First Day

More Mama-razzi from Bo Bunny! I do love this line! So this is the first day we took Kevin to day care. Up till then he'd been at home with daddy in the morning and at a babysitting friend's house in the afternoon. He was not at all happy that day... combo of having this new thing happening and he was also coming down with his first cold of the winter, poor kid.

Anyway, in addition to using a bunch of stuff from the Mama-razzi line, I also cut scissors and a pencil from the cricut cart Speaking of School. I borrowed the cart at a crop, but I think I may have to put it on my to-buy list for someday. I cut the title too, but now I can't remember what font! Don Juan maybe.  I also used a bit of Tim Holtz' film strip ribbon, which goes perfect with this line of papers. Don't know why I didn't think of that earlier. lol

I hope to be a little less busy this week (ha!) so maybe I can post some more stuff. Last week was crazy! I think I only got online twice to check email and didn't really get online for much else.

Thanks for looking though! Come back soon because I really do have more to post soon. ;)

Jello or Cone?

Check out this new Bo Bunny line! Mama-razzi! and boy is it awesome! I did this layout for Scrapaganza!, they put the line out friday afternoon and I was there cropping, and had to do a layout right away!

I had taken those photos over a year ago with my cell phone at a restaurant, my son had both jello and an ice cream cone (this was before we knew he was allergic to dairy) and he couldn't decide which one to eat first... so he ended up eating both at the same time. Anyway, the watching him was hilarious and I had to take a million pictures while he did it. I knew when I started scrapbooking just how I wanted to scrap these but waited for just the right papers. I'm so glad Bo Bunny read my mind and supplied the perfect papers.

The filmstrips are cut from Mickey & Friends, but I manipulated them on my Gypsy so that the inside square was 2x2 to fit my pre-cut photos.The title is cut from Stamped.

In addition to the papers in the line, I also bought the pad of coordinating mini album papers which I wasn't sure was a good idea but now I'm glad I did. Some of them are pre-cut (to fit Bo Bunny's new mini albums) and some are just mini versions of the 12x12 papers. I realize now that the pad was a good buy because I don't have to cut up my big sheets to make mats and I also used the smaller paper from the pad to do the title on this, saving my big sheet but allowing me to do coordinating cuts. I bought the brads, the chipboard stickers and the stamp that is the film board (whatever that thing is called). Love that stamp! I'm not a big stamper but sometimes I like those interesting ones.

I have more to post soon, thanks for looking!

Paper Psanky

I love doing psanky (Ukrainian egg decorating) but it's very time consuming and I am still at a beginner level even though I've made several eggs. It's probably the most complicated craft I've ever done. I'm thinking I won't have time this year to do it. But my Yevshan catalog came today and as I browsed it, I thought... can my cricut and I make a paper version?  So, I did. lol...

I used my gypsy to design it. I'm not sure how true to the traditional designs I was able to stay, but I think I came close. If you are interested in learning more about psanky and about the designs and their meanings, try LearnPysanky.com.  Here are the cartridges I used:  Accent Essentials (various shape elements), Easter 2010 (egg), George (triangle), Home Accents (half circle border), Life is a Beach (wave border), Wild Card (bird).

The egg is about 6 inches tall, and about 4 inches wide, give or take. After I glued all the peices on, I did some doodling with a white gel pen to add some designs that are typical of psanky. Then, I coated the whole thing in a light coat of Glossy Accents to mimic the shine of varnish that most eggs get coated in. I thought I made a mistake in using a foam brush to apply the Glossy Accents, but it dried okay.

Not sure what I'll do with this... I wish I could find some photos of me and my friends actually doing psanky, but I don't think I have any. I'm sure I'll find a use for this. :)

Edited to add cut files:
Since I don't have time to write a full tutorial, I do want to say that the 2 eggs in the cut file are white (bottom layer, blank egg) and black (2nd layer, has some cuts out). The rest is pieced on top of the black.

Gypsy cut file for Psanky paper egg
Design Studio cut file for Psanky paper egg

Thanks for looking!

May Day - The Story Matters Kit & SOUS!

Happy Friday all!
One of my favorite challenge blogs turned into a Kit Club in February. The Story Matters is now the name of Scrapaganza's mail order subscription kit club. They are gearing up for their official Grand Opening launch of their website in May, but since February they have been selling subscriptions to their introductory kits. I missed out on the first kit, they sold out in 10 days!  So I am signed up now, and got my first kit last week. Finally I was able to dig into it for my first layout. The only thing in this layout not from the kit is my journaling paper, the burlap flower, and the scrap I used to cut my title.  Here's the peek of the kit!

The nice thing about these kits (and I haven't tried other kits yet so I don't know if this is standard), is that they break up packs of things so I don't have to buy whole packs which never get completely used up, and then sit in my stash forever, getting old and staying unused... Here I get to sample a bunch of things and I will use up the whole kit and not be stuck with a big pack of ephemera cards I won't use up... Also, Scrapaganza has Charlene the Button Diva making exclusive buttons just for these kits. I adore Charlene's buttons, I used the red flower one on this layout. They also have a few people shopping for vintage ephemera and other vintage items to make these kits unique. I love vintage stuff on my layouts. I can't wait to use the milk bottle cap that came with this kit.

I used the sketch at Stuck On You Sketches to get my inspiration. SOUS is also one of my top fav challenge blogs, mainly because I LOVE LOVE LOVE the work those ladies do over there. Go check them out!

Here's a close up of the burlap flower.

I was at the store, looking through the accucut dies and found a flower die. I know cricuts can cut fabric but I am lazy, I didn't feel like figuring out if it can cut burlap. So I ran some burlap through the accucut. :) I spritzed the bottom flower layer with glimmermist in a color that went well with the flower button.

