Squeezin' in One More October Hoorah & Some Blog Awards and Such!

Warning: This maybe a long-winded post from me today, due to the fact that yes, October is coming to a close :( and I wanted to squeeze in one last post for my favorite month! I can't believe that we are now headed into November and Thanksgiving Day is almost at our door... WOW! Where has 2009 gone to? Certainly there are those days that I just wish they would hurry up already and leave me alone, but for the most part I just wish I could stop the clocks and take more time to enjoy the people and the things around me. I don't believe I do that enough -- so easy to take all the "everyday stuff" for granted!

Anyway, it's Halloween weekend so I wanted to show off something cute that I made here the other week to add into my seasonal Fall/Halloween decor. You know all those sweet lil' home decor wood signs with inspirational sayings or quotes on them that are in all the stores? Well, I decided to make myself a "SPOOKY" sign out of a scrap of wood block and some Imaginisce goodies. I painted my block black and then sanded the edges first. Then I cut a piece of the orange dotted paper from Imaginisce's Twitterpated line down to size and ran the left hand side through my Cuttlebug machine to emboss the Spiderweb texture on it. I inked the edges and the web before adhering to the block with Mod-Podge (Matte) adhesive. My lettering I cut using the Cricut, Winter Woodland font... probably my new current favorite font from a Cricut cart! I then stamped the Imaginisce Skull stamp twice onto a piece if their Old Whirled Elegance paper, cut them out and embellished with Eye of Newt brads for eyes. After I glued all these pieces onto the block I finished the sign off with a spritzing of Old Lace Glimmer Mist (also a favorite in my scrap supply arsenal these days). Very fun project to do, and I can see myself whipping up a bunch more of these now for all other occassions and holidays!


Next... thought I'd share another card design of mine using Cosmo Cricket... and my Cuttlebug folders and Cricut... believe me, I find it hard anymore to scrap or create without those two handy-dandy machines. Seriously!! Again I created another "Houndstooth" pumpkin for this card... quite obsessed with makin' those :)

Isn't it just perfect for a pumpkin though?

Okay, one more scrappy thing to share that I've been working on, but this one has to only be a peek for now because I still have to finish... hope to do that later today before all the Trick-or-Treaters invade my porch! Can you believe that I have never scrapped with Webster's Pages before this layout that's in progress now? I am almost embarrassed to admit that...oy! I have had some of their beautiful papers from various collections piled nicely on my counter, just waiting to be chosen. Wanting to be used. I could not deny their prettiness anymore! The page is coming together nicely, so I'll be sure to share it with you all as soon as I can!

Oh, and dare I say, I also combined it with some fabulous trinkets from the Vintage Findings Making Memories collection too!

Now, onto some cool blog awards that I've been given from some friends! This morning, Beth gave me this one...

Thanks, Beth! Like I said, you are a big sweetie! In recognition of this award I now must answer a list of questions with only 1 word replies for each... should be easy :)

Here are the questions: (Copy and paste your list)
1. Where is your cell phone? STAND
2. Your hair? DRY

3. Your mother? GIVING
4. Your father? REMEMBERED
5. Your favorite food? CHICKEN
6. Your dream last night? NONE
7. Your favorite drink? TEA
8. Your dream/goal? BABY
9. What room are you in? GREEN
10. Your hobby? CREATING
11. Your fear? BABY-LOSS
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? HERE
13. Where were you last night? HOME
14. Something that you aren't? PATIENT
15. Muffins? CHOCOLATE
16. Wish list item? BABY
17. Where did you grow up? PENNSYLVANIA
18. Last thing you did? TRASH
19. What are you wearing? LOUNGE-WARE
20. Your TV? ON
21. Your Pets? NONE
22. Friends? MORE
23. Your life? JOURNEY
24. Your mood? SLEEPY
25. Missing Someone? ALWAYS
26. vehicle? PONTIAC
27. Something you're not wearing? SOCKS
28. Your favorite store? TARGET
29. Your favorite color? GREEN
30. When was the last time you laughed? NIGHT
31. Last time you cried? WEDNESDAY
32. Your best friend? MUGI
33. One place that I go to over and over? LAUNDRY-ROOM
34. Facebook? SOME

35. Favorite place to eat? OUTBACK

Sooo now it's my turn to name and bestow the above award to 5 other cool ladies whom I admire and know to be "Over the Top"! In no particular order, they are...

1. Elizabeth C.

2. Wendy P.

3. Karen P.

4. Staci T.

5. Ellen S.

And now onto another award given a few weeks ago, and I'm just now (remembering).... soorry, Ellen, but thank you :D I am honored that you picked me, really I am! Looks like she wants me to be HONEST, so... here it goes...

