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.

Sparkly inspiration

After watching Jennifer McGuire's Thinking Inking videos for Perfect Pearls, I was feeling pretty inspired to break out my Luminarte pigment powders. I knew I wanted to make my mom a set of cards for her birthday, but other than the stamp wasn't sure how I wanted them to look, so this was pretty good timing!

I tried a few different things, but wound up doing this:

1. Stamp damask image (Inkadinkado) on white paper with VersaMark ink and emboss with detail clear powder.
2. Make a paint with the pigment powders & Simple Solution #2.
3. Layer paints over whole image- wipe off embossed image with paper towel.

The emboss resist worked fairly well, although the image does not appear to be totally solid. I made 8 different panels- I'm not 100% sure what I will do with them next, but I'm looking forward to some hopefully really neat cards!

It's hard to capture the sparklyness on film, but it's pretty cool!

Well, I will have to get these done soon as I'm on a deadline!

Felt + Cuttlebug!

This post is for Leslie!

I'm going to try and show the marriage of felt and Cuttlebug, but not really do a tutorial. How much tutoring is to be done really? Here are a few pics to try and show the thickness of my felt.



See, not super duper thick, but certainly different than paper. I ran mine through my Cuttlebug with the regular sandwich. I'm not sure how many times it needs to be run through as you can't see if it successfully cut all the way through without disassembling the sandwich. Unlike paper you do not see cut lines when it is actually cut. Running it through once was insufficient, but I just run it through 5 or 6 times and it is definitely cut then!

Here are a few little shapes cut out from my Nestabilities. Layer, add a button, suddenly it's a flower! You'll confuse bees everywhere!

At the end, you get cool cut out shapes like this little frame.

Ok, I'm including this weird shot to show how you do in fact get some embossing on the felt. Enlarging it might help.

I have lots of felt from Mom, so I'm hoping to make more using it when I eventually get more dies. In the meantime, I think it makes for a nice backing layer for journaling spots- next post will have mini album pics showing how I did just that!

Next post will take a little while- I need to retake all my pics in an attempt to balance enough light with not having glare. All of a sudden I feel compelled to take nice pictures. Curses!

I am in adhesive purgatory!

Yes, I am in tape purgatory! This is the source of my many woes:

I had been using tombow mono multi happily for quite awhile, but was longing for a tape runner again. I had heard many good things about the dot 'n roller and decided to take the plunge. I ordered one snazzy little dispenser and 6 refills. I tested it out and was immediately in love! Adhesive love. Heh. STP anyone? Anyone?

I digress. Back to my agony. I tried it, loved it, and happily toted my new dispenser and 2 refills to an overnight crop with me. All was going well- I was cruising along and had done several layouts I was quite pleased with when it came time to pop in a refill. Then my happiness quickly dissipated as the unthinkable happened- my refill didn't work properly! Crap! Basically the uptake roll which collects the empty plastic strip is not rolling back, so the tape strip stays stuck to the paper leaving a great big mess and the need to take the thing apart and manually roll the strip back in. I end up with not enough adhesive on my project for it to stick, but enough left on the plastic strip to get all over my hands, pants, desk, really anything nearby.

Thankfully, I was smart and brought another refill with me. Problem was, that one didn't work either. Now I was in deep sh!t. It was very late at night and I was at an overnight crop in some remote camp ala Jason movies. CRAP! Luckily, I'm super prepared and actually brought about a billion adhesives with me, so I was not without stickiness.

Ok, fast forward, I go home and try out my other 4 refills, and they are sucked! Ack! I had purchased these online so I was a little worried about exchanging them, but the folks over at scrapbook.com were oh-so-nice and sent me 6 brand spankin' new refills cartridges! Hooray! 5 of my bad refills were from the same lot, and the 6th was from the next sequential lot.

Ok, so I sat down the other day to make some thank you cards, like a good little gift recipient when what should I discover? Why my replacement refills also suck!

Now I have invested probably a few hours of my life attempting to understand what my refills are doing when they are not working properly and have to figure it out. A few hours is a lot of time to spend considering adhesive. So finally, I have given up and succumbed to societal pressure and ordered, you guessed it, and ATG-714. The Cadillac of adhesives. It came with 3 rolls of 908 acid free Gold tape and I purchased another 3 rolls for a grand total of 216 yards of 1/4" sticky goodness.

Because I have been moderately obsessed with my little adhesive dilemma, I decided while I was trying *one more time* to correct my adhesive misbehavior I would take pictures. Because that's what scrapbookers do: we take pictures of things that really don't deserve to have their picture taken. Enjoy.

Starting to roll. Not too bad. A little slack isn't so bad....

Hmmm, maybe it's more than I realized...



It does not appear to be getting better...


So you see how this can become problematic:


Yeah, no good. Probably funny for the people who saw me ripping up huge strips of the stuff and doing battle with clear sticky tape and midnight.

On to a more positive note! Here are the cute little images I plan on using the yet to be constructed thank you notes:


There are actually going to be thank yous from the dog to the family members who purchased her goodies. We're a polite family. When I was visiting my parents my mom cleaned out her arts supply stash and found an unused box of Derwent watercolor pencils. Yeah, completely unused! Full set too- 72! So now I have watercolor pencils. This was my first foray into watercoloring since probably elementary school. I'm pleased with the results and look forward to practising more. Here's a close-up.


The stamp is from Amuse, also a Chrismakah present, but for me. Madison would only chew on stamps if they were given to her.

Ornamental

Ok, so it's been awhile since I posted anything, and this post is a touch late topic wise, but I still wanted to post it so too bad. :P

For my holiday cards I purchased some pigment powders from LuminArte. The product is called 'primary element's and comes in 3 flavors: regular pigment powders, iridescent mica powders, and straight up mica powders. As I was poking around their site, I saw they had a tutorial for using said powders to make ornaments. Now the pictures sure were pretty, but I wasn't sure that I was interested in branching out. I mean, I like crafts and all, but I generally want to avoid picking up every neat thing I see resulting in an overflowing craft room and dozens of unfinished or never even started projects.

However, after rolling the idea around some more I checked out the YouTube tutorial and thought that a) the finished product is awesome, b) I already owned the most expensive part (the powders), so the additional cost would be low, and c) it looked so easy! So I trotted on down to my local stamp shop to buy some remaining goods and picked up some uber cheap clear glass ornaments from Hobby Lobby and I was off! Except I was never able to get anything other than the regular pigment powders. Shoot. I went ahead and made a few ornaments and found it was indeed easy and produced a fabulous result, so I went ahead and placed an order directly with LuminArte online and got some flashy mica powders (regular and iridescent). I was set! I cranked out about 20 ornaments total- though sadly did not take picture until I had given most of them away.

12 were packaged up and sent off to my step MIL as a Christmas present which was quite well received. I was a little unsure about giving them as a gift- after all she is a person not a tree, but she was touched that I made something just for her and she thinks they're beautiful, so score for Jess!

One other was given away as part of a thank-you gift for my neighbor for watering our tree while we were away visiting family. The rest that are left are pictured below. These are a mix of ones I liked the least and ones I wanted to keep just for me.

Close ups! I really like the way these came out. The colors swirled a lot on these, that is partly why I like them so much.

This was a fun and pretty easy project. It was however not cheap initially if you have to buy everything and quite messy. The little jars of powder seem like they will last a decently long time, although some are already half empty (oh no!). I hope to find some other ways to use these. I'm going to investigate decorating glass plates/bowls with these. I'm thinking I can paint/powder the underside and apply some sort of sealant and it will be ok. That would also make a killer gift for someone like my mom who doesn't have much need for Christmas ornaments. :)