A new person to adore

I was able to take one of Donna Downey's classes while at CHA, as well as talk with her at her booth for a bit and let me tell you, she is so incredibly REAL. Her talent knows no boundaries, but I was amazed by how funny and down to Earth she was. As you probably know Donna creates for Prima and she announced that her Prima products will be featured in turquoise packaging, so it will be easier to find her great creations.  The other medium that Donna is incredibly talented in is fabric. Her fabric projects are just awesome. Even the skirt she is wearing in the photo is one she made. Super cute!!

She is such a doll!

Pieces of her class, can't wait to finish this album.

Fabulous goodies in her booth. The heart canvas is actually covered with tags and then painted!

See the spool in the right corner? Wait till you see it unfold in the last picture!!

If I had an apron this cute, I would wear it everyday.

This album was all fabric and super cool!!

I REALLY want to make one of these spool fabric albums.

Super L-O-N-G post

I figure for the next few days, my posts will be kind of on the long side, but I promise they will be packed with more pictures and less of me talking. This morning I wanted to feature one of my favorite designer lines that was debuted at CHA, Melody Ross for GCD. Melody was Chatterbox back in the day from my understanding and then she had some rough times personally, causing her to kind of disappear in the scrap world. Well, let me tell you, she is back and in incredible form. Her new lines with GCD are so much fun, I love everything about them. The one drawback I will be honest with you is they are kind of expensive in my opinion. A pack of 15 buttons for $9.00 is too pricey for me, so I am sure there are others who feel the same. Her papers are average price and some of her embellishments are reasonable. So, my advice, stock up on the papers and less expensive embellies and then hope that you can grab the others on sale.

This has one of my favorite sayings ever on it, "Creative people are seldom tidy." LOVE it!

More CHA

I am going to break this up over a few days. Hoping that Miss Tabitha will share some of her photos with me. As many as I took, I still didn't take enough. Here is the first booth we went to on Sunday morning,  7Gypsies. I loved their booth, it was beautiful.

(I am SOOO excited about this tray!!)

How about some Theresa Collins? Her lines are always so elegant and her booth was a total reflection of her signature style. We also really enjoyed that she was doing mini book make and takes with a new line each day.

For tomorrow, how about some pictures of the uber-talented Donna Downey and some of the loot I gathered while there?

CHA! CHA! CHA!

WOW, WOW, and WOW!!! I seriously cannot tell you how incredible this experience was. Thank you to my favorite girls in the world for making it that much more amazing, (you know who you are!). I will post more (so many more) photos very soon, but as we got home really late last night, (thank you, LA traffic!), I am still digesting everything. But I have to be completely honest, this is the highlight of my trip. Please ignore the horrible picture of me, but it is a moment I will never forget.

I didn't realize until this morning, I looked like that, but seriously, who could look good standing next to her? I will go on record now as saying that Elizabeth Kartchner is an incredible woman. She is beautiful and genuine, not to mention talented and so very, very nice. The complete package.

Okay, enough fan gushing. I will be back later with more. But first, I should change out of my jammies.

Ms. Productive

Not sure if it is withdrawls, a new scrap space, or sheer focus, but Friday has been a good day productively. I completed the cute pink elephant shaped card I featured in an earlier post, I made another birthday card that I will add to a package tomorrow, and I created a layout based on the sketch posted on the Memory Maker's Forum in the first week of the LO challenge. And all this before 3:00 pm! Of course, I haven't really got dressed for the day and I haven't started dinner or emptied the dishwasher, but who is keeping track of those things?

In addition to all of that, I have used only things from my stash for all three projects!!! It is such a great feeling to throw away the empty packaging of another goodie I have finally used.

Such wonder...

I absolutely LOVED these photos of my niece. Every once in a while, photography kismet happens to me and this is one of those moments. She is eight months old and is like a sponge, trying to take in everything around her. I lovingly nicknamed her the "Hoot Owl" while home for Christmas, because if there was someone sitting behind her, she would do the swivel position she is in here in the two outside photos. She wanted to make sure that if they, (me, in this case), did something interesting, she was watching. 