TEN HONEST THINGS ABOUT MYSELF:

1. I am insecure. About alot.

2. One of the reasons why I hope to one day be a mother to an"earthly" child/children is for a purely selfish reason... I have an intense fear of growing old and dying alone with no other family around.

3. I honestly hate to iron and I enjoy that fact that my dh will gladly iron his work clothes.

4. I love deeply.

5. I often wish I could trade places with someone who has easy pregnancies (Michelle Duggar comes to mind, lol), and wish I knew what it's really like to have a "normal" pregnancy.

6. I feel that sometimes I am too invested in this quest to be a mom, and that I'm just wasting time when I could be improving myself in other areas... career-wise and being a better spouse, for example!

7. There's a certain Design Team that I'd like to be on right now... well, 2 teams to be really honest!

8. I'm not a patient person. That's not good!

9. I need to lose weight. And I'm working at that!

10. This honesty list is hard... glad I'm on ten because I can't come up with anymore :)

I know... now you are all so eager to see if you are all on my list for the "Honest Scrap" award!

Again, in no particular order, here are 5 stand-outs of my pickin'...

1. Heather C.

2. Rebecca K.

3. Stacy A.

4. Chrispea

5. Tara P.

Okay... that about does it for today... just one more thing. I am actually for the 1st time in many many years, going to be home tonight handing out treats for all the neighborhood Halloweeners! Well, this is only our 2nd year in this neighborhood, but last year, I totally forgot what night was trick-or-treat night and didn't have candy bought. This year I am all prepared....

Mmmm---- Kit-Kats, Butterfingers and Nestle Crunch bars!

Now if I can only keep my hands off of it all, lol!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! :D

Weekend Scrapping!

For the first time in a long while I actually had some success with scrapping on the weekend and getting more than one layout finished! I'm so happy with myself, lol! The first page here I finished on Friday for the Anniversary Crop at AMM. I'm kind of sad that I only got one of their Crop challenges finished, but it was a fun one regardless! DT member, Tonya Dirk's challenge was a cute "menu" challenge where she gave us the chance to pick which halloween menu items we wanted to use for our page, but we didn't know what each item represented until after we chose them. For instance, everyone was given the "starter course" of Blood Orange Sorbet which represented GLITTER, so everyone's page had to have something glittery on it. My other pick's were Pumpkin Juice=Polka Dots, Witches Wart Soup=Journaling must be handwritten, Mummy Mushu=Buttons, and Moon Pies= Photos must be titlted. Like I said, FUN challenge!

For this and the next page I also finally busted out my Pink Paislee Amber Road yummies that I've been hoarding for weeks! I just love this collection, probably because I'm such a Fall fanatic, but I also love the color palette with that gorgeous dusty green-blue with the cinnamon red and brown! Yum!

This second layout below I did yesterday and I followed Sketch #32 over on the Inspired Blueprints challenge blog. It's been awhile since I've done any layouts with sketches, but it really was a help because I wanted to scrap these photos of us from our recent weekend get-a-way, but I was really stumped on how to begin. Sure enough, I found the perfect sketch to give me the inspiration I needed. I LOVE their sketches at IB... I really should use them as a resource more often!

Again, I also used the PP Amber Road here, but I also found the perfect striped and colored ribbon to use, hiding in my stash. The Fancy Pants ribbon from their Dapper collection perfectly matches back to Amber Road... practically made for each other! The scroll and scroll-leaf accents and the title were all cut out using my Cricut with the Ashlyn's Alphabet cartridge. I've had this cart for about a month now and I just now used it for this page. I wasn't too sure how much I'd like this one, but now that I've used it, of course I've fallen in love with it and I can see using this alphabet and it's images over and over again. It's a beautiful font! Ohh, and I also embellished the cut-out accents with some Kaiser Craft pearls.

The title was certainly more time consuming for me to make than it would've been to just slap on some AC Thickers and call it done... but I really think the results are well worth it! I worked on cutting out and constructing this title last night while watching my weekly fix of Desperate Housewives and Brothers & Sisters! I wanted the lettering to have more of a customized look to compliment the diecut Amber Road paper, so I started by cutting out each dusty green letter 3 x's and layering and gluing them together to create a thicker and sturdier letter, similar to a "Thicker". Then I ran each letter through my Cuttlebug, using the Victoria folder as to give the letters the look of tooled leather. I then cut out each of the letter's shadow in brown 2 x's each, layered and glued them and then put them together with the tooled dusty green letters. So all together, each letter is 5 layers. Time consuming, but gorgeous!

