Hybrid 4th of July Inspiration

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again - I'm a traditional scrapbooker in that I love the feel, texture and dimension that I can get when I work with paper, ribbon and whatever else I can find to throw on my page.

Working solely in digital doesn't allow me to get my fingers dirty - but I also love playing with my computer. I don't know who discovered hybrid scrapbooking - but they are awesome - and it's the perfect solution to my dilemma of wanting to play with paper AND my computer!

Usually I edit my photos and create my journaling on my computer. But, I did some different things on this 4th of July page I created for Spotted Canary.

Look at the background paper, the one with the checks on it - now LOOK really close - you can see that it's really a photo that I did some fun things to in Photoshop Elements 7. Now, look at the photo in the center of the page - the one of the fireworks - it's the same photo that I used to make my patterned paper - the one with the checks on it in the background behind the photos.

It came out really cool, if you want the complete instructions on how I created this page, the background photo and get the supply list, you can find all of these here (and more great inspiration) - at the Spotted Canary site.

Just in case you were wondering, the star on the top center row of photos is really a lemon tart decorated with blueberries and rasperries - and it was delicious!

In other Spotted Canary news, I'll be hosting the July Challenge over in the Challenge section of the Spotted Canary Forum - I hope you'll fly on over and play along - it's going to be fun. Check back for the details of the Challenge on July 1st - or just check the forum.

I've got a busy two or three days so I don't think I will have a chance to post until the end of the week. I hope you had a great weekend - THANKS for stopping by!

Art is in the Cards Cracked Up Swap

I finally finished my ATC's for the cracked swap. Here's what they looked like the other day when I first posted about them....Something wasn't quite right - so I decided the ribbon didn't work and they needed some stitching. Though, a couple made it through with stitching on them.

I love how the Tim Holtz Clear Rock Candy looks on the first layer of the stamp, I used a couple of thick coats to get a nice thick cracked look. But, before I did that, I stamped the image from Inkadinkado 2 times for each ATC on white cardstock. For the base layer I added some color with a light blue ink pad and then liberally brushed them with a couple of coats Clear Rock Candy and let them dry. For the second layer I colored them with Copic Markers and cut each image in half before I glued them to the Clear Rock Candy layer.

When the Rock Candy Crackle was dry I collaged the image onto vintage papers and added an ATC stamp to the back. I printed the saying on white card stock, and sprayed it a with brown and blue Tattered Angels. When I had all these elements together, I stitched each card and added the trading information on the back and I was done.....

I'm pleased with the way my Cracked Up ATC came out. You can see some of the other ATC's here at the new Arts in the Cards blog....

thanks for stopping by - I hope you are enjoying your summer so far and enjoy your weekend!

Vintage Holiday Frenzy

Wednesday I drove to to Topsfield to meet with Sue Pelletier, and Catherine Bickford from Art Escape for a planning strategy for the workshop we'll be having this November!

I'm really excited - the projects we've got lined up are going to knock your socks off. A fun, collaborative project for Friday night, and then 3 projects on Saturday and then finishing up any unfinished projects on Sunday. It's going to be so much fun, but space is limited - so I suggest you sign up early if you want to come.

Here's Sue with some of her snowmen - they were on the cover of Cloth, Paper Scissors last year. I love them! I have a little snowman collection, I may have to commission her to make me one to add to my collection!

Here I am getting a little silly, but hey - I can't help it I was having a great time.

THANKS for stopping by, enjoy your weekend.

Introducing College Diva at the New England Bloggers Carnival

The New England Bloggers are celebrating the beginning of summer with a blog carnival introducing our readers to someone who is a New England Blogger. You can join in if you are a blogger and from New England. There is link-up to all the participants is at the bottom. I hope you get a chance to visit some and maybe make a new bloggy friend.

I discovered a lovely Mixed Media artist in Kathryn Antyr of College Diva. She’s a lovely college artist from New Hampshire! You should check out some of the photos she’s taken of her Ikebana flower arrangements, VERY beautiful! You’ll definitely be inspired by Kathryn’s blog!

Thanks for stopping by, hope you enjoy the rest of the stops on this Carnival!

The Road to Happiness....

is through making art.....

Well for me, that's partially true - the other part of the road is the happiness that my family brings me.

I've had this page sitting on my desk - moving it from here to there since last Thursday. First I wanted to find the perfect picture - then I ran out of printer ink and photo paper - then I got too busy to work on it.

