My craft room

I've been working very slowly on rearranging my craft room and bringing some order to it. Since we had people over last night, I figured I needed to get most of it done so that it wasn't a huge mess. I still have stuff to work on (like figuring out what to do with stuff that's living on my desk and driving me nuts), but it looks so much better. Yes, my walls are really a bright yellow. I wanted something cheerful and bright for my scrapbook room and since we were the ones who did all the painting in the house, I figured why not get what I want. I still need to get a pair of curtains that I really love for this room. These ones are just ones we had from before we moved in that got put up because we had nothing else at the time.

Before: A look across my scrapbook desk into the bookcase I put at the end of it. I did this so that I could just put convenient stuff on the bookcase to reach from my desk, but it was too hard to get to the shelves and ended up making it just really hard to do anything with the bookshelf. The lamp sitting on the desk is a true color sunlight lamp. It's not an ott-light, but one I found at Shopko, a local discount store like Walmart, that was much less expensive. I love being able to tell what color things really are. This is especially important since the ceiling light in this room tends to have a lot of yellow tone to it, thanks to the color of the walls.

After: A picture of the top part of the bookshelf. I moved the bookshelf to the corner on the other side of the room. Since I had to take everything off the bookshelf to move it, I took my time putting everything back on. I tried very hard to group like things together and used several baskets to contain the small stuff that had been floating around. I put the stuff I use regularly on the middle shelves and stuff I use less often on the lower and higher shelves. Because I had done such a better job of organizing it, some items that had been living on the floor were able to move into the bookcase.

After: A full picture of the bookcase. It is much cleaner and better organized. It should be interesting to see if I can keep it this way.

After: I didn't get a straight on picture of the desk before, sorry. This one shows the two shelves in my hutch. Before I started cleaning, the shelves were just piled up with this stuff, no rhyme or reason to it, just whatever I used last on top. I got two of my baskets I had from the craft show and contained all the little bits and pieces into them and then put them on the shelves. It looks much, much better, and it's easier to get at the stuff I need also.

After: The other side of the desk and hutch. I also unmounted a bunch of my wood mount stamps and transformed them into unmounted stamps using Alene's "Tack It Over and Over" glue. My unmounted stamps are what the cd cases in the hutch hold. On the surface of the desk you can see the items I need to find homes for: My 8 1/2 x 11 cardstock container (this was the holder that a bath gift set my husband got me for Christmas came in), my cuttlebug, and assorted other items. I'd like to have them near the desk, just not on it. I'm still working on figuring out exactly what I want to do. You can also see my cork board I hung up. It had just been on the floor leaning against the wall. I put my shaped paper clips on it, hoping that if I see them, I'm actually use them.

Before: This is my sewing table. The machine folds down into the table, providing another flat surface in the room if I need it. The bowl was something I picked up to use as a fish bowl and now am going to use it as a vase, eventually : ).

After: The sewing table is the one area that didn't look better after I cleaned the room. I am using it as a holding spot for items that I want to get rid of by offering to my friends and for items (my wind chimes) that I haven't decided yet how I'm going to display.

After: The floor under the sewing table. I need to move these paper holders back into the closet.

Before: Since we were able to build our house last year as a custom house (my brother-in-law was our builder), he allowed us to make changes to the way the floor plan would normally look. Since this room, from the beginning, was planned to be my craft room, he suggested that we build the closet with only shelves, since I wouldn't need the clothes rod and why not make it exactly the way I want it?? So he built me this wonderful closet with five shelves that reach the whole span of the closet. Unfortunately, it was used as a dumping ground for all types of things as we were unpacking. And then we had a friend live with us in my scrapbook room for a few months, so it's only now that I've really gotten the chance to rearrange the shelves, move stuff to other areas of the house that don't belong here, and really sort through all my possessions and decide if I really wanted to keep them. Part of the cleaning process for this closet was recycling a bunch of magazines.

Before: The bottom half of the closet. As you can see, just tons of stuff in it, it's overflowing and totally unusable as it is. I was just shoving stuff in wherever it would fit and if I had to take stuff out, hoping that I wouldn't be buried in an avalanche of crap.

After: I again tried to group things together by type. I moved some of the scrapbooks to the lower shelves so the ones that were more comfortable for me to reach would contain stuff I use on a regular basis. The very top shelf on this side holds all the memorabilia that I have sorted into page protectors. I need to think of a better way to do this, since it'll be hard to find anything in this stack, but for now, at least it's only taking up one shelf, instead of half of several shelves like before. The second shelf, with all the scrapbooks lined up by size, are my blank albums. I don't think I need any 8x8 or 6x6 albums for a while, especially since I've only ever made one 8x8 album and never even worked on a 6x6 album yet. : ) Most of these either came in kits (I found a really good deal at Joann's for an 8x8 album, a photo box, 3 8x8 paper holders and some 8x8 paper for about $7, so I picked up 4 of them), or in album sets that I wanted the 12 x 12 album that came with it and it was cheaper to buy the whole set than to find a similar album by itself.