This last layout that I finished this weekend then is my entry for GCD Studio's latest challenge, and it's a sketch one as well. Had to use at least 50% of GCD product on here, and GCD is kinda hard to come by around here... I have some, but not much... only pp :( So I used up some of the pretty black and white damask from the Cosette collection along with some of the "gold" side of the Ciante paper. I just can't get enough of the textures of the GCD paper though. Luv the stuff!

While I'm into discussing scrapping, I also wanted tell you all that I was THRILLED to finally get one of my card designs picked up for publication from CARDS magazine! This one has been a long time coming for me, as I've been submitting to this and Scrapbook Trends publications for almost "2" years now hoping to get something accepted! FINALLY, is all I can say! My... two years is a long time. I can no longer complain... although I do hope that this will just be the first! I'd hate for it to be the first and only, lol!

Thanks for checking in and I hope everyone has a great week ahead... enjoy!

Been Meaning to Share...

I've been wanting to tell you that I'm on a new challenge blog's design team! It's a fun one for me because it also involves cooking, and I do like to play around in the kitchen every now and then! It's called Creative Cookbooking, and it's all about enjoying cooking and scrapping about our favorite foods and recipes and sharing them in the process. The challenges are terrific incentives to motivate you into creating a beautiful recipe album that can be passed along to the next generation in your family! I've always wanted to put together a recipe scrapbook, so these challenges are perfect to get me going! If any of you are interested we would love to have you join us... a new challenge is posted to the blog every week. Our first challenge was to scrap about a favorite soup and bread combo. The following pictures are of my Soup and Bread (All in One) layout that I made for our favorite French Onion Soup recipe. I played around with my new "From My Kitchen" Cricut cart. for the accents on here and then most of the product that I used is Fancy Pants... I can never have enough Fancy Pants!

Not much going on here today. It's Monday and it's cloudy out and COLD! I may have to actually turn on some heat today and I cringe at that thought! For now I just layered on the socks and an extra hoodie!

No plans today so I may just do some creating... or cleaning, but I prefer the creating! I think today maybe a great time to lounge and play with my new toy. Yes, I took the plunge and got myself a Gypsy when they launched them on HSN the other week. I've finally got it all registered and in sync and I did my first cuts with it the other night, and it was really easy... I like it awhole lot more and find it a ton more user friendly than I do the Design Studio, so I've made my mind up to keep it! Yep, today would be a great day to get all my carts linked to it I guess. Hope everyone has an enjoyable week... catch ya all later!

Passing this along for a good friend....

This is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and my friend Amy Tara Koeppel is paying special tribute to the memory of her beautiful mom who passed away from this dreaded disease 20 years ago today. In part, she's giving away an extremely generous and pink RAK! She would greatly appreciate you all taking the time to stop by her blog to get informed on the importance of self-examinations and mammogram screenings. It definitely is nothing to be lax about... too many women AND men are losing their lives to this battle, and it's time that we do all we can to kick cancer in the butt! So girlies, DO THOSE EXAMS!! Click here for Amy Tara's blog!

It's October 1st... Yay!

Yesss!!! My favorite month has arrived! Hope the month goes slow, but it never does!

First, today I'd like to share with you a card that I did for the Fancy Pants' blog challenge that they have going on. October 3rd happens to be National Card Making Day, so FP's challenge is to create a card in any theme and of course use some FP products on the card. No problem there!! If you really know me, you KNOW how I love my FP... gosh, even DH knows how much I LOVE Fancy Pants! I went in the direction of a Get Well card for this... I think it turned out pretty cute with the band-aid cut from the Cricut Indie Art cartridge!

I used All FP papers (Turquoise Grid Kraft Kuts paper, Delight-Bubbles, Botanical-Bluebell, and On a Whimsy-12x12 cards.) The chipboard alphas are also FP and I inked them with chalk ink and sprayed with Burnt Red Glimmer Mist.

Well, we had a nice lil' get-a-way this past week. We ended up going to Lancaster and staying there for 2 days and 2 nights. The best part was that we stayed in a Bed & Breakfast for our very first time! I've always wanted to stay in a B&B and we never took the plunge, but we got on-line and found one that we thought looked great, and it was! It was so charming and just perfect for us to grab some relaxation time that I believe we both were really needing! We had the best time doing a lil' site-seeing in ole' Amish country and of course shopping and eating some really good food too! Ohhh... and speaking of food, the breakfast that we had both mornings at the B&B were outstanding... very light, but so delicious!

Here's a photo that the inn keeper took of us before we left...

I'd show you more photos of the B&B and our trip, but for some reason Blogger is being stubborn and I can't upload any more pix correctly! It's been wacky for me in photo uploading for awhile now... and I don't like it. Any other Blogger peeps having troubles?