I wish I had a shirt that says artGirl - but I don't. I stamped this on my shirt with a tiny little stamp I picked up from RedLead a while back. I wish they were closer - MUCH closer.

It was a busy weekend around here - a couple of thunderstorms here and there - a lovely evening out at Soakology in Portland to treat my husband for Father's Day - and an awesome dinner on Sunday with my family.

Thanks for stopping by.... enjoy your day!

He was Cracking up on the inside...

Work in progress....the stamp is from Inkadinkado.

Need to finish up and get them in the mail to my swap sisters. The theme for this swap was Cracked - hence the title he was cracking up on the inside, LOL. Some of the ATC's I've gotten so far are very cool!

Sorry this is short and sweet, I've got a million things to do today - and it's the LAST day of school, let the summer fun begin!! Thanks for stopping by - enjoy your day....it's almost the weekend!

Sew Somerset - Summer 2010

It was a beautiful day around here today - I managed to work in my garden for about 10 minutes watering and weeding my tomatoes and beans - but it needs about an hour of undivided attention. And fertilizer. Hopefully tomorrow I can find that hour but I don't plan on leaving the house so the fertilizer may have to wait for another day. The weeds may wait for another day too, LOL.

I'm still dreaming of the pajama day on Friday......

I keep forgetting to share one of my favorite publications with you. I recently received the Summer 2010 Issue of Sew Somerset in the mail. It's jam packed full of beautiful creations - and a couple of those pages are featuring some projects I made. I just love the project on the cover! No, it's not mine.

The first two pages of my article.....THANK you Sew Somerset for choosing my projects and writing to publish in your beautiful magazine!

Also wanted to share a quick card I made a while back - a long while back - it was published in a different issue of Sew Somerset - and I just recieved it back from them last week. I decided to give it to my son's teacher along with a Starbucks gift card. She's been a wonderful teacher and made an extra effort to work with him on some advanced reading and science projects.

I can't believe it's Wednesday already. I'm beginning to plan my classes for the Fall and Winter at My Creative Classroom this week. And, don't forget that "Get Creative with Punches" - a fun 4 week punch class also at My Creative Classroom - starts on Friday, July 9th. You've got plenty of time to register here!

Enjoy your day and thanks for stopping by....hope your summer is coming along nicely!

Nothing like a Craft Day with Great friends!

It's amazing how spending time with good friends doing something that you love can renew and refresh your spirit. I've been working so hard on assignments for the last long bit of time (can't remember how long.....) that I really haven't had a chance to do anything remotely like what I did today - it was a wonderful day! We had so much fun just working on our junk, talking and laughing - and eating the lovely lunch that Karen made - I just have to say it again - I had a great day!

It was nice working in Karen's newly designed studio - makes me want to get mine done even more! She has so much storage space and everything is so organized - it's simply devine!

Kelley had a quilt that she needed to finish for her nursery, it is going to be a BEAUTIFUL quilt! I think she really wanted to work on what we were making, but she's under the gun to get it done, next time she'll get to play though!

Karen and I made our tin can people. We did a lot of brainstorming to figure out the best way to do things. Love that part!

Oooh, Karen's head looks nice on my Tin Can lady. :-)

I must have said something funny, Karen's laughing at me again, LOL. I thought it was funny that Karen and I both decided to use keys for our feet. I packed my junk up last night and threw two different sized feet in my box and she had a pile of goodies on her work table that had the two keys on top. Great minds think alike!

This is what she looked like before I left Karen's (mine is on the right, Karen's on the left.) When I got home I couldn't stop fiddling with her .....and ended up making some drastic changes to her outfit!

I decided she needed to start wearing a dress and lose the quote. I like her much better now. The pink velvet ribbon and lace really are the perfect addition.

I don't think these pictures really do her justice, she looks MUCH better in person! I had so much fun making my Tin Can Lady that I have the body of another one all done - Tin Can Lady #2 just needs a head. Now - I'll just have to find some old junkie ones that will adorn my Tin Can Gal.

Thanks for stopping by, enjoy your day!

Gettin' My Craft On....

I'm getting ready to go out for the day and craft with two of my favorite crafting pals today, a much needed respit from assignments and due dates. Though it's right back at it tomorrow because I've got more due on Wednesday and a HUGE list of instructions due on Friday!! I'm hoping for a rain day on Friday so the boy and I can have a pajama day on the first day of his summer vacation and I can get those instructions written up and out of here!

We saw these fun little gals on our trek to Brimfield. I picked up a HUGE bag of spice cans like this at a yard sale a couple of weeks ago and we're going to try our hands at making some. Need to get motivated and get in the shower!

Thanks for stopping by, enjoy your MONDAY!

Butt Dialin' Etiquette

Have you ever butt dialed anyone with your phone because it wasn't in the case or you forgot to lock the screen?? I have - like 15 times since I lost my phone case last week. Not sure if lost is the appropriate word - more like I accidentally threw it away last week when I was cleaning out my car at Panerra Bread because I like to use their garbage can instead of my own. Maybe that was Karma that came and stole my phone case...hmmm.

Anyway, after I butt dialed my husband's voice mail for like 2 minutes and my friend Hannah and whoever else I decided that I needed a new phone case. I had picked up this cute felt purse at AC Moore last fall to make a fancy little sling purse for my niece for Christmas butt never got around to it.... I think it got lost in the pile of other good intentions that I was going to make.

As I was cleaning up from a crafting frenzy this last week or so that Ican'ttellyouaboutuntilmuchlater I found my niece's possible Christmas present and decided it would be perfect for my phone - but it was pretty plain and had a strap long enough so you could sling it around your shoulder or across your chest. I cut the strap off so it would fit in my purse nicely and then got to work on a little design to make it more like something I would want to carry around in public.

I pawed through my stash of stuff and found some little squares of wool felt that the lovely ladies of ArtGirlz gave me eons ago - and an idea finally came together.

I spent about 30 minutes cutting circles from the felt and gluing them to the little case with craft glue to keep them in place and then I spent about 2 hours stitching all of them on.

I am totally loving it, my phone is stylin' now - and no more butt dialing my friends, my husband, the school and whoever else I called over the last week!

Thanks for stopping by, enjoy your weekend!

More of my daily dose.....

I'm out of printer ink, and with no new pictures already printed - I dug through pictures leftover from ones I printed for EK Success pages to find these to make my page yesterday. Well, I started it yesterday and finished it up this morning while I was waiting on a very important shipment.

You can't tell, but the shirt my husband is wearing has a little teeny bit of yellow print on it. I used my brandy spanky new Big Shot to cut the Nestibilities label from a piece of patterned paper, I also stitched the chipboard letters in place. Note to self, wait for the ink to dry before sewing with white thread, LOL. OH, and be sure to wipe the presser foot clean before stitching on white fabric. No harm done, and I like the way the letters look - I like the way the entire page came out.

In these pictures we had hiked up a very steep but short mountain to do some rock hounding. We were looking for tourmaline but didn't find anything worth saving really. Our son collects rocks (well he collects everything, LOL) and he really enjoyed the hike but was taking a rest when I took this picture - it was a pretty hot day. I hope we have time to do some rock hounding this summer, it was a lot of fun. What's your favorite thing to do in the summer besides going to the beach?

I am a little disappointed that I didn't have the chance to make a page today - to many irons in the fire....but I can't share that until later, MUCH later.

Hopefully I can get back to a page a day (or a craft for myself a day) next week. I've got several rush jobs to do over the rest of the week and the weekend and don't think I'm going to have the time.

Thanks for stopping by - enjoy your day! It's almost FRidAy, yeah!

a CREATIVE start to my day!!

I was so inspired by the two scrapbook pages I made using Nat's beautiful papers that I got up - got my son off to school and got into the studio to scrapbook a page just for ME. It was lovely and came together perfectly - and quickly too.

If only I could find a half an hour every day to do this I'd be able to use up the plethora of supplies (both new and OLD) hanging out in piles in there and have a ton of scrapbook pages ready for albums.

Seriously though, my studio is a complete disaster - with piles and boxes of products, projects, clutter and crap everywhere! It's too much of a disaster to show pictures right now, depressing really. There are many days where I can't stand to go in there. I've been squirreling away my money for almost a year now so I can make it over, now I just need to get in gear and do it. I started getting serious about wanting to do make my studio over when I saw Donna Downey's new studio. AMAZING. Inspiring. A great space to work in. Though, I was totally inspired by what she did - I'm not going to use Ikea cabinetry - for one - it's a LONG drive to Ikea - and two - I'd have to hire someone to put it together and there goes any savings.

I do plan on getting lining two walls with base cabinets with two work spaces - one for my computer and one for my sewing machine. I also am planning on having white bead board wainscoting with two shelves over to store my punches and little jars, favorite trinkets on....but I think one wall is going to be open shelving with labeled baskets to store all the junk that doesn't fit in the drawers.

