Getting in a Fallish Mood!

But it's not coming fast enough! I'm already for the cooler weather and for the crisp air. I can't wait for Fall festivals and fairs... and sweaters! Yep, I am ready to dig all my favorite Fall decorations out from storage and to set pumpkins galore all around! But in the meantime, I do have a few Autumn inspired projects that I recently completed for my CX assignments, which I can share with you all. These both revolve around the use of the "Speaking of Fall" Classmate educational Cricut cartridge. I was so excited that I could create with this due to my love of all things Fall! I can see this cart being used in a variety of ways, but I chose to use it in designing an embellished title for a Fall themed scrapbook layout and for creating a cute festive seasonal garland to dress up my fireplace mantel.

Pumpkin Posing

For the title here, I pieced together leaf and pumpkin designed letters using the alphabet on the cart with the "Layers" and "Layers Shadow" creative features. Before piecing together the shapes and adding dimension with foam tape adhesive, I gave all the pieces (layers) a color boost with Glimmer Mist sprays in Antique Brass, Garden Fairy and Golden Terracotta.

The sweet pumpkins were also cut using the SOF cart and I finished them off with a cool texture using the Houndstooth A2 Cuttlebug folder... one of my favorites!

"Happy Fall" Autumn Garland

This garland was so fun to design! The SOF cart has a creative feature which allows you to cut out leaf "tag" shapes with the alphabet already on them, so these garland shapes can be made in a snap! I cut out enough leaf shapes to spell out my sentiment of "Happy Fall" and these were all cut at 3 1/2 " using alternating seasonal colors of cardstock.

I also embossed these with two different textures... the "Pumpkin Harvest" A2 Cuttlebug folder, and the "Autumn Type" folder. To bring attention to the texture details, I misted them with Glimmer Mist in Golden Terracota and Antique Brass.

Larger pumpkin shapes were also created to anchor the garland on both ends and in the middle between the wording of Happy and Fall. These pumpkin shapes were all embossed with the "Distressed Stripes" A2 folder. I created more shimmer to them as well with the Glimmer Mist sprays and then I wrapped natural and green raffia around the stems for embellishing. A piece of rust colored rope twine was used to string the garland together and spiral clips were used to attach and slide the pieces onto the rope. Last, sections of ribbon were secured onto the rope to create stations between the pumpkins and alphabet leaves.



Thanks for following along with these projects! Till the next time, I'll be anxiously waiting for mid September's arrival, lol!

Behind again...

I realized I never posted my project assignment for CX for the month of May, so I guess I'll do just that. Most of our assignments for this particular month were centered around the wood products available from Kaiser Craft. I picked the set of 3 mini books to do. I'll admit that these were the most difficult and technical project I've worked on so far at CX, but in the end, they did turn out pretty cute. The reason they were a bit technical is because the pages are individual and you have to bind them yourself to create the book. Oyy, I had some frustrations because my double sided tacky tape wasn't doing the trick, and I then discovered I should have binded them differently with strips of paper, but it was all good. Sometimes it's all about trial and error!

Since there were 3 of them in the set, I made one for each of my 3 angel babies and created each one very pink and girly using Swiss Dotted Bazzill (Pirouette) and Basic Grey's Bittersweet line. I also used lots of BG two toned rub-ons... I love them!

These are from Baby Amu's book...

and here are Ava's pages...

and then here are from Amelia's book...


These lil mini's are adorable though, and Kaiser even has a mini bookshelf that you can get to alter and display these mini books on. I think it would be cute to get 4 sets of these and make a mini dedicated to each month of the year... what a neat gift idea that would be!

Thanks for stopping by!

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 :)

Sweet Land of Liberty!

I love Americana stuff and also love to decorate with the Americana theme throughout the house, especially in our guest bedroom. So over the weekend I was looking over on the Fancy Pants blog and saw that they announced a weekly, "Fancy Friday"challenge to create something using their products with the theme of "Celebrating the U.S.A.", perfect! I love Fancy Pants and I love Americana! I've been wanting to make something artsy... with paper-piecing and such with this very theme for awhile now - a piece of my own art to add to my home decor. Yep, it was perfect timing. So, I got out all of Fancy Pants products, my trusty Cricut and some other needed materials, holed myself up in my room and set off to play. I had so much fun creating this framed wall hanging, so I hope you don't mind me showing it off :)

I used primarily Fancy Pants products for this...

FP patterned Paper:

Happy Holidays "Candy Cane", On A Whimsy "Flutter", Botanical "Tulip", Kewl "Splendid", Frou-Frou "Lil' Princess", Delight "Bubbles" and Sweet Spring "Sweet Spring Alpha".

FP felt shape stars: Tis' The Season, Fashion Sense.

FP star border stamp: "Chic Alpha" set.


FP chipboard scrolls: "All Fall" Printed chipboard shapes.


FP ribbon trim: "Dapper Collection" ribbon.


Other products that I used include:
Bazzill cardstock
Cricut (Story Book, Graphically Speaking and George carts).
Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists in Antique Brass, Meadow and Pewter.
ColorBox Chestnut Roan Chalk ink.
Corrugated cardboard
Black twist-tie
Pinking shears
Pounce Wheel tool
Foam tape and 2-Way Zig glue pen
Scrapbook frame from Michael's (took glass out).

Here's some other detail shots...




Thanks for looking! And thank YOU, Fancy Pants, for inspiring me to get this done with your challenge! :)

Life can turn on the drop of a dime!