And last, today was October 1st, the start of my favorite month of the year, and it also is our angel babe, Ava's 3rd Birthday spent in Heaven. It's so hard to believe we would've been throwing her 3rd Birthday party... I sooo wish more than anything that she'd be here with us instead! Yes, the 3 years have come and gone, but our memories and love for our daughter will forever remain. I hope she had a great day up there playing with her baby siblings and her Pappy... and perhaps they enjoyed a slice of heavenly cake too! :)

It's the Most WONDERFUL Time of the Year!

For me it is! I LOVE FALLL! And I was so excited that it officially arrived this past Tuesday! I got out all my Autumn decorations nearly 2 weeks ago already, because I just couldn't help myself! I took pictures too to share. Staci posted a thread over at A Million Memories showing some of her decor for the season and wanted others to share their stuff too, so I just uploaded my pix there, but wanted to get them here on my blog too. I know I've shown some of my favorites on here last year too, but I suppose there are some new readers that haven't seen any of it yet! I didn't buy anything new this year but there's still plenty of time :) I'll be going to a Fall Craft show in about 2 weeks and I usually have luck at finding something there that catches my eye! Yesterday we went and got some pumpkins to sit next to all 5 trees in our front yard along with some corn stalks that were cut down from our garden... I think it looks kinda cute, but I'd also like for us to get some potted mums to set around too...

Then here's my alpine tree that I decorated with some cute Halloween stuff...

... and more of the front porch decorated...

I showed this guy last year I know, but here's my Pumpkin guy (one of the last things that my dad got for me before he passed)! I love this sooo much...

... and now, here's the mantle in the Living Room...

We keep this sweet, "Two Together" Willow Tree babies box on our Mantle with both Ava and Amelia's ashes in it. Ava's ashes used to be in a seperate Willow Tree angel box, but then after we had lost Amelia too, I later found this box when we were needing one for Amelia as well. I saw this and I instantly knew this was perfect for both of their ashes... to be together!! Anyway, I had these adorable lil' ceramic pumpkins, so they are playing with their pumpkins now, lol!! :)

I also took some pix of our Kitchen and Dining tables...

So there's most of my favorite Fall decorations around our house, but now I'm excited for the leaves on the trees to be changing their colors! We are having vacation this week and we don't really have any plans set in stone but I sorta like vacations like that. I think on Sunday we're just gonna set out driving and wherever we decide we wanna stop we will. We do a lot of our vacations like this and we always seem to enjoy them. I would love to stay in a Bed & Breakfast somewhere this time, so we'll see! It's also that time of year for the Bloomsburg Fair! I've been looking forward to fair week for months now. It starts tomorrow and ends next Sat. but I think we are going to try and go on opening day for a bit and then maybe again when we get home from our excursions!

In other scrappy news, I was stoked to get one of my cards picked up for Kimber McGray's upcoming card idea book that she's doing with F+W Media (Memory Makers books)! Funny how it was the 1 out of the 3 that I submitted that I least expected to be chosen! I think that happens so often... perhaps from now on when I submit I should just show what I don't really care for, lol! I am really happy to be chosen for this book however because the cards will be going for a awesome cause rather than being returned to the artists. All cards are going to be given to Cards for Heros at Operation Write Home. I love that!

I'm sure I have other stuff I could blog about right now, but I really do need to do some cleaning and such around here before we go away this weekend, so I'll just wrap it up for now. But I'll hopefully be back soon with some fun new pictures from the fair and our vacay!

More Pumpkins!

Well, I know I've been kinda scarce on the ol' blog again lately, but sometimes life has a funny way of getting in the way. But, I'm here and I actually had a bit of time to create this week. I started a scrapbook page, and I'm getting ready to finish it up after I'm done posting here! I also decided to play along in another Bo Bunny blog challenge and it was hard to resist this one because the challenge is to create a "shaped" card and I LOVE LOVE LOVE shaped cards... they are a favorite of mine to see and to make! Sooo, of course with Fall inching it's way ever so closer, I had to crank out sumthin' with punkins!

I made this with the BoBunny Month 2 Month November paper and with the help of my dear Cricut! Again, I used the Speaking of Fall cart to cut out my pumpkin and vine shapes, and the Picket sign came from using the Walk in My Garden cart.

And before I forget, in other scrappy news... I just wanted to proudly toot my own horn that I was notified that I made it back onto the CreativeXpress.com DT for the 2009-2010 term! I wanted back on this team so bad! I'm very relieved and excited and can't wait to continue creating with my favorite bugs... Cricut and Cuttlebug :D

Ta-ta for now, and have a great Labor Day weekend!

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!