Saturday, January 21, 2012

Scrapbook Steals Midweek Mojo Garnet #6 "First Ride"

Here is my layout for this week's Midweek Mojo sketch. While I have 3 children, I realized that I used more photos of my middle child. Sorry Elliot and Karis. I have been wanting to use these papers from Basic Grey's "Sweet Threads" line and the colors matched perfectly. Not to mention they didn't lend themselves to a masculine layout. : ) And my poor baby. Not only are there fewer photos of her, but none of them have been ordered either. : ( So, Olivia it was, again and these photos aren't even current. I think I need to do some organizing and ordering in the photo department.

Here is the original sketch for the layout.
As mentioned before, I used Basic Grey's "Sweet Threads" and a little bit of Basic Grey's "Sublime" for the journaling strips. I inked all edges with Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Wild Honey. The large paper flower in the top left hand corner was made with a 1 1/2" paper punch. I wrinkled and folded the edges of 5 circles and then overlapped them. I finished it with another 1 1/2" circle in the middle. The rest of the paper flowers are Prima's Teal Got Flowers bottle of mulberry flowers finished with an adhesive pearl in the center. I made the paper rosette in the lower right hand corner by cutting a 1"strip of paper 12" long. I then scored it every 1/4" and adhered the ends. Then I turned it out and hot glued it to a 1 1/2" circle, added another circle to the other side and embellished it. There are a lot of great tutorials on YouTube if you want to watch a how to. Just search paper rosettes. The word "ride" and the letters on the journaling strips were printed off of MS Word, cut out and adhered. You can also find a lot of great fonts to download for free on the internet if you don't have one you like already installed on your hard drive. This particular font is called Special Elite and I downloaded it from www.fontspace.com.



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Friday, January 13, 2012

Recently finished projects and some still in the works!

I have recently completed a few projects which I would like to share. The first is a mini chipboard album, measuring 4"x5", for my grandmother. I am terrible at sending photos of the kiddos and thought this would be a nice brag book for her to have. It's small enough that she can carry it with her in her purse. I repurposed the Cheerios box from Costco for the pages. It is a perfect weight cardboard. Heavier than the regular cereal boxes at the grocery store, but not so heavy that I couldn't cut them myself. I then covered it with some of my favorite paper from Basic Grey called Sublime. The collection has long been retired and it will be a truly sad day when I use up my last scrap! :. (  I inked the edges with black ink and embellished with punched flowers, stickers and rub ons. The mats are cut at 3.5"x2.75" for a wallet size photo ( I always cut my mats at 1/4", so I add 1/2" to my total size. If it's a 4"x6", then my mat is cut 4.5"x6.5"). Here are few photos of that album.








The next project was an altered wooden birdhouse measuring 2.5"x3"x4.5" that I found at a local thrift store for $0.99. This was fun, but challenging since there was no way to trace a template. I had to do a lot of measuring and cutting to cover the house. Once the house was initially covered with paper (DCWV linen closet) and mod podged, then I started embellishing. I used my Fiskars "Threading Water" edger punch to create the roof and the edging around the bottom. I inked all my paper before placement with the Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Vintage Photo. I used a "fence" sticker, which I had to cut down, around the bottom part of the house. I finished it off with Martha Stewart Smoky Quartz glitter on the roof line and a fussy cut crown rub on from Prima at the peak. My rub ons are all Prima from the Madeline collection.








Lastly is a tiny little schoolhouse that I put together thanks to Martha Stewart's Winter Village template. For templates click here. This is a tedious project but if you are detail oriented like me and enjoy the reward of such work, it's so worth it! They are really adorable and can be used in many ways. Martha says to use chipboard and paint them, then cover with glitter snow. But I thought, why not use heavyweight cardstock? Then I don't have to paint them or try to cut out chipboard with a craft knife. Ugh! So, once again I used my favorite Basic Grey Sublime papers and created this adorable little schoolhouse. I used vellum to cover the window openings which allows light through. I used Tacky glue and it held really well. I plan on finishing a whole village someday.





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Scrapbook Steals Midweek Mojo Garnet #5 "Granny's Glasses"

So, here is my interpretation of the lay out I created from the scrapbooksteals.com midweek mojo sketch. It was my first one and so much fun! (Sorry for the blurred reflection.) Here is the original sketch.




I used Restoration Collection papers from Crate Paper and fussy cut the doilies, dominoes and the flowers. I then inked all the edges with black ink (this was not a Tim Holtz distress ink, but that is my ink of choice). I "popped" a couple of the flowers out with foam adhesive squares and added adhesive pearls.

On these papers, I used my Martha Stewart "Cherish" around the page punch just on the edges. I LOVE this punch! It's beautiful and versatile. I offset the edge as outlined in the sketch. I finished by adding a little journaling tag. I just typed out a little blurb in MS Word and printed it out on cardstock, adhered it to chipboard, inked the paper with Tim Holtz distress ink in Vintage Photo and the edges with black ink and voila! Whew, that was it! Lol! It isn't hard, just time consuming.




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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Up and Running!

Well, I was prompted a while ago (thank you, Tammy!) to start my own blog and didn't think I had time with 3 young children. However, I realized that I spend an awful lot of time on the internet drawing inspiration from other artists work. So, I figured, why not share my work so that others can draw inspiration from me. While my husband is very supportive and my children, enthusiastic, I felt that it was finally time to share my work with others. That's what art is for anyway, right? Other than to satisfy a yearning in the artists heart, art is made to be shared. To communicate what your heart cannot verbalize. It reflects an inward and outward style. So, thank you for letting me share and I look forward to your comments and suggestions. In the next day or so I will be posting pictures of the layout I am currently working on. It is a 12 x 12 for scrapbooksteals.com midweek mojo. I love how it is coming along and can't wait to share it!

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