Over the Top award

I received this award from two wonderful ladies, Sandy and JeanneLee!!  Please go check out their blogs!!!

The rules are:

I need to pass this award on to five people and let them know on their blogs. And I need to answer a list of questions with ONE word (this is hard! I can be talking when I'm typing lol)

So I'm passing this award on to these fabulous ladies, please check them out!

Magoo

Phlen

TheBugBytes

Cindy

Slyn

1.Where is your cell phone? here

2. Your hair? brown

3. Your mother? florida

4. Your father? closer

5. Your favorite food? mexican

6. Your dream last night? forgotten

7. Your favorite drink? rootbeer

8. Your dream/goal? SAHM

9. What room are you in? craftroom

10. Your hobby? crafts

11. Your fear? loss

12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? loved

13. Where were you last night? home

14. Something that you aren't? pessimistic

15. Muffins? okay

16. Wish list item? cartridges

17. Where did you grow up? Iowa

18. Last thing you did? breakfast

19. What are you wearing? jammies

20. Your TV? off

21. Your Pets? cats

22. Friends? many

23. Your life? interesting

24. Your mood? optimistic

25. Missing Someone? mom

26. vehicle? Saturn

27. Something your not wearing? makeup

28. Your favorite store? Scrapaganza

29. Your favorite color? blue

30. When was the last time you laughed? today

31. Last time you cried? week

32. Your best friend? no

33. One place that I go to over and over? Scrapaganza....

34. Facebook? rarely

35. Favorite place to eat? restaurants

Honest Scrap Award

A little late coming! lol... Sandy gave me this award, she is such a sweetie and really has inspired me in the past month. I'm so glad I discovered her blog. Check it out!  Thank you so much Sandy!

There are rules to the award! 
Say thank you and give a link to the presenter of the award
Share “10 Honest Things” about myself
Present the award to 9 other bloggers whose blogs I find brilliant in content and/or design or to those who have encouraged me
Be sure to tell the 9 bloggers chosen that you are giving them the Honest Scrap award and provide the guidelines for them.

Here is my list of honest things:
1. I am a TERRIBLE procrastinator.  Sandy gave me this award almost a month ago and I'm just now getting it posted. Terrible. 
2. I am lazy sometimes. hmmm... probably more often than I'm willing to admit. lol
3. I want to be a work-at-home mom in the worst way, but in this economy, I'd have to win the lottery. 
4. I am type 2 diabetic and I hate it. And I'm not very good at controlling it and I hate that too.
5. I have serious issues with self-hate. I do it an awful lot and it's not healthy. But I do it in secret so people around me don't know how much I hate about myself.
6. I too struggle with depression. Have almost all my life but finally admitted it a few years ago, and only just this year decided to try medication. 
7. I love my son so much that I would do anything for him. Anything.
8. I am a TERRIBLE housekeeper. Terrible.  It takes time away from my son and scrapping.
9. I'm not much better at being a wife. I want to work on that. 
10. I love everything about scrapbooking, the art of it, the community locally and the internet community. I keeps me going when the icky things bring me down.

I hope I can find 9 ladies to share this with! It's hard as I don't know very many scrappy ladies yet! I will start with the first scrappers I met, who've encouraged me and inspired me since I began scrapping last year and go from there.  These ladies are awesome! Many of them scrap at the ScrapbookDreamer.com forum, the first place I found online. Check that out too! 

Penny
Kathi
Laura G.
Dawn
Michelle
Melanie
Rachel
Zoe - Ceyda's Scrapbooks
Regina

Classes and Holiday Swarm Crop

I'm organizing a crop here in my town!!!  If you live near the Quad Cities IA/IL and you want to crop with at least 6 foot of table and electric at your table (so you can have your cricut or other electronic toys at your table)... come play at this crop!

You can download the Holiday Swarm Crop flyer here.

All the info you need to register is there.

I'm also teaching Cricut classes at the local scrapbook store, Scrapaganza! My first class, Beginning Expression, is on sunday and is nearly sold out! If you want to get one of the last remaining 4 spaces (as of friday night) then go to the Scrapaganza website and contact them to see if there are spots remaining!

Sharing Gypsy files!

It's a great day! The newest updates allow us to share our Gypsy cut files. Mine can be found in the sidebar to the right.

If you do not own a gypsy, but you have DS, you can still download the file. Make sure you have the most current version of Design Studio on your computer. Open DS, then open the .gypsy cut file in DS. You can convert the .gypsy file in DS to a .cut file, save it and use it to cut for your own projects! How cool is that!

