Another Fun Mail Day

I bought some other papercrafting related stuff the other day and it came today.

First was this paper holder. I bought a bunch of paper over the holidays when Joann's had their Die Cuts With A View paper stacks on sale. I now need to go through my old paper and decide what I'll actually use and what I should either sale or give away. I bought the paper holder because I have a feeling I'm still going to need room, regardless of getting rid of some stuff.

Next was this Provo Craft Cricut tool kit. I don't have a Cricut, but I do have a Craft Robo, which is close, except instead of cartridges, you can cut anything that you load into the Craft Robo program. This tool kit came with a bunch of stuff I'd been wanting to get for a while: a bone folder, a few tools to get stuff off the cutting pad that is sticky, a scraper to clean scraps off the cutting pad. I also like the scissors and the fact it comes in a cool little carrying kit. Makes it easier to keep track of. And Amazon had it for $10, which was nice. I also got some Cuttlebug embossing folders. I love both of the ones that have ornaments and both of the snowflake ones. The bird one and plaid one are pretty good too. The name of this set is "Winter Wonderland." When I was looking for the names of the folders I already had, the one with the hanging ornaments was one I really wanted to get. (a better picture at Joanns.com)

These are Cricut pads that will fit in my Craft Robo, since the cutting pad I have is pretty much hashed. I'm hoping that if I have new mats and the tools that I'll start using my Craft Robo again.

Lastly, I bought a 50 pack of page protectors for my 12 x 12 scrapbooks, since I'm out of them besides the few in different scrapbooks holding places.

All in all, a very fun papercraft mail day. I look forward to playing with all my new toys and not having my paper organized in stacks on my window seat.

Snow pictures

Someone on the Scrapbookaddict message board asked if someone could post pictures of snow. So here are a few pictures of my boys playing in the snow on December 1st. We must have gotten like 6 inches in one day. It snowed on the 7th and 8th too. Most of our bad snow storms so far this season have been on weekends.

My Christmas card, take two

So I played around with the same stamps I did the card in the post My Christmas card, take one. I used the snowflake cuttlebug embossing folder and the Stampin' Up snowflake wheel. This time, instead of using the metal word by Lasting Impressions for paper, I used the Stampin' Up hostess set called Rivets and stamped the happy holidays one. Since all the other images were snowflakes, I didn't think the Christmas tree in the middle part of the stamp really went with the theme. So I stamped a snowflake on the same color paper the embossing was done on and cut it out and added it to the center of the sentiment stamp. I think it turned out pretty well. I made one card so it had a horizontal orientation and another card so it was vertically oriented. I like the vertical orientation better myself. The second and fourth pictures are close-ups of the sentiment part of the card.

My Christmas card, take one

I want to apologize for not updating for such a long time. I've been busy and haven't taken the time to write about my creations and I'm sorry.

Last year (2006), I sent out Christmas cards that I had made the year before to sell at a craft fair (not very many of them sold, so I had lots left). We built a house last year and moved in 2 weeks before Christmas, so there was no way I had time to make cards especially for that Christmas. Painting all the walls, grouting the tile, and just generally helping build the house took too much time. The year before (2005), I was so focused on making cards for the fore mentioned craft fair (that was held the middle of November), that I didn't have time to make cards and just sent store bought ones. This year I am determined to send handmade cards that were specifically made for my friends and family, not just ones I have sitting around extra (not that they care, but for some reason it makes a difference to me). I really wish I would have started before now, like in July, but life hasn't worked that way this year. So, around the middle of August, I was in Joanne's craft store picking up ribbon for another project (that I will blog about soon), and decided to pick up a Cuttlebug snowflake embossing folder. Then a few days later, a friend had a Stampin' Up party. Since I had spent so much money at Joanne's, I didn't have much left to spend at the party, but I did find a snowflake wheel that I thought would go with the folder and decided to pick it up. Here's my first attempt at blending the two. Not perfect yet, but it's a work in progress to find the exact one I will be making.

I finally had found the glue ink pad I've been looking for since the end of last year when I was at Joanne's in August. It basically works like a regular ink pad, but after stamping with it, you heat it with a heat gun and it becomes tacky, making the perfect surface to adhere Perfect Pearls, glitter, small beads, Pearl Ex powder, etc. I'm still getting the hang of it, but it basically works like the Stampin' Up Heat and Stick powder, but cuts out the extra step of stamping with ink and then adding the powder. You just stamp with the glue pad. I used it to ink the wheel (which is on the light blue paper) and I then added white Perfect Pearl to the images after heating it. I also rubbed the glue pad over the embossed design on the dark blue paper and then added the white Perfect Pearl powder to that too. I then added a small metal saying from Lasting Impressions for Paper that says "Happy Holidays". That is one of my least favorite parts, I think the metal should probably be either silver or nickel, but this is what I had. The two colors of blue didn't work as well together once the designs were added as I would have liked, and I don't think the images from the wheels pop enough yet.

A close up showing the metal phrase, the wheel image, and the perfect pearls added to the embossed image.

So, take two will change several things: If I use metal, it will be silver or nickel finish. I may just stamp a saying on a tag, find a ribbon with a saying that I like or something like that. I will find colors that work better together. I will experiment and try to make the images from the wheel pop a little better.

But all in all, a good start!

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

Make and Take Scrapbook Pages

I like these pages, but I think I might sell them at the craft fair next week. I've had them for a while and haven't used them yet, so my guess is they just don't mesh that well with my scrapbooking style.

This one was a workshop project from a Stampin' Up workshop. The title says "Snow Play" and it has those pretty snowflakes stamped all over the bottom of the blue and the white cardstock. Like I said, really pretty, just not really my style, since the only 8 1/2 x 11 scrapbooks I do are my boys' ones and these snowflakes just strike me as a little too elegant for a boys' scrapbook.

This one I did as a make and take at a crop I went to a while ago. All the paper is by Ann Griffin, if I remember correctly (it's old enough that I can't find the paper online, sorry). It was definitely fun folding that paper mat so that it looked like that. Tons of scoring and then folding and scoring again. It's really pretty, but I so seldom do one picture pages that I haven't used it yet. Oh well.

Winter and Christmas cards

I don't have a lot of these to post right now, since I used my stash last Christmas since we had just moved (December 9th) and I hadn't had time to make any (painting our new house took FOREVER, the last week in October and the whole month of November). But here are the few I have:

This one was fun to make. I stamped the polar bear on white card stock and cut him out. I then stamped my versamark pad on white card stock, covered it with holographic embossing powder mixed with clear embossing powder (I've found the holographic doesn't work well by itself) and heat embossed it. I then tore snowbanks out of the now sparkly white card stock. I cut along the polar bear's head so he could be resting his head on the front snow bank and layered everything on gray cardstock (I have a few in a light blue also) after stamping snowflakes on the cardstock. I love the look of it.

Look, the blue one! Figured if I was taking all of the pictures again, I'd take a picture of the blue polar bear card also.

I held a Stampin' Up workshop and got this set as a hostess prize. It's called riveting. This one says "Happy Holidays" around the outer ring and has a tree in the inner ring. Used my versamark pad for the highlight on the outer ring. I had saved this silver ribbon from a Christmas present I got last year knowing I'd love to use it on cards. I mounted the one happy holidays on 3d mounting tape and hung the present charm from it.

Another one the same as the last, but this one has an ornament charm instead of the present charm.

As I was going through my various card holders getting out the cards again this morning, I found this card we were supposed to give to one of my husband's friends for Christmas last year that he never gave them. Pretty simple, but I like the look.

Danielle