With the light coming through the windows and picking up on that soft baby fuzz on her head, she is highlighted much like the little angel she is.

Seems things are coming in doubles

Grandma always said it should be in threes, but here lately I have been creating two layouts at a time. Now the other night, I created, (I use that term lightly here), one but it was so horrible, I refuse to post it. I was going to take a break from layouts, but was drawn back by some fabulous sketches and work out there. There is this one, New Love.

This is my sister in law, Samantha and my niece, Cadence, obviously when she was born. I immediately fell in love with this photo, its tenderness and the love that just radiates from it. When I saw this incredible layout from Robin Latish Shakoor in this month's issue of ScrapStreet magazine, I had to lift it. Robin's layout is beautiful!

From one holiday to the next

It seems like it was just Christmas! I hope that everyone has a fabulous and safe New Year's Eve. This is a little mini that I made for my sister for Christmas. Leslee loves flamingoes, so when I saw the metal flamingo business card holder, I knew I had to do something with it for her, even though she doesn't have business cards. She also loves the song/spoken poetry, "Wear Sunscreen" by Baz Luhrmann, so I put the two together and made her a very simple mini book that features the lyrics and uses the card holder as a stand for the book. I used manila file folders for the base of each page and broke the song up per page, adding a few tropical colored flower embellishments along on each page. She LOVED it!

One more mini down!

So I have finished* the third mini I planned to make for a Christmas gift. There is a very special lady in my family, one who is not blood or even marriage related to any of us, but she still loves us like we are. I wanted to let her know how much I really appreciate her choosing my family to share her beauty with. I used a kit from my incredibly talented friend, Daniela, at The Art Life. The kit was full of Jenni Bowlin papers and one of my favorite Maya Road albums. The brown, red, yellow, and green color scheme is perfect.

I wanted each member of the family to have a message in the book, so I created separate 2 part tags for each one of us. The first part is a place where we will write what our special family member means to us and the second part is a photo of the author, which I laminated and put together with a bad so it could spin in case the person's message needed to be carried over to the back.

I used the pages of the album to either be a pocket to hold the personalized tags or to be a full picture of the family. 

Hopefully on Christmas morning, she will have a small idea just how important she is to everyone of us and that without her our lives wouldn't be as beautiful.


*it still needs the messages added, but technically speaking, it is finished. ;P

On the cover...

As promised, here is the cover for my 25 Days of Christmas album. For those of you who had this done in November, shush! ;-P Yes, this is as far as I have got, but I have quite a bit of down time this week and I am pretty sure I will get caught up. I am planning to use the KISS rule for the inside pages, hoping that will help the flow.

Call me slow, but I also realized this morning that the perfect place to photograph things is placed on a package in front of the Christmas tree! 

Inside of the Mini

Here are the remaining pages of the gift mini book. I am still really happy how this turned out. The blank book had mini file folder shaped pages, so I used the tabs to distinguish words that I consider going with the family theme. The recipients of this book have had a blessed year, getting married last October and then welcoming a beautiful baby girl in July, so I made sure to make pages for both of them and one for their baby. I pre-matted all the photo spots for either 3"x3" or 2"x3" photos and included two templates, one for each size. I wanted to make adding photos super easy. I also added a page with two removable tags in a pocket for journaling memories and on the back cover, I used a die cut scroll to feature the last name of the family and the year they were married.

I will be back later with the cover of my "25 Days of Christmas" album and hopefully the majority of the second mini I am making for a very special person in my family.

Loving the minis!!!

I have really been into the mini books lately. They are fairly quick, fun, and give a sense of completion. I did this one for a friend for Christmas. I started by staining the wood covers and letting it take shape from there. I am really happy with how it turned out. These photos are of the cover and the first inside page. I will post the rest of the photos tomorrow, but for now, it is back to the studio where I have three projects on my desk that must be finished by Thursday when we leave for Oregon.

I also just realized that I forgot to add the middle ring to this book! Sometimes I do not fire on all cylinders. Oops, I will have to send it to my friend.