After: The other side of the closet. I was able to contain some of the smaller things in baskets. I also had enough room left over that I could put my library books in the closet, which was unheard of before. I am so happy I decided to tackle this project, it'll make it easier for me to scrapbook in the future. I was really debating whether I should tackle it or spend the time scrapbooking, but I feel that this will make it easier for me to scrapbook since I'll be able to get to everything easier.

Before: The window seat. It's kind of just become yet another dumping ground for stuff I don't know what to do with. It'd be a much better idea to actually use the baskets rather than just leave them sitting here, don't you think?

After: The window seat. I still need to find a place to put the basket with the picture frames in it and the box holding all my cards (yes, that box is totally full of greeting cards, and that's not even all the ones I have that I've made), but at least it's getting there.

These shelves were in our basement in the condo we used to own holding some of my husband's items he wanted to display. When we moved into our house, he didn't want them anymore, so I decided to use them for holding stuff in my craft room. The blue and red photo boxes are from the Joann's album kits I mentioned before. They hold different categories of my foam stamps. The oval container came in a Thomas Kinkade gift set my younger son bought me for Christmas. It has more foam stamps in it also. The other shelf has decorative items I love displayed. The two boxes with the same design I found at Micheals and just fell in love with it. The smaller of the two holds 2 sets of alphabet foam stamps I found at Walmart. The big one is just display for now. The green box is an altered cigar box one of my scrapbookaddict.com Secret pals gave me (thanks Awna!). I use it to transport cards to places so that the cards don't get wet or wrinkled on the way (like to the park when I'm meeting friends so I can show them what I've done lately). I've always loved the Oriental cork art and one of the last times we were in Vegas, my husband picked up this one for me. There are candles (including some cute Valentine candy ones I got from a different scrapbookaddict pal) and then the goblet I picked up at Halloween time a few years ago. I think it's funny, it's a skeletal hand holding the bowl of the goblet. I display it because I like it so much. I know, I have a weird sense of humor.

After: My display shelves. I added the green shelf unit, which had been in the closet just taking up space and used it to display the candy candles, and another candle I had found buried in the bookshelf. Since the bookcase blocks part of the shelf, I used that part to hold my pen holder that contains my less commonly used pens (the more commonly used ones are in a pencil cup on my desk). Basically this clean up just consisted of rearranging different items.

Before: These drawer units hold some of my stamps and my punches. There just wasn't anywhere available to put them other than the floor. The blue snap close box is a greeting card organizer from the Creating Keepsakes card kit I had. The other box is envelopes I picked up for my cards at the local paper supply company. If you need envelopes, it's definately less expensive to buy them at a paper supply company. I got 250 envelopes for $13. To get the same amount through Stampin' Up, it would have been $25. You can also see a bag with my cards in it (this is the rest of the cards that didn't fit in the box) and the scrapbooks from the Joann's kits I was talking about before. There are also some of the paper holders from the Joann's kit on the floor. All of this stuff fit in either the bookcase or the closet when I was finished.

Before: The floor in front of the window seat. These are the display units I made for the craft fair and one my craft totes. Everything just got tossed on the floor once I got home. It's only taken me a month to get a new home for them. With the room the state it used to be, there just really wasn't anywhere that they could go, everything else was full of other stuff.

After: It's so nice to have nothing on the floor. It sure was a pain to have to get the stamps and punches out of those drawer units while they were on the floor.

After: The floor in front of the window seat. The display unit for the cards was put on the floor in the closet under the last shelf, which is a much better place for it. The scrapbook tote was put in the closet on one of the shelves.

Second Verse, Same as the First

As I got ready to post this card that is the same base as the one I posted earlier, this lyric (used as the title for the post) from "I'm Henry the VIII, I am" by Hermin's Hermits came into my head. Weird the types of things that pop into your head at times. It fits though, since it's the same card base, just different embellishments. This time I played around with my watercolor pencils to color the card background. I didn't like how that looked by itself, so I added chalk on top of the watercolor. I like it better with the chalk, I think the two together give it dimension it wouldn't have with just one or the other.