Yes, life is funny that way! But, by now I know all to well. And once more, bad luck has struck us again.

I've just had one of the happiest months of my life and now it's suddenly morfed into another melancholy mess. As it turns out, I should exuberantly be announcing my pregnancy, as I am currently approx. 10 weeks along. However, yesterday it was confirmed that this pregnancy will not continue! Sorta confusing to me because I am pregnant, I feel pregnant in every sense of the way, and by gosh, I am even starting to look pregnant... but there will be no baby. It all started a few weeks back when I went in for my first u/s check going on 7 weeks. At that appointment, a gestational sac appeared but there was no fetal pole (baby) or heartbeat. My OB really didn't think much of it because he said that it maybe just too early to be detected... that in many cases these don't show up till at least 8 weeks. So I was scheduled to come back for another check this week at 9 weeks. I went in on Monday the 8th, to have my u/s, which just so happened to be exactly 1 year since we had and lost our Amelia. Not a good day :( The u/s again showed no baby, only a larger gestational sac. I went to the hospital and had my blood drawn again to check the Hcg levels and the numbers indicated were very good, which was confusing, so he had me wait until yesterday (Thursday) to come back in and check once more. This time, my Hcg levels started to decrease and of course when he did another u/s... no baby again. I have what is referred to as a "Blighted Ovum", a miscarriage that is fairly common in pregnancies. It just wasn't meant to be... even though still very frustrating and heartbreaking for us.

I will be going into the hopital on Tuesday for a D&C. It really sucks knowing that for now I am pregnant and had all the hopes dreams and possibilities of having a baby this January, and after Tuesday, that will all be out the window... again. But, for now we are doing okay, and as I've told some others, this pales in comparison to what we've already gone through the past 4 years... although it still stings! I refuse to let this defeat me. We will one day reach that glorified finish line with our baby in our arms. My faith is not broken, and I truly believe this!

Just wanted to close out this post with a scrapbook page that I made soon after we found out that we pregnant this time. It will still be included in our family scrapbook...

It's another Hop at Outta This Funk!

I have been a very bad blogger these past weeks... I have rarely posted much at all, that is! I guess you could say I've been in a funk of my own. But I shouldn't be. I have so many photos that I need to get scrappped, a handful of cards that need made for certain people, and I certainly have enough product to use for my all said creations. Really, I should have no excuses... but plain and simple, I'll plead guilty to laziness!

So I'll admit, I didn't create anything special to show off to my fellow crafters during this second "Outta This Funk" Blog Hop. I just didn't have it in me to create this week with all the dreary rain we've been having here in PA. So, I'm just going to dig into my project archives and share another card that I recently made. I made this wedding card to take to a friend's wedding last month. Her wedding color was baby blue so I wanted to create something matchy!

This was really easy to make... I used some blue Bazzill cs with a small heart scalloped punch edge and over-layed a lighter blue layer of the KI lace paper. I cut my Celebrate Love sentiment on a brighter blue cs, using the Cricut Calligraphy Collection cartridge. I then finished off the card by threading a blue satin ribbon onto a white button and securing fast around the card front. Elegant, yet simple... it probably took me 15 minutes tops to complete this.

Well, thanks for stopping by my blog, but now I must send you in the direction of more inspiration! Please be sure to stop by and visit Char at, http://www.scrappinchar.blogspot.com/

Ohhh... also, I'll randomly be giving away a nice bag O' ribbons (including some of the pretty blue satin ribbon that I used in the above wedding card)... and maybe a lil' something extra thrown in for good measure too! Sooo, if you'd like to have a chance at it, I'll be picking one lucky person who comments here on this blog post! :) Hope you have a wonderful inspired weekend!

ETA: OTF BLOG HOP WINNER is....

Cricut Calligraphy Collection cart... projects to share!

I am finally getting around to making a post for these assignments from CreativeXpress last month. I don't know where all the days are flying to because I find it hard to believe that we are already in the 5th month of the year! And it'll soon be Summer, officially, so I hope that it soon begins to act like Summer too. But not too stinkin' hot, lol!

So yes, this past month I got to work with the Calligraphy Collection cartridge from Cricut for my projects and found out that I love the fonts from this! There are also some really cute phrases and images perfect for cardmaking. I made two cards and one scrapbook layout, and here they are...

"Be Happy" card

"Hope" card

"Autumn Welcome"

Full intructions for how I put these projects together can be found over at CX's new blog!

I hope everyone had a special Mother's Day last Sunday, whether you celebrated with your own children, with your own mothers and perhaps Grandmothers too, or all of them! I know a special day like Mother's Day can be difficult for some as well... I know that I myself struggle a bit, but I still celebrate it because I enjoy spending the day with my own mom and grandmother. I also know that I am a mom to those angels of mine, even though they can't be with me here in the physical sense. I was surprised by a beautiful card that I got from my hubby and angels. I have the most thoughtful and sincere husband ever... I totally believe that! It was a great day... we also had a fun cook-out (although somewhat breezy), here at our place for mom and gram! It seems we've really been into the cook-outs and barbecuing on the grill since we just bought a new gas grill at the end of last month. Now it's hard to cook anything in the kitchen, lol!

Well, I need to get going and do something productive on my list. This weekend we are having a yard sale and there's still a lot to still get ready for it... can't wait til it's over and all the junk is gone... at least I hope!