Finally broke through!

In case you haven't noticed with all the silence, I have been mojo-less. Not sure if it was the traveling, the illness, the end of the term, or all the above, but I was like a creek bed in the dead of an Arizona summer for about the last month and a half. Then I did make two gifts for friends and completely forgot to photograph them. But I think I have broke through to the other side. I made 20 Christmas cards, a mini book, and covered my 25 Days of Christmas album all in the last two days! Not too shabby, I would say. So here is the cover of the Christmas card. Can't show the inside yet because it is a surprise to those getting these in the mail.

Tomorrow I will post some pictures of the mini, but not too many because it is a gift too, though I don't think the recipient peeks in on me here.

Monochromatic

Happy first day of December, everyone!! So I can finally post this layout. I have been hanging onto it for almost two months, but it was created for a challenge over at Scrap Street magazine and I didn't want to publish it until I was sure they weren't going to pick it up. They didn't, so here it is. The challenge was to create a layout that was monochromatic and I instantly went to all white. I pictured the top of Grandma's dresser, with lace and sparklies, and pearls. In the center is my beautiful niece, Cadence, looking like the angel she is. (Yes, I am partial, but look at the picture. You can see why I am partial.) I added the little gossamer bag at the bottom which contains charms such as a music note and a ring. I journaled why each charm is included and what I feel it represents to Cadence, such as the music note- I hope that she always has music in her life and dance in her step.

This has to be one of my favorite layouts ever. I love the layering, the details, and the essence of colors, or lack of in this case. Thanks for looking!

SOOO excited!!

As I was scrolling through the new posts on my Blogger dashboard, I saw one of my layouts on someone else's blog. My first thought was, "why would someone else post one of my layouts?" A second later I realized it meant that my submission for the "Watch Your Language" challenge at Candy Shoppe Designs had been chosen!!! I love Candy Shoppe Designs and was excited when they issued this challenge because I actually didn't think I would ever be able to show this potty mouthed layout to anyone, let alone enter it in a contest. So, thank you ladies of C.S.D. for the honor!

Some of you showed us your potty mouths and some of you sugar coated it, but all in all the Lollipop Girls and I thought those of you who stood up to this particular challenge had a lot of balls and we give you all much props for participating. There can only be 1 Winner and for this challenge that would be Lora Oliver. Excuse my language but we Lollipop Girls thought her layout kicked a$$! Check it out for yourselves!

Been a busy bee today.

I created a card for the Paper Popsicles Wacky Wednesday challenge, I created a layout for the Therapeutic Thursday sketch at Paper Popsicles, and finished a home decor project. Whew! No wonder I am yawning. Oh, and possibly because it is after midnight. I used Cosmo Cricket's fantabulous new "Nutmeg" line for two of these projects and some older Cosmo and Making Memories paper for the card. All of this yummy paper is available at Paper Popsicles of course. Boy, I love that place. And just a little secret, Melissa just posted the November kits for sale in the store. Shh...I wasn't supposed to say anything, but that is too good to keep to myself.

I have a challenge for you and finally a project.

Today is the first day of my new challenge on Paper Popsicles. It is called the Fortune of Color and will be a weekly challenge started on every Sunday with the deadline being midnight (PST) on Saturday night to post your creation on the Paper Popsicles forum. I will announce the winner of the challenge when I announce the new fortune of color on the following Sunday.

This is an open challenge. You can create a layout, a card, an altered item, whatever the color inspires you to make. All that is required is that you use the color in the fortune for the largest part of your art. So the first fortune is:

"FOCUS ON THE COLOR PURPLE THIS WEEK TO BRING YOU LUCK."

Okay, get started!! Can't wait to see what everyone comes up with!

Now, for the project. Here is a layout I created for Challenge #4 on All About Me blog. It is about a turning point in your life. For me, when I turned 30 this year was a big turning point. A lot had happened right before I turned 30, got married, was laid off, lost our family pet to cancer. I had actually journaled about these feelings the night before my birthday, so I typed that up and went from there.