This one I did make just a square of paper for the inside of the embossed square. It is a 2 inch square, in case you've purchased this set of cards and need to know what size to use. I added some red eyelets and then used wine organza ribbon from Stampin' Up to "hang" the square in the middle of the card. The cardstock was a little heavy and kept pulling down the ribbon so it wasn't staying in the square on the card background, so I added 3D foam adhesive to keep it where I wanted it to be. I used the 3d adhesive to make it look like it's still floating over the card.

For the square in the middle, I stamped a heart background stamp (by Rubber Stampede) I have with the versamark watermark pad, which makes a watermark just slightly darker than the paper. I then used some of my Studio G $1 acrylic stamp sets to stamp the word "love" and the hearts in a Merlot color of inkpad.

Heart Card

This card utilizes a couple items I've purchased in the last week. The card base is from a pre-embossed card set by Die Cuts With a View. It had 40 cards and 40 envelopes for $5, which equals about 13 cents a card (it was on sale at Micheal's), so I picked it up to play with. It has 10 different designs with 4 of each design. The middle part is from a set of small Cuttlebug embossing folders called "Fancy Corners." It kind of looked like hearts to me, so I figured it would go well with the heart card I chose to try out this morning. I got this set at Roberts on Monday, when I had a coupon for 25% off my entire order.

I used my pink Versmark chalk ink pad to add color to the front of the card and kind of highlight the embossed part, since the card was totally white. I wanted to use ribbon somehow, so after playing for a while, I cut slits down the sides of the center square and threaded 2 different types of ribbon through it, alternating the shiny pink one with the dotted pink one. Since I had cut one more of the dotted pink one than I needed, I used it to make a kind of bow below the embossed pink design. I used 3d mounting foam to mount the embossed pink design. I was originally going to have it be a square just slightly smaller than the one already embossed on the card, but the paper shifted as I put it in the cuttlebug, so it wasn't centered. I decided to see how it'd look cut out, and I think it turned out nicely.

A close up of the middle part of the card. I really like how the layered ribbon turned out. Now all I have to do is figure out some way to cover the inside part of the card so you don't see all the ribbon tails on the inside : ).

Craft fair results

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to post about the craft fair that I participated in on June 29 and 30. It's been almost 2 weeks and they've just flown by. Part of it is that I've been sick most of this week (some nasty flu bug) and last week was the 4th of July and a birthday party we threw for a friend. Just lots of other stuff going on.

So the craft fair started Friday afternoon. We didn't have a single sale Friday, but according to our neighboring vendors, that's pretty typical, so we didn't sweat it too bad. When Saturday around lunch time came and I had only sold 2 cards and 10 window clings for a total of $3, I knew something had to change, so I offered the cards at buy 1 get 1 free (after calling my husband and crying on his shoulder. This was his idea to up the sales). That seemed to get people more willing to stop and at least look. I ended up saling $25 worth of cards and the 10 window clings (they were 10 cents each, so that was another $1). All in all, not a very profitable craft fair, especially considering I spent $8 on food while there and had spent $18 on display stuff (plus a $12 gift certificate).

So, will I do another craft fair? I'm not sure. If I do though, I'll make a few changes that I think really would have helped. The first change I'll do is make packs of cards. People looked at the packs of 6 moving cards I had and seemed interested until they realized it was only moving cards. They seem to want to get packs of cards, even if it ends up the same amount they'd pay for the singles. Second, I'd find a better display method. The one I had made for me at Home depot seemed to be a good idea, but I had so many cards that were in baskets and stuff that people seemed overwhelmed. I'd like to find some way to hang most of my cards so that they are easier to see at a glance. Lastly, I'd organize them by theme. I did that with the baskets, but ended up hanging everything I could fit on the tent itself, so the themes were no longer together. I'd love to find a way to hang them all together, and label them with a huge sign that says what themes they are. I'll be experimenting at home before the next one to see if I can accomplish this. I guess most of all I'd just be more prepared. Even though I knew about this one for 2 weeks, the first week of it I was preparing for a party at our house, so I really only had one week to prepare and most of that was spent packaging the cards, making envelopes to match, and labeling the cards with prices. So preparation for the booth was seriously lacking. That'd be the one thing I'd change.

This photo shows my card table with baskets on it. The picture frame shows some of the vinyl window clings I made with my craft robo. People seemed to think that it was a picture that I had made with the shapes (if it was, it'd look more cohesive). This photo also shows the "Captain's Log" notebooks I made.

I began to realize that I could hang some of the cards on the tent flaps, thereby maybe making it so there were less baskets on the tables. It seemed to overwhelm people to see so many baskets worth of cards, so they'd flip through one and then quickly leave. You can also see the cloth visors my mom made and the little animal fun foam visors she made.

