Sweet As Cherries!

Here's a new card that I did yesterday to fit the latest sketch/card challenge over on the BoBunny blog for the week.

This time they are wanting to see Birthday cards. I've been wanting to use the cute cherries image off the Lyrical Letters Cricut cartridge, so this is what I came up with... "Hope your Birthday is sweet as cherries"!

Oh, here's their sketch...

I used BoBunny Fruit Punch Popsicle and Holly Jolly Swirls papers here and the cherries were spritzed with Burnt Red glimmer mist before giving them a glossy coat and shimmer with paper glaze medium and Lily White doodlebug sugar coating. On the cherries, I also popped in two red acrylic pieces from BoBunny's Calypso Buttons and Bling. Two of the new Cuttlebug folders were used on here as well for the textures... the herringbone pattern used on the leaf stem and the harlequin pattern for the white cardstock behind the cherries. By placing the harlequin pattern on it's side though, I believe it gives it more of a basket-weave look. Guess Cuttlebug needs a "basket-weave" embossing folder now... so there an idea for you product designers at Provo Craft, lol!

And speaking of sweet as cheeries... I finally got to meet Ellen at a lss crop last Friday night like I had said we were planning, and she IS more than sweet as cheeries! We had such a fun night and I am so happy to at last have a scrappy friend around me. She is the best and so darn crafty! I just love all the altered stuff and decorative frames she thinks up. Ellen rocks!

Here we are...

And here she is digging through all the Creative Cafe buttons! I also got this one of her scrapping... and the page she was working on here turned out to be pretty fabulous!

I'm looking forward to the next time for sure!!

Bold and Simple GCD Studios Challenge!

I couldn't pass this challenge up considering that I had some wonderfully beautiful and BOLD GCD papers to work with from the "Cosette Collection". These paper designs also enhance any black and white photo perfectly! For this project I had a plain white photo mat from an older frame that I was using and I gave it a fresh bold new look by covering it with a piece of the "Simpicite" white and black damask print paper. I then layered this over my photo onto the larger print of the black and white "Elegant Floral" paper. I then used my Cricut to cut out the label frame, heart flourish and "One Love" title to add that extra touch of "simple", yet elegant embellishing pizazz!


The photo that I used in the framed layout here is one of myself that my hubby had taken while I was pregnant with Amelia. It is probably one of my favorite photos of me ever. I was around 14 weeks pregnant at the time and I was HUGE, but I absolutely loved the way I looked and felt! Good memories... and I'm so glad to have this photo and equally glad to have it displayed so pretty now too!

Well, I hope you all had a super fun and relaxing weekend... so hard to believe it's already through and now we'll be moving onto a new week. On Thursday we meet with a new High Risk Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist just to discuss various things that need discussed! We hope this will be a good meeting and that we can gain some insight as to what options lay ahead for us in our future endeavors... our quest to bring home a baby once and for all. Then I'm also really looking forward to Friday's crop that I'm going to where I'll finally be meeting up with the insanely awesome, Ellen... aka Howdee over at CMK! I don't often meet too many on-line scrappers, so I'm so excited to be scrapping and chatting with her this week....eeekkkk! Yipppeee! :D Hope everyone else has something fun to look forward to in your week as well... enjoy!

Bo Bunny Challenge!

Today is the deadline for a Bo Bunny sketch card challenge over on the Bo Bunny blog, so I thought I'd post mine here. I decided to make a Christmas theme from mine and I also went a little old school here with using some older Bo Bunny product... namely their patterned paper and alpha stickers. Ahh well, at least I finally was able to put it all to good use and I was happy with the way it came together.

Supplies used-

Patterned paper: Bo Bunny (Shabby black & white, Shabby Princess Raspberrie Red).

Ampersand and tan block alpha stickers: Bo Bunny.

Double-Dot ribbon in Harvest: Bo Bunny.

Black and kraft cardstock: The Paper Co.

Black glitter stickers: White Blossom(Michaels).

Star embossing folder: Cuttlebug, Provo Craft.

