My Funny Valentine

After having an amazing time for Making Merry in December, Rosemary, Kim and I decided to get together for a day to celebrate Valentine's Day. This time Kim was hostess at her lovely home and she fed us incredible food. Nom, nom, nom. I'm still dreaming about that white lasagna...

Kim had us create 2 beautiful cards. I love that she didn't use a traditional Valentine's Day palette with the lavender card. For the other card, she had us beading which was soooooo fun! I could've kept making little beaded petals all day long. Rosemary used her wicked cool Cricut creativity to cut out matchboxes with acetate windows and brought an awesome stack of vintage images for us to fashion adorable Valentine's decorations. I hung them up right after I got home to show them off! I had bought a stack of chandelier ornaments after Christmas at Target (love Target!)for 50% off. I had a stash of honeycomb wedding bells because I always go to the party supply store for something like napkins and can't help but peruse the wedding & baby aisles for art supplies. Take some Paris slide images, vintage sheet music and a bit of glitter to alter those chandelier ornaments and they become gilded bell ornaments for Valentine's Day.
One of my favorite things to do (it seems), is to create holiday projects with supplies that aren't holiday themed. A few years ago, I bought a stack of Foofala papers from a friend who was having a scrapbook yard sale. 100 sheets of fun. None of them holiday themed, but some of them with a romantic, dusty palette that was ready to be fashioned into a Valentine.
I always sketch card designs or layout designs in my notebook. If you ever see my scribble-scrabble, you will look from sketch to finished project and wonder to yourself, "I don't see the resemblance." It helps me thing and work through the design process. For this card, I sketched (ha!) it out and started to measure, fold, play with different patterned papers, etc. I pulled in the grade school trick of folding paper in half to create a heart and used that as a template to cut a heart from a page torn from a vintage German book. I printed and distressed a love poem to use as the card sentiment. Added some bling, distress inks and vintage crepe paper and hope it fulfills the romance quota. But even more than the projects, it is the decision to take the time away for the purpose of creating, sharing and oh, the laughter that is food for the soul. We really did laugh over some funny Valentines. And I can't wait to come up with an excuse (perfectly good reason) to do it again!

These goodies also go perfectly with the latest Opus Gluei challenge. If you haven't checked them out before, head on over. Low pressure, high-octane creative fun! Come as you are and be embraced by the Poobahs. :)

Fabulous Fifteen!

Oh wow! Just. Wow.

My baby is turning fifteen this Saturday. She was a blizzard baby, born right after the crazy blizzard we had in 1996. I remember my neighbor, who was a firefighter, freaking out when he saw me shoveling snow. I was ready for her to ARRIVE.

He very kindly offered to help me deliver her should I go into spontaneous labor. I think after I picked my jaw up off the floor, I thanked him and said something to the effect of "I will walk to the ER in snowshoes before you deliver this child because no way would I ever be able to look you in the eye again."

Fortunately all the roads were cleared of snow and the skies were full of stars on the night she came into this world. When I remember the night of her birthday I always think of this line by Shakespeare, "There was a star danced and under that I was born."
And she is a star. Happy Birthday Baby Girl! (I made this very girly card for her. She's starting to actually like bling-bling, so I'm milking that for all it's worth!) So much glitter on here. And rhinestones, pearls, Glimmer Mist, paper lace, old tulle, vintage seam binding, etc. It's an homage to a young lady who is growing up on me, but it still very playful at heart.

Return to the Roots

Long, long ago, a friend tricked me into scrapbooking by asking me to host a Creative Memories party to help her launch her new business. LOL Little did I know that as I was cutting wedding photos into star shapes and smattering them with sticker sneezes that I would become so hooked.

But I was.

It was a tether back to the creative little girl that I had been; who had been choked by the weeds of life, the real world and the admonition to 'grow up'. (as I type this I can't help but think of the John Candy movie, 'Uncle Buck' where he tells off the principal who wants him to crush the spirit of his imaginative niece, what a hilarious and sweet moment that was. Look it up!)

To all those who think scrapbooking is something soccer moms do in their myriad hours of spare time, I'm sorry you feel so negatively. I've met incredibly talented women (and men!) with rich, full lives who pour their creative spirit into documenting a life well-lived. Some are married, some are single. Some have 10 children, others have no children. Some are doctors and others are stay at home parents. ALL are valuable.

And yet, as much as I enjoy it and continue to invest in new product and/or tools, I hadn't scrapbooked at all in quite some time. I made a lot of art that I had a great time creating, but I'd gotten away from the heart of what got me back to creating in the first place: scrapbooking.

So, while others dressed up to go out and party on NYE, I pulled on some yoga pants, brewed some hot coffee and went to the studio to play.

And I loved it.

What I did isn't elaborate or newsworthy, but it was nourishing and renewing and most of all, it made my 2 oldest feel treasured because they are the subject of my time and effort. They laugh and weakly attempt to hide it from their friends, but then they pull all the old scrapbooks out and spend hours looking through their own lives. Lives well lived. (forgive the cropping of the photos. I'm still trying to figure out my new camera and its photo editing software!)