This one shows more cards hanging on the tent flap, plus my mom in the background. It also shows the wands she made to sale, the cute little rabbits she had, the bracelets she was saling, and the bucket of water bottles she was saling.

This photo is just another one with the cards hanging on the side of the tent. The next day I had to move these ones because my mom's friend who showed up late Friday and was in the area next to ours, insisted that she set up her tent right next to ours. Wished I had known that before I set up the cards, it was a pain to move them all : ).

Another photo from Friday. I went to Home Depot on Wednesday looking for ideas to display the cards. A very nice man helped me and made these display racks for me. He cut the dowels, and suggested that the bottoms be shelf brackets, which turned out very pretty. He also drilled the holes and screwed the dowels in for me. His idea was to have the two brackets be like bookends and the dowels support the cards. It was a good idea, but wouldn't have let me display this many cards on it (it would have maybe held 15, instead of the 25 to 30 I hung up). So I modified it once I got home, setting the brackets as bottoms and then the dowels up in the air. I then strung ribbon like clothes line and used clothes pins to attach the cards to the ribbon. You can also see more of the window cling shapes I cut out, plus baskets of cards. Like I said, I think it was overwhelming for people to see how much stuff I had and feel like they had to sort through them.

A close up picture of my mom and her table. She made the wands and jewelry out of kits she had ordered from Oriental Trading company. She is putting together more of the necklaces in the background.

This photo was taken on Saturday. Since no one seemed to get what the window clings were, I made a window out of cardstock and put it in the picture frame, then put at least 1 of each type of window cling on the front. People seemed to get the idea of what they were much better. We moved the clothes line display to the front of the booth today so people could see it better. I also made it so there was not as much stuff on the table. In fact, we just lined the front of the booth with all 3 tables, so people didn't feel like they were invading our space to see everything (a suggestion by the vendors next to us and it seemed to work). I also used the front of the table cloth to hang a few cards.

A photo of my mom's stuff and some of the baskets of cards. I had brought these photo boxes just in case I needed to elevate stuff, and so I put a few baskets on them to give the display more depth. I again hung some of the cards on the front of the table cloth. People seemed to notice the booth more on Saturday because of the cards hanging everywhere. I guess just more visual stimulation.

The basket with my mom's wands in them, plus the stuffed animals. I made two window picture frames, one for the butterflies and flowers, the other for the more generic shapes. I put the extra clings in ziplock bags, separated by type of shape (butterfly, flower, star, etc). This did two things: it helped clean up the cluttered look of our booth, since now there were only 2 frames instead of 5 and it helped give people more of an idea of what the shapes were for. I only sold 10 of them, but that's better than 0. By this time, I had also strung ribbon from the top of the tent down the tent pole on both front poles so that I could hang up a few more cards. Just another attempt to clear a few baskets off the table so they didn't look so cluttered. You can see a few of those cards on the left side of the picture.

One last photo from Saturday. This one shows the cards hanging on this part of the tent, part of the tables, and my neighbor's booth. I think another problem was that people would see the beer bottle wind chimes our neighbor had (they were labeled "Red neck wind chimes") and skip over our booth to see what they had. I wish I would have remembered that I checked out a book on saling at craft fairs from the library before I left. I skimmed over it this past week and it mentioned that you should have some sort of wall separating your booth from the next one to prevent this exact thing. After reading that book, I have a few more ideas on how to have better success at a craft fair that I wish I had known before this one.

Am I sad I went to this craft fair? Not really. It was a good exercise to get me thinking more about what I should do if I want to actually make money at these things. It helped me get more experience with the whole craft fair idea without me spending a lot of money (my mom paid for the booth. She had some blankets she was going to bring that she took to work with her to finish and had people at work buy them, so she did make enough money to cover the whole thing, just not completely from the sales at the craft fair itself). It was a good learning experience for if I do it again. I just hope that next time I sale more and make more money : ).

Tag, you're it!

On the scrapbookaddict blog ring I belong to, there's been a tag game going around. I got tagged by Gotpictures yesterday (just noticed it this morning, yesterday was busy). The question to answer is: If you had the opportunity to do a 1-year internship in a company or field completely unrelated to your current career or specialty, what would be your top 5 choices?

This is hard for me, I haven't worked in 4 years, and the only jobs I've ever really held were ones I took because they fit into the weird schedule I needed to keep (mostly customer service phone jobs). I'll try though.

1. I'd love to work at a scrapbook magazine. See all the new stuff before it comes out, be given free stuff from the manufacturers : ), maybe help guide the industry to more of what we as scrapbookers want from it.