Die-cut: Lyrical Letters Cricut cartridge, Provo Craft.

Graphite glimmer mist: Tattered Angels.

Chestnut Roan chalk ink

Staples

Foam tape

See that cool embossed star pattern? That's one of the newly released Cuttlebug embossing folders. I was happy to get my order of 11 new folders in the mail the other day which were ordered off of HSN because they had the world-wide launch of the new releases. I was really wanting that star pattern... love it!

Thanks for taking a look... and for visiting! :)

Catching up!

It looks like it's time to do some catching up here on the ol' blog!

First off, we had a terrific Fourth of July weekend. We didn't do much of anything on the 4th...didn't even see any fireworks, although we heard them since they were being set off 8 miles from our house. It was pretty much a lazy day.. But then on Sunday we hosted a picnic get- together at our place. It was kind of a spur of the moment event, but we had plenty of good BBQ and food and everyone here seemed to enjoy themselves. Ohh, and I decided to make cupcakes and decorate them red white and blue, and as I was making these I really thought that I should and needed a nicer way of displaying/presenting them and then I remembered that I saw the cutest cupcake stand at Target... of course I had to stop everything and go right away to get myself one ;) I also made some cute embossed silver star picks to stick on their tops with my Cricut and Cuttlebug! Here they are...

They turned out really cute and of course they were yummy!

And here's a few more pix from the day...

the grill master at work!
... and a shot of my mom... it's like pulling teeth to take her picture, but I got it!

...our friend Jen and her 7 week old princess, Emma...

...and her silly boy too...

I've got more pictures, but I don't think I'll bore you all to pieces... but I will show you all some photos of more previous DT projects that I did for Creative Xpress recently.

I 've been meaning to post these but keep getting side-tracked. My assignments for the month of April were to create a layout using the Ranger (Tim Holtz) Distress Embossing Powders and two distinct cards using Acrylic Stamp and Store stamps from Bo~Bunny.
I love to incorporate stamping into my projects and even though I rarely heat emboss with powders, it is an enjoyable technique to implement.

"Impression" layout

The photo I chose to work with for this page carries a lot of weight of emotion for me and I definitely wanted that all to come across. The use of the Distress embossing powders in combination with some dry embossed cardstock and textured embellishing worked perfect to show-case the focal photo.

I also high-lighted my page with chipboard title letters which I cut out using a Cricut font from the Lyrical Letters cartridge. I then handpainted the letters brown and then stamped them and heat embossed with the, "Tattered Rose" Distress powder. I completed my page design by making a scrunched ribbon accent from Bo~Bunny double dot ribbon and a floral accent cut and dry embossed using the Cuttlebug machine. I just LOVE these fonts from Lyrical Letters!

"Family-Home-Blessing" card

I wanted to make this card to send for any occassion. I came across the sentiment in a “Country Home Accents catalog”… where it was used on a wall hanging. I thought it would be nice on a greeting card embellished with die-cut and stamped accents to represent a country home-spun design. This card features a house accent (Cricut Lyrical Letters cart.) and girl and boy accents (Cuttlebug), all cut out of generic chipboard and stamped using Bo~Bunny ornamental images.

"Hang in There" cardI was inspired to create this card from a Cricut “sun” die-cut that I had leftover from a previous project. One of the larger Ornamental images from the Bo~Bunny stamps had a section that reminded of sunshine rays and I thought the sun die-cut would be perfect stamped with this image. The other smaller stamped images reminded of tree branches so I incorporated a bird and branch accent onto the card as well, using the Wild Card cartridge. The card was finished of with some inking detail and a spattering of the Antique Brass Glimmer Mist spray to mimic the glistening of sunshine!

And as always I do "Thank YOU" and appreciate you all looking at my projects and reading my blog! Have a great weekend... I know I'm excited... we're going to Knoebel's Friday evening and then to the State College Arts Festival on Sunday to listen to a Reggae band on the lawn of Penn State's Old Main! Praying it doesn't rain! Enjoy :)