The leaves were cut on my cricut using Lyrical Letters. The rest of my cuts were from Songbird: the title (welded on my gypsy) and the two top layers of patterned paper. The scalloped yellow cardstock was part of the kit.

I can hardly wait to use up the rest of the kit!

And hey, if you subscribe, there are prizes to be had (if they aren't sold out of March already!). Mention that Michele sent you and I might get a prize too!  It's only $25 to subscribe for the monthly kit, and you can opt out of a kit if you don't like the sneak peek!

Butterfly Wings

Believe it or not, there is no cricut on this page. *gasp*  LOL
Scrapaganza has an in-store kit club and I'm designing for it now. This page uses a few of the papers in the kit. I totally went out of my comfort zone on this, as I am not really a big fan of lime green unless it is in small doses. But I got the idea for this and went with it, and I kind of like it. 

The butterfly especially. The big butterfly was an experiment. I actually traced and cut this out using a cover from a pad of K&Co paper that had a butterfly cut out of the front. I inked the edges of the butterfly with brown, then coated the whole thing with a good coat of the Tim Holtz Crackle Paint in the clear rock candy. OMG... I LOVE this paint! I forsee using this bottle up rapidly and moving on to another bottle soon. LOL. When the butterfly dried, it curled but that was ok.   Once dry, I put liquid glue (3-in-1 craft glue) on the center and pressed it onto the layout where I wanted it. Then working from the center out, I slowly glued, uncurled and held down the paper gently till the whole butterfly was glued down. I left the very edges to curl up still as that looked cool. You have to work slowly and gently when uncurling it because the crackle paint can flake off if you are too rough with it.

 The rest is scallop circle punch for the flowers and a small butterfly punch.

The kit included letter stickers and word stickers but neither of those fit the idea of this layout that I had in my head. But I love mini alpha stickers. However, I was limited in what I could use that wasn't in the kit, soooo.... I just cut up the word stickers to make my mini-alpha title. :) 

So, the layout is really bright, and hurts my eyes almost to look at it. I'm still not a fan of this much lime green. But hey, I like the layout still.  Oh, and there is a hidden journaling tag behind the photo, which basically talks about me wanting to feel my baby move and that I'd been told it usually feels like butterfly wings the first few times.

Thanks for looking!

I got awards!

I'm not a very good blogger. I get so busy between day job, family and trying to find time to scrap that surfing and blogging take a back seat! But people still give me awards I probably don't deserve! 

 

 Thank you so much to Sheila of She's A Sassy Lady and Cindy of  Crazy for Crafting!!!

Those two ladies are seriously creative and crafty, and have been such an inspiration to me. I would probably never have tried some of the things I have with my Gypsy if it weren't for them. Everyone needs to follow the work of those two!!!

Since I'm so late at getting my awards posted and picking the bloggers out that are supposed to receive it from me, I'm probably going to award someone who's already gotten it! Sorry about that but that's the way it is. :)  I'm also bad about leaving comments as I usually only have 15 minutes to surf my whole blog list!

So here are 6 blogs to see and their deserving authors:

Zoe at Ceyda's Scrapbooks - I know Zoe from Scrapbook Dreamer message board and she does beautiful work. Check her out!

Linda at Studio L3 - Lovin her work! I've followed for a little bit now and her stuff is fun and I love the artsy look!

Mel at Through Our Children's Eyes - Mel has been an inspiration to me since I first saw her work. Go see!

Annette at My Paper Trail - I love her projects, they are so cute! Go see that minibook she posted last week!

Janet - She's not to far from me geographically, we even shop at the same LSS, but I have yet to chat with her face to face! She does wonderful work though, so go check her blog out!

Rachel at Happay Scraps - Rachel has been another big inspiration to me, and her challenges at ScrapbookDreamer always take me out of my comfort zone to explore something I haven't tried before. Go check out her work!

Then I got this award:

This award came from Linda at Ladybug Lair and Pam at The Bug Bytes!  Linda is the sweet sweet lady who won my first ever blog candy. Pam is the creative and smart lady who I go to whenever I have a question about my Gypsy. I don't even have to ask her the question, she's always had the answer already posted on her blog or on cricut.com. But you have to go check out her teapot gypsy cut file too, wow!

The only problem is, I don't think I can make a list of 15 blogs to award this to. It took me all afternoon to write this post, between having to give my attention to my son (who is sick for the 50th time this winter) and trying to find someone who had not gotten the award. So I'm going to jump the track and do something different.
If you've never won a blog award, please grab the award (save the picture to your computer and post it on your blog), leave me a comment with your blog url so I can post your beautiful blog on my blog links list. The reason I'm doing it this way (beyond the obvious time saving reason) is that there are a bunch of blogs that I've surfed to through other people's blogs that I haven't had time to add to my links list, and I want to come back to your blogs!  So this way, I get a bunch of new blogs to visit and a bunch of deserving people get an award. :)

The conditions of this award are, apparently, to award it to 15 other blogs and to list 7 things about yourself. Uhg... I guess since I'm cheating on the giving it out part, I should comply with the 7 things... sigh.
1. I was 40 when I had my son, my first and only kid!
2. I'm a retired belly dance teacher.
3. one of my favorite things to do is play dress up. I love costumes! (I have never grown up)
4. I am an armchair "egyptologist".
5. I am also an armchair "astronomer" though it's easier to get out of the house with that one. Unfortunately my telescope has collected dust for years.
6. I want to win the lottery so I can be a snowbird, and live in florida during the winter.
7. I want to go to one of those beaches in Greece where everyone is topless and no one cares what anyone looks like. I heard they exist. lol

ok, I'm done!