2. I'd also love to work in a scrapbook store. Not own one, mind you, because that would be too stressful, but work there. Help inspire people to scrap, help them find just the perfect embellishments.

3. I think I'd do well as a bookkeeper or accountant. I love to organize money, find out where it's going, where's it's coming from, etc.

4. I'd love to be in some type of design position, you know, helping a company come up with designs for paper, stamps, something like that. I'm not a great artist, but I'm getting pretty good at putting different items together to make a cohesive whole and so I think I'd be good as a big picture person, combining art work into lines that go well together, stuff like that.

5. I'd love to intern with my husband and find out more about computer programming. He's so good at it and I'd like to find out how to do it better, but I'm just lazy : ).

Wow, that was a lot harder than I thought it'd be to think of 5 things I'd really like to do.

Okay, I tag PunkyB http://ginn4.blogspot.com/ and Barb-n-PA http://lv2scpbk.blogspot.com/ (I looked on sba for people who had blogs mentioned and made sure they hadn't been tagged yet.)

Thanks for the compliment on my Captain's Log, gotpictures!

Noel's Adjective Challenge

Noel did another parts of speech challenge on her blog at http://noelmignonchallenge.blogspot.com/. I haven't been scrapbooking lately, so I decided it wouldn't be a bad thing to do a layout for it. The challenge ends today, July 6th, so I needed to get going on it. I decided to use the word "Sparkling" and use pictures of our Christmas tree in 2005. (I looked it up and it is an adjective, as in "Our sparkling Christmas tree") I used perfect pearls on both the stamped snowflakes (since our Christmas tree theme is snow) and on the word sparkling. The snowflakes are part of an acrylic set by Provo Craft and the alphabet stamps are Mama mockingbird Nester stamps by Sassafrass Lass. I love how it turned out, it shimmers a little in real life.

Danielle

More trifold cards

I made a few more tri-fold cards for the craft fair I went to on June 29th and 30th. I forgot to take pictures before I put them in the plastic, so sorry about the bags. Since none of them sold, I took one of each out of the bags and took pictures again once I got home. So here they are without the bags, thanks for being patient with me.

This one I stamped 4 different sized star stamps on the red paper with my Versamark watermark ink, that makes an image just slightly darker shade than the paper. I then mounted the green star paper on the smaller of the two folds. I cut a light blue square and then a smaller square out of the green star paper and layered the two squares. I cut out a star using my sizzlet die and layered that on the squares. I placed the squares on the flap in a diamond configuration.

Same card as the one above, but using blue cardstock for the base instead of red.

I had fun creating this card. When I went to Micheal's last week, I bought a package of sparkly colored hot glue sticks. I made a dot of the red sparkly hot glue on a scrap paper and stamped it with one of my flower rubber stamps. After the glue had cooled a bit, I pulled the stamp out of the glue and it made the impression that is mounted on the square on this card. For the rest of the card, I stamped the flower stamp that I used with the hot glue on the red paper with my versamark pad. I then mounted the flower patterned paper on the smaller flap (this paper has glitter in the center of the flowers). I cut a square of the red cardstock, inked the edges so it stood out a little and then layered it with a smaller square of the flower patterned paper. I then mounted the hot glue flower seal in the middle of this layered square and mounted the square on the card.

My first altered item

I tried my hand at altering something this past week. I had made up the other 4 pirate card kits I had (see this post) and decided to make a "Captain's Log" notebook to go with it. I tried to find composition books, but wasn't willing to pay $2 for one of them, so decided to try it just using the spiral notebooks I have at home. I was at Micheal's to pick up mod podge to coat it with and found a set of 3 cute pirate foam stamps for 50 cents. My husband designed a "Captain's Log" logo to cut out on my craft robo.

I attached a piece of black paper to the notebook, cutting a little tab at every spiral piece along that side so I could put it through the spiral and cover that part of the cover also. I then folded it over to the back, and covered the folds with a black piece of cardstock on the back of the front cover. I stamped the foam stamp on the paper and another smaller skull stamp I had. I then attached the "Captain's Log" logo and then mod podged over it so that the paper wouldn't tear as easily (mog podge is a paper sealer that makes the paper stiffer and thicker basically). It looked good, but it was really hard to see the skulls. So the next day I took the big skull stamp, stamped it on the paper again, then covered it with embossing powder and melted that. I did the embossing powder so the stamps would be protected but I wouldn't have to do another layer of mod podge and possibly have them be muted again. I think it turned out well. Unfortunately, I only sold one at the fair, but my boys are thrilled about that because it means they each get one instead of having to wait for me to make more of them.