For this one, I took the sentiment right from the lyrics of the song.  I wanted to make an "I Love You" card that wasn't all... you know... red. Haha. Just sweet and simple.

Thanks for stopping by!  I appreciate your comments ;-)

"I Wanna Sing You A Song"

I've mentioned a couple of times that I work at a school.  One other gal and I keep about 20 three to five year olds for a few hours everyday for aftercare.  I love it.  They're some of the most clever, intelligent and hillarious little characters you'll ever meet.  Yesterday, we were down to the last few kids (mostly girls) and 4-yr-old Tara says to me "I wanna sing you a song." So they started having a sing-off.  I heard new renditions of songs by Lady Gaga, Hannah Montana and "Tayla Switch".  I'm always amazed by how much of the lyrics they actually know, and amused by what they say when they can't quite remember.  There was a memorable verse from a "Tayla Switch" (Taylor Swift) song about "Dooby the guy" and something about gnomes.  Haha.  I just sat there and smiled and tried not to laugh. :-)

On that note, here's another reminder to check out the Scrap It With A Song challenge blog.  This week the song is "Once Upon a Dream." (And don't worry-- they post the lyrics so you don't have to ask your preschooler!)  I'd love to see what you would do with it. Here's the card I made...

I'm still trying to catch up with all of you guys at 365 Cards-- The only problem is that every time I get one done, there's a new challenge up! lol.  I gotta pick up the pace here...

Day 55-On Pins and Needles
Pins as an embellishment, needles used for stitching.

I used fabric for the bottom of the card and then tried to mimic the flowers with some punches.  For the "pin" requirement, I used straight pins with some beads glued on the end.  I didn't use a sentiment because I wasn't totally sure what I wanted to do with it.  It might just make a cute, generic note card though.

Day 56-Super Sketchy Sunday (I flipped it) and Digi Kitty-"Whooooo's the Sweetest????"

I paper-pieced the image with Bazzill swiss dots paper.  I like the soft, girlie colors-- and how cute is that owl? :-)  I also just wanted to mention that of all things, that sentiment is the only thing that looks wrong in this picture.  Why is that??!?  In real life it's brown and it matches. Just so ya know. Haha.

Whoa! Catch-up Time!

Friday night I left for a weekend retreat with the student ministry at my church. We had an awesome time and even though it was super cloudy, we never had any rain that kept us from any of our activities. One of the events of the weekend was for each group to choreograph a song for a lip-sync competition. My group of 7th grade girls did a FANTASTIC job. The video of their routine is at the end of this post--it's pretty awesome :-)

Aaaannnd because I was gone all weekend, I got behind on the 365 Cards challenges. But, I'm all caught up!! Here are all my entries for Friday through today:

Friday, Day 12 "Circle Frenzy"
Include 20 or more circles from at least two sources.
Some of the circles are from the patterned paper, some are punch and some are hand drawn.




















Saturday, Day 13 "A Whole New Dimension"
Take an image and... raise some portion of it off the page to give it dimension.
The two flowers are raised off of the image.



















Sunday, Day 14 "Super Sketchy Sunday"
Click on link to see sketch.




















Monday, Day 15 "Ad-Inspired"
Click on link to see ad.
















Tuesday, Day 16 "Opposites Attract"
Feature a pair of opposite images on your card - sun/moon, sun/rain, boy/girl, etc.



















If you made it all the way to the end of this post, bless your heart. Lol. Thanks so much for checking out my blog :-) And now, if you have yet a few more minutes to spare, check out the lip-sync my girls did this weekend... If you go to the actual YouTube page, you can see it a lot better!

Blah!

Okay friends, I am feeling UBER ick today, so forgive me for this half-hearted post! Thankfully I finished this card earlier in the afternoon, before said ickiness. Today at 365 Cards is a "Lovely Landscape" challenge to create and outdoor-themed card using patterned paper. I like how this turned out, but I think I'm wishing I had done something else with that "happy birthday" sentiment... I think it gets a little lost in the busyness of the patterned paper. Oh well. I still like it!

Thanks for stopping by! Leave a comment and let me know you were here :-)

Wackiness

Today is "Wacky Color Wednesday" and Day 10 at 365 Cards. The color combo is orange, purple and blue. It sounds a little crazy, but I decided to go for a sort of simple, "chunky" look and I think it turned out rather nice. I even pulled out the sewing machine again... it was a bear getting it to stitch evenly around that curve!


Well, hopefully I'll have another post up tonight... I got the new "Forever Young" Cricut cartridge (the flower on this card is from this one) and I'm itching to try it out some more! Thanks for looking :-)

*Sew* A Needle Pulling Threeeaaaad...

Hey, hey! Hope this finds you all at the beginning of an excellent Monday! (Or maybe the end of one... either way, I hope it's good.)

Tonight I've been working on my card for the Sunday sketch challenge on Day 7 of 365 Cards. I'm not gonna ramble on too much about this one except to say that I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever used my sewing machine to stitch on a card. It was waaaaay fun. I should do it more often.


Okay... I gotta get some sleep now. Thanks for looking!