Upcycling En Masse

Elsie Flannigan and Rachel Denbow are about to kick off a year of repurposing, remaking and renewing old, worn or damaged items. In other words, they have tapped into a passion of mine: Upcycling. Join in the effort here...Project ReStyle - A Beautiful Mess

Go against the grain of New Years exclamations of Out with the Old and In with the New. Embrace a new resolution of In with the Old and Who needs the New!

Making Merry Revisited

During this time of year when, in general, women all over the world are busy doing, going and buying for others (and quite happily too), I invited Rosemary and Kim over to put the breaks on the Christmas crazy and spend an entire day Making Merry. What better way to recharge and refuel in the midst of the Christmas season than to indulge in a bit of top notch retail therapy and ultra creative play?

We went to one of my favorite places to get decorating inspiration, Chartreuse and Company and then we stopped in at a new store down the street from my home, Wild Rose and Co. that also does an amazing job of merchandising the goods.

Then it was back to the house where we said hi to the City Chicks and then got down to the business of creative play...

Rosemary had brought the motherload of Christmas stashes (I want to go shopping in her studio!) as we embellished wine boxes. We were so proud of our accomplishments that they all got an impromptu photo shoot (mine is on the far left).

I decided to give mine away to my mom (She never reads my blog, so I'm safe. Did I tell you about the time Mom went skinny dipping with my Dad when I was a little kid? hehehe) and put some very delicate, breakable Christmas ornaments in it. Voila, perfect vehicle for a fragile gift.

Then we stopped for snacks, nom, nom, nom. There shall be no art without serious carbo loading.

After that, we started on my very long, very messy project. Let's just say that cotton batting, cotton balls, glue and mica make incredibly gorgeous finished clouds and snow scenes, but the process is like you gave a kid a roll of duct tape and a bottle of paste then told them to go to town with it. The final result was a snow laden cloud with a vintage Christmas light to lead the way through the dark night with a vintage goodie laden tin in tow (or that's what I hope it looks like).

The inspiration were some vintage cotton batting ornaments, some 'travel' related ornaments my children have the involve zeppelins, or cotton batting sail boats and another project where someone used a vintage tin as a balloon basket. (I've come to the conclusion that a truly original idea, if it should ever suddenly hit me, will probably happen long after I've gone gray and senile) After all that creating, we were wiped out, so it was dinner time! Tim, otherwise knowns as Pizza Boy, took our orders and made us homemade pizzas which was followed by more carb loading because being covered in glue and mica burns serious, um, brain cells?


For our final creative endeavor, Kim taught Rosemary and I how to make flowers from ribbon. Both Rosemary and I kind of shivered with intimidation until Kim guided us through beautiful petals, leaves and more. Seriously we had no idea how cool it could be and all of the amazing projects that can be done with ribbon flowers!


Of course, I don't have a photo of mine because we didn't finish. Our spirit was willing, but our bodies were weak. I've had my pieces in a basket by the sofa so I can slowly put it all together, but I think Kim enabled us to explore yet another new creative outlet!


(And I think we ate some more as we packed away all of our projects. Who are we to waste perfectly good carbs?) As we hugged each other goodbye, cries were heard of Making Merry to all and to all a Good Night!

Egg-static, lol

Today we had our first 'real' snow that stuck to the ground. All in all, it was maybe 1/2 inch, but it was enough to cause several accidents and cancel all after school activities.

This also meant the first snow for the City Chick(en)s. I went out to check on them and they were all cowering inside the coop, hovering around their pop door looking out at me.

I meant to tempt them with some sunflower seed and a few brave girls ran out for about 10 seconds to gobble some up before running right back inside the coop and scolding me loudly as if to say "You half-wit woman, can't you see the sky is falling?"

They returned to their vigil of hovering around the pop door and clucking about the end of the world that was surely nigh.

Biology got the best of them and several still layed their lovely little eggs.

We are getting a kick out of giving away fresh eggs to neighbors and friends. I suppose if you had a highly developed palate, you might say "Dayum, these are downright amazing eggs." I'm not one of those people. But I can tell you that their yolks are brighter & sturdier than any store bought egg. I can also say that I've been told because our chicks eat a well-rounded diet that their eggs are healthier than their store bought counterparts.
And, by golly, they are pretty! Each day going to collect eggs is a bit like Christmas morning. Or maybe I'm just incredibly easy to entertain. :)

The Circle o'Vintage

My old house has something that often foils my attempts to hang things on walls: loads of windows and plaster. I am determined that this beauty IS going up this year rather than languishing in obscurity. I may be scaling back, but I still love the shiny (oooh, shiny). Sweet angel on her cloud...Love this bell! Full of vintage love. It will go up. I may crack some plaster, but it's one of my projects for the day. And I carved out some time to play with Opus Gluei for their current "Getting Frosted" challenge. It was like carved out while watching Jimmy Fallon late at night carved out, but I was having too much fun for sleep.

When I make stuff purely from old stash I start to feel bad about shopping for new goodies.

I mean, really, really guilty bad.

For about a minute.

And then I'm over it. :)

But, I do quite love pulling together a project from old stash and creating something new.

This wintery, frosty card uses old Heidi Swapp, Ranger, Martha Stewart, Making Memories, Basic Grey, vintage flowers and I used vintage tinsel to make a nest. If you figure out how to removed my camera covered face from the reflection, let me know. I'm not fluent in Photoshop, so it'll stay there for now. ;)