Closing up shop

I've decided to stop blogging. I've enjoyed sharing what I've made, but blogging is not for me. thanks for taking the time to visit!

Snow day activities

I took advantage of finally having some down time this past weekend and spent some time in my craft room. First I took all my printed photos and went through them making page kits for all the photos I know I plan to scrap:

some of the page kits are nice and small: I actually narrowed it down to just a few sheets of cardstock and patterned paper. I don't bother adding embellishments at this point because I stock so few and they are so versatile I can easily pick them out at the time I am ready to use them. Plus I don't want to tie them up in kits in case I need them another time.

Sometimes though, I get lazy and just throw a whole collection pack into a 'kit' with a few photos I know I want to make pages for. Hey- it still makes things go faster for me and it works!

Here are some additional ones that I had not completed at the time, but have since gone back and finished up too.

Here are two actual pages I made:

I cut the clouds out of other paper also by American Crafts. I really like the simplicity of this. I didn't have much to say- it's a funny picture of my dog and representative of her desire to right up in your business at all times, so to speak.

Classic cute doggy picture- she can't seem to keep from sticking her nose in the dirt! I had always liked shaped paper but never really wanted to thunk down the ridiculous amount Jenni Bowlin charges, but grabbed this piece and another like it at my LSS recently. I'm still a little unsure how I'm going to store it in an album and not 'lose' the shaped quality- perhaps I'll just use the other shaped piece in the same page protector.

Homey

This is the other mini album I finished up recently. I had purchased this word album and this set of papers quite awhile ago with the idea to use them together to make an album about our first house (I bought it all *after* we bought the house though, so I knew I would have the subject matter). I have been taking pictures of stuff along the way thinking maybe I would do an album of all our renovations, and that isn't quite how it turned out, but I love it nonetheless.

First off, I totally did not plan to have that picture of me peeking out through the whole in the letter 'O', but apparently all those scrapbooking rain dances I've been doing have paid off.

This key is what came with the house and is the original from when it was first built. Even though we are the 4th or 5th owners, we are the first to change the locks!

Getting this hardware just so was a real pain, but I think it looks so cool it was worth it!

It's a little hard to tell, but I embellished a lot of the pattern on the paper with stickles. Now their purchase has been justified :)

My poor husband- he wound up on the page with all the rhinestones!

Ahh good fortune- these shots came out great for scrapping; we were just excited new home owners!

So... much... painting...

I love the little bit of ribbon! This is also my most 'artistic' scrapbook shot. It's of a row of stakes we put around the back yard when we were getting the fence put in. I got the first stake in focus and rest of the background is blurry. Artsy!

Mental note: don't put fresh mini books on very dusty shelves or you will be sad.

I look forward to doing another word book- it was a lot of fun and relatively easy to do- there aren't that many pages! I could have added some short in between pages for journaling, but didn't feel like making it a huge production. Sometimes you just want to show a few pictures in a cute way.

Splish Splash!

A few months back I went to a day crop and found myself in an interesting situation: all the projects I was excited about working on got wrapped up really quickly, and I didn't really have anything planned. Luckily I grabbed extra photos and paper packs because I like to overpack like that. I had bought the DCWV Citrus PP pack and Cardstock pack in January 2009, but was crushed when they arrived and I hated them. I dragged my feet and by the time I was ready to return them, it was too late and I wouldn't even be able to get a store credit, so I hung on to them figuring I would maybe sell them to someone local or something. Anywho, as the months dragged by I found the paper less and less objectionable, and so when I was packing for this particular pack I tossed them in my bag. Lo and behold, they would being the perfect match for these photos I had with me! So the moral of the story is, always over pack and never return anything. Listen to my words of wisdom people!

I decided to take a pretty simple approach to this book and kept the journaling to a minimum, same with embellishments. I was pleased to find out that the Lime Ricky buttons and brads I had purchased were a perfect color match! I'm quite pleased with how this all came together.

I have had this scalloped square clear acrylic album for awhile but never felt comfortable with how I went to use it, but think using it for clear covers worked out great!

And now on to the barrage of gigantic pictures! As always, click to enbiggen.

unconventional birthday card

Hey there! I've been busy lately and haven't made much time for crafting in the past few months- sad I know :( But I don't want to let my craft blog die, so I scrounged up some unposted pictures. Here are some shots of a card I made recently for my husband for his birthday:

The background paper is actually a fabric paper. I had purchased both the fabric paper and the dotted paper together years ago when I was first starting to scrapbook, before I really knew how any of it worked, thinking I would need to do some book binding voodoo in order to make a scrapbook- I selected these papers to make my honeymoon scrapbook. I then very quickly learned that I could use a pre-fab binder and the fancy book binding papers have been sitting prettily in the corner ever since.

I highly recommend enlarging the pics- those little colored dots are raised and are quite cute! I used orange rhinestones for the eyes just to spice it up. The stamp is kind of hard to read but says 'Hoo loves you'. So it's a non-birthday birthday cards for the spouse :)

*so close*

Ta-dah! Furniture and boxes and labels! Hooray!!!

Ok, so there's still some work to be done, but all my craft stuff is back in my craft room and is mostly organized- I have to hang a shelf and Bygel rail, but the bulk of what's left is getting the rest of my 'Jess stuff' in there and organized. I don't want to bring in any piles- thing must have a home to be let back in! You can see some of my dolls and stuffed animals along the top of the cube unit- it makes me so happy to have them home with me!

I wasn't really sure what to get when I went to Ikea for boxes, so I just bought a bunch in two sizes and it worked out surprisingly well. I actually filled each box with some category of item, though thankfully only one of the boxes is actually *full*. They are however nicely sorted and labelled- now all of my craft stuff is mixed together and it should be pretty easy to find what I need regardless of what type of project I am working on. I did spring for two nice metal boxes to hold my Thickers and other misc. flat embellishments and am thrilled with how well that worked. the left tower is still holding our DVDs.

After I get it all finished up I'll do a post with some detail shots.

gift box

I wanted to make a cute coordinating card holder to send the card set to my mom, so I downloaded the 'All Boxed Up' template from Paper Trey Ink. Initially, I had a problem with the card holder pockets being too small, but I was able to recreate the basic design with a whole new set of measurements specific to my needs. After thinking about it, I think the template just printed out at less than 100% of size, so I'll be sure to keep an eye on that next time.

I liked being able to customize it- I used some older SU! paper with a damask print and felt it all tied together pretty nicely!

Here is the front- the stamp I used is from the same set I used to make the cards. I finished the main image off wit a single pearl and popped it up. I layered brown grosgrain and thin purple satin ribbon to tie it shut.

Here you can see it stuffed with cards and envelopes!

Here is is open- 4 cards and 4 envelopes on each side.

Of course, I covered up the inside and outside of the pockets with more of that SU! paper.

Here is what he envelopes look like- I love how the image looks when it is creeping off the envelope.