Welcome to Frugal Fridays week #30

Well I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving Feast and Day- I'm still in Arkansas  and enjoying the company of my mother and I'm sure we are doing some kind of crafting as we speak-probably starting our Christmas cards or maybe we are shopping-one of the two, either one we're  having fun.
     So, here is a little tip which won't take up to much of your time-cause I know we are all busy this holiday weekend.
      Every wonder where you put that plastic cover  for your ink pad?  The lid that is to be replaced on top to keep your ink pad moist...well  that won't happen again. Just place an adhesive dot on top of the plastic lid and then put the main cover on and give a little push down, then the next time you take off the main lid the plastic lid will remain inside and you will never lose it again...AHHHaa great idea-isn't it? I thought so, when I first read about this in a scrapbooking tip book awhile back and I just now remembered I had done this to all my ink pads that had this kind of lid and I wanted to share it with you.

2 Clowns-Jenna and Izzy

Here is my take of Sketch #88 over at The Scrappiest of my two Eskies dressed as clowns for Halloween this year- Aren't they the cutest girls? Well I thinks so- but I'm a little bias. Well, I used  several Halloween papers, also for the mats on photo's, ribbons, halloween buttons on the flag banner which I cut out and added circle punches to stamp the title on and used pop dots, trick or treat and other chipboard embellies-  and inked edges.

Welcome to Frugal Fridays week #29

Wow, time is flying by it's almost Thanksgiving where did the month of November go? This week I thought I'd talk a little about preparing one for a scrapbooking retreat or crop since I just got back from one last week. Mine was a 3 day retreat-and I accomplish alot -I did 30 layouts (12x12 pages) and only because I was very prepared.
     About a week before my retreat I started to do power layouts of the photos I wanted to work on during this time. First, I choose the photos, then picked a sketch , then choose all the papers and kinda figured out what type of embellishments I might use. I wrote this all done in a book (drew a little sketch of my page ideas) and wrote all the supplies I would need for this layout. I then paper clipped all the papers, photos and any misc. embellishments that I had (put into a plastic baggie) then I put all the power layouts in a 12 z 12 plastic box to bring with me. I did this for 34 pages-which I thought I could finish during my 48 hour retreat (you could do what ever you think you could  work on). 
     Then the day before my retreat I packed up my supplies that I had listed on each page that I would need to do that layout. And of course, all my everyday tools and misc supplies that I would need ( adhesives, tapes, glues, inks etc.) This sounds like a bit of work-but it's really not-considering I only packed what I needed and didn't have to cart so much stuff with me, especially papers which are so heavy. I did bring a box of scraps and some plain cardstock that I might need for small cuts.
     When I arrived at the retreat I was already to go with my power layouts and my little sketch book- while others were deciding what to do and see if they had the supplies that they needed- I was already way ahead of them and was having fun, relaxing and scrapping away.

In fact during the retreat they had a contest called Parade of Pages, where everyone got to vote on their favorite layout and the page that I entered in the contest called "Grandma's are Special" won 1st place- I was so excited about this and this page took me about 3 hours to do- so its was worth it. Again, I had all my papers, cuttlebug, spellbinder die-cuts, buttons, ribbons, thread, stickles, etc.- I had already precut with my Expressions the embellishments (title, birdcage-bird)  all packed- but I still had to make all the flowers- some of them hand sewn and the other misc embellishments to lay out. Many of the ladies at the retreat -just loved the idea of my power layouts and decided that is what there are going to do next time also- its so much easier.

Well ,enjoy your week and have a Great Thanksgiving Day. I and my husband (and the 2 dogs) will be taking a road trip to visit and spend 5 days with my mother in Arkansas, which will be so much fun.  I still will have a Frugal Fridays scheduled to post next friday- I love how we can set this up on here.

Grandmas are Special

 I did this layout at a Heart & Soul retreat this past weekend and I just love it and also won 1st place for a contest called Parade of Pages. It just so happens it will also works for the SOUS sketch-which I didn't plan that way- but it works-Great! I think I will put this page in a frame and put it on display in my home instead of in a scrapbook-in memory of my Grandma- since I don't have too many photo's of her-It will be nice to have out during the holidays.
    

click on photo for enlargement

     Materials used: K&Company 2 sided designer papers, SpellBinders die cuts, Cuttlebug, rhinestones, Spray Glimmer mists, Stickles, buttons,  sewing thread for lace flowers, ribbons, epoxy glossy accents, Martha Stewart border punch, circle punch, stamps, chalks, pop dots, many inks, Cricut cartridges-Jasmine, Serenade, Home accents, and a few misc. embellishment sayings and bingo card.

Life is Good...

The sketch is from PageMaps, which I will be entering this layout and for the challenge to use 3 out of the 5 items listed over at Chop Suey this week...which was pretty easy to do, and my first entry at both of these blogsites. My 3 out of 5 items used in the page are the following: white cardstock, buttons, and a stamp (leaves) and inks too. Materials used in layout are the following:  papers from Colobok and cutouts flowers, Memory Box for blue floral print paper, white & green cardstock, Cricut cuts from Graphically Speaking and Accent Essentials, blue and purple ribbons, purple buttons, fiskars border punch,  green, blