For a Friend

I've been on a bit of a card making spree lately. I really want to get back to scrapbooking. Crossing my fingers. But I just *had* to use this cute stamp I bought this Stampin' Up single stamp that is available for a limited time called Hello, Foxy. I might be developing a little thing for foxes. This stamp is available through 3/31 so if you like it snap it up now!

I wanted to send something to brighten the day of one of my crafty friends Melissa and made it yesterday. Come to find out that today is her birthday! So it will arrive late for her birthday but I decided to do my blog post in honor of her. So Happy Birthday Melissa!

Paper Girls Challenge #28: photo inspiration

This challenge is to draw inspiration from this tag:

I really liked the spashes of color and the gold accents. I thought this would be the perfect time to pull out the art journal I intended to start. So here goes my first page in it:

I tried to  pull in some similar colors and gold accents that I was drawn to  on the tag. I'm sure that is the only similarity. Now I know this is an art journal not a scrapbook but when I wrote " This is ME" I didn't feel like the page was complete without a picture.

I can't wait to see what people decide to do with the inspiration picture. Link up your project at the Paper Girls Challenge blog.

Paper Smooches Designer Drafts

I finally got a little bit of time to play along with the Paper Smooches Sparks challenges again. It's really fun to see what I can come up with. This one is the designer drafts challenge where they give you a sketch to go from. Here it is:

And here's what I made:

I really wanted to use the Teen Routine stamp set I bought. So I used the phone image and kept it pretty simple. And since today is St. Patrick's day I went with shades of green for the background: Gumball Green and Certainly Celery to be exact. My favorite part was that I was able to make a stamped background with all of the little symbols that come in this set by simply lining them up on a clear block and stamping them in rows.

Confession: I didn't have a word bubble stamp so I free-handed it around the sentiment in pencil and did my best to trace around it in black marker.

Pinspired #4

I've been dying to get more challenges done lately but we were redoing the floors in my house and that took away a lot of my free time. On one hand I have beautiful new floors but in the meantime my house is a wreck and I've been really missing my crafty time! So today I cleared out a little space on my table and came up with a card for the latest challenge at Pinspired. Today is the last day to link up so I'm just eeking by. Here's the inspiration picture:

And here's what I came up with:

I really liked the background on the inspiration picture so I went with that as my inspiration. I had a 6x6 piece of paper that worked great for the background of my card so I stained one of the planks with Tim Holtz distress stain in Marmalade. I added some splatters with some Mr Huey'sto make it messier. I layered up some stamped images and the added some hemp twine and a few touches of washi tape.

Here's a close up on the layers.

I also want to link up to Scrapbook Steals Monday Craft Madness which is to add stamping to your project. 

Supplies:
cardstock: SU Very Vanilla, Naturals Ivory, Gumball green
Paper: My Mind's Eye Miss Caroline
Ink: SU Gumball Green, Pumpkin Pie
Tim Holtz distress stain Marmalade, Mr Huey's Leaf green and Opaque white
Punches: SU Scallop Circle,  1 1/4" Circle, 1" Circle, Star (retired))
Twine: Divine Twine

Wood Veneer: Studio Calico star

Paper Girls Challenge #27: Snowflakes

When coming up with my project for the new Paper Girls challenge about Snowflakes I remembered some of the pages I made for my December Daily album I made. I never got around to blogging it and actually haven't quite finished it either. It's on my long "To-Do" list. Instead of  buying a kit I bought a mist-able canvas album by Prima. I really wanted to go through my stash of Christmas papers that I already had and use some of them up. I rarely scrap Christmas and this is why I wanted to do the December Daily. I think the main reason why I only have a handful of Christmas pages scrapped is because I end up with so many pictures that I get a little overwhelmed and also wonder how many Christmas pages I can scrap per year, etc. So I think this ended up being a great compromise.

Here's the outside of the album. It started as just a cream colored canvas outside. I pulled out some of my Dylusion's mists and made a mask with some transparency and a SU snowflake die that I had from the Holiday Mini catalog. I layered the misting so some areas were darker than others and spritzed with water to blend. I also took the top off the spray bottle after it was semi dry and dripped some full strength dye on to add one more layer of depth. I think I need to add some sort of label/ title to the front of my book but still don't quite know what I want to do.

Here is a page that I haven't added pictures to but had gone through and pre embellished for a jumping off point. I did the negative effect with the SU snowflake die and backed it with a small print from OA. On the other page I had cut some snowflakes on my cricut out of vellum and added them to the misted canvas page with glue dots.

This is one of my favorite pages that I did. I created a pocket at the bottom of this plastic insert with sticky strip tape and put some wood veneer stars and glass glitter for a shaker page. I made sure to allow enough room at the top for the print of my digital Christmas card that I designed to send out this year.

The page on the right I decided to stamp and color a page to add to the mixed media feel of this book.

This page is kind of fun with the mini 8 punched center pages I added. I was running out of room for all of the things we did this particular day. They also came in handy for extra journaling space.

This is the last page I wanted to show off. I busted out my sewing machine for this insert style page. I just wanted to make some pockets with Christmas/ Wintery themed embellishments. I used some pieces from a K&Co Christmas pack and also some pieces for my October Afternoon Holiday Style flower sack. The nice thing about the OA pieces are that they are printed on both sides so I didn't need to back them with something else since the pockets show on both sides.

Sorry about the marathon post. I just had a hard time narrowing down what I wanted to show off. Make sure you go check out the other great projects at the Paper Girls Challenge blog and post your projects by March 16th!