All I ask is that you leave me some love in my comments if you download my files. Enjoy!

ICS #41

Hey all! reveal day at Inspirational Card Sketches! This was a wonderful sketch to work with this week!

You may have noticed, I'm not much of a stamper. I tried but I couldn't get into it, really. I have stamps, but I prefer playing with the paper. :)  My favorite cards I make with my cricut or by fussy cutting. The card for this week's ICS sketch is definitely a cricut card! LOL

I used some BG papers from last year's scraps, some cardstock and some white chipboard. The branch, squirrel and snowflakes are all from Winter Woodland. I used Martha Stewarts branch punch for the greenery. You know what I did? A few weeks ago I grabbed a bunch of scrap cardstock in several shades of green and just punched it all with the branch punch. I have a box of these punches just waiting to be used so I don't have to bother punching them out while I'm putting together a card. Very handy!

 

 

The snowflakes in white chipboard have been stickled with Diamond stickles. The 'berries' are red microbeads that are in a type of glue that holds the beads together and dries and glues the beads to the paper. Love that stuff! My good friend Anna sent me the jar. 

The sentiment starts on the outside with the "we wish you..." which are mini letter rubons on a tag that I hand cut. The inside will finish the sentiment, which I will probably write or type later when I decide who I'm sending the card to. :)  I'm really pleased with this card. At first I thought I'd cut the squirrel too big, as I'd intended him to be a little smaller and for there to be more negative space, but now I like him big like that.

Thanks for looking!

Journey - Gypsy Spot Challenge

It's the first challenge for the new blog, Gypsy Spot!  If you are a Gypsy fan, a cricut fan or just a die cut fan, you are sure to find a lot of inspiration at the Gypsy Spot! If you don't know much about the Gypsy, come to the blog and see what we are doing with it. It is a personal design studio for the cricut, it allows papercrafters to take their ability to design on the go... also carrying all their cricut cartridges as well, which means we can travel to crops a lot lighter than ever!

I designed this to be a companion layout for my "Only 15" layout of my mother. This is my dad at graduation from high school. I fell in love with the K & Co "Blue Awning" paper pad that I found and I got it in the mail just as I was designing this project for the Gypsy Spot. Knew I had to use them for this layout! I also used Bazzill cardstock, Prima bling, Stickles, an EK border punch, and a couple K & Co. ephemera pieces I had laying around.

The first challenge at the Gypsy Spot that this was made for is to use either of the cartridges that came pre-installed on the Gypsy: Gypsy Wanderings or Gypsy Font, or both. I chose to use Gypsy Wanderings since it had EVERYTHING I needed for this layout. The marquee shape that is the background the photo is adhered to and the journal block were cut with GW.

All three leaf cuts are on Gypsy Wanderings, as well as the dragonfly. After I adhered the leaves and dragonflies to the layout, I went over them with stickles. The leaves have Distress Peeled Paint stickles and the Dragonflies have Frosted Lace stickles.

The word "Journey" can be found in Gypsy Wanderings as well, in one of the function keys. Up till now I rarely used the shadow features but I'm really liking the effect that shadowing a cut has. I applied Distress Faded Jeans stickles to the word. That particular color went with this paper perfectly.

I didn't have to do anything fancy with any of these cuts. I simply cut the leaves in a couple sizes, the word to fit the spot I wanted it to go. I'm finding that the Gypsy Wanderings cart is really versatile and has a lot of cuts in it that can be used for entire layouts.

Thank you for visiting!

random post

I just noticed I hadn't posted for a week! lol... thought I'd update so it doesn't look like I fell off the edge of the earth. I can't believe I have so many followers!!! wow!

This past weekend the hubby, my son and I went to a science fiction convention. What's that you ask? It's basically a weekend long geek party. There are authors, artists, science fiction fans all gathered for a weekend at a hotel, with costume contests, panel discussions with such topics as "What is Steampunk" (a sub-genre of science fiction with such literary beginnings as Jules Verne and more recent installments from movies like Wild Wild West) and the "History of Women Writers", an art show and a lot more... Anyway, we had a great time, renewed acquaintances, hooked up with friends. My son got to wear his costumes and he charmed everyone he saw. (he's VERY social) I got tapped to judge the costume contest so I didn't get the pictures I wanted to take. :(

I haven't had time since then to scrap!! The weekend is coming, which is going to be busy busy! Trick or treat is friday night here and I have a crop at the LSS after that to go to! crazy times! :)  Well, off to surf my list of blogs that I like to visit! You all have a great week!
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