And lighting, there will be NEW lighting to brighten the place up. It's really hard to work in there or even take pictures of my work because of the shadows cast from the spotlights.

Thanks for stopping by - please send any good organization, lighting or cool studio ideas my way if you have a minute or two, TTFN‼

More of Nat's Beautiful Papers

I had so much fun making the first page with Nat's papers that I posted yesterday that I couldn't wait for dinner to be over and the kitchen cleaned up on Sunday night so I get into the studio and make some more!

This one came together so quickly - I love how Nat's papers look with the blue 7 Gypsies polka dot tape and the Basic Grey paper.

Enjoy your day, and be sure to check out all of Nat's papers here! Thanks for stopping by!

Beautiful Papers by Nat Kalbach

My friend Nat recently sent me some papers from her new - and BEAUTIFUL line of papers that she designed. I'm kind of sad that it took me so long to have an afternoon to do something with them! Today was a rainy day and after we got finished with the big laundry room makeover I MADE the time to play in my studio! oh, and the laundry room looks great too.

These papers are so pretty, Nat did a great job with them - she's very creative!

I had this picture left over from a BIG project I made for EK Success/AC Moore and decided I wanted to scrap it for my album too, I never scrapbook for myself anymore and have been missing it a lot lately.

THANK you Nat for letting me play with your pretty papers! I hope you get a chance to play with her papers as well!!

Thanks for stopping by, ENJOY your Monday.

Getting on the Copic Bandwagon

It seems like many of the arsty - fartsy - crafty people I know have jumped on the Copic Marker bandwagon. I've resisted - mainly because EK Success has had a full line of markers that I've always fallen back on when I need to add some color to a stamped project. Now that they don't have the Brushable line anymore I've been missing that spot of color here and there.

Back in May when we went to the Brimfield Antique Market we stopped at Absolutely Everything in Topsfield, MA. The salesperson (she was a REAL help, but I can't remember her name) showed me everything about Copics, and even stamped a couple images for me to play with coloring in the store. Every possible road block that I had in my mind - the reasons I had come up with not to buy them - she broke down. Replaceable tips, refillable, hundreds of colors.....well you get the picture.

So, I ended up coming home with some. When I finally got around to playing with the 6 that I had - I realized that that really wasn't enough to do anything with. So I got a small set from Dick Blick. Then I realized that I didn't have the right kind of ink to stamp with - and I kept forgetting to pick some up on my trips to JoAnn's - and now I'm finally getting to playing around with my new investment, LOL.

When I got a huge box of all the new InkaDinkaDo inks, tools, glitter and flocking powders a couple of weeks ago - I decided to have a little experiment.

I had been told (by a couple friends and the lady at Ab. Everything) that that the only stamping ink that works with Copic Markers is Memento and that because Copics are solvent markers StazOn doesn't work that great either.

This is simply NOT TRUE! But with a disclaimer on the StazOn! If you check out the image below you can see my examples. I'm a little embarrassed to show these, they are a little elementary - and the colors that I have is limited....but you gotta start somewhere!

I used an InkaDinkado Black Dye Ink Pad (top row of images), a Coffee Bean Dye Ink pad (middle row of images) and StazOn (bottom row of images).

Since I have a background in watercolor painting I approached this experiment with that in my mind - thinking the colors would mix and move around like watercolors but they don't. I did however figure out that if you want to lighten the background with a blending pen that you should apply the background color first and use a blender over the entire image, the one I like the best, and that shows this is the one on the top row in the center.

This is my favorite from my experiments, I love the way the background looks.

You can see that two of the StazOn images are ok and the butterfly on the bottom right is a little fuzzy. It appears that if you have a gentle touch with the markers on the StazOn, meaning that if you don't do a lot of blending with a blending pen or try add a lot of color to the image - the StazOn holds up to the gentle application of color using Copics, as shown in the other two images on the page. If you go crazy with the blending pen and coloring - well forget that. The solvent from the Copics causes the ink to bleed on the paper - because they are both solvent based.

Anyway, I'm happy to report that if you want to try a new kind of ink, the new DYE inks from InkaDinkado work perfectly with Copic Markers. I can see why everyone has so many of these markers though - I need to get some more so I can get the look I am going for....LOL.

Thanks for stopping by, enjoy what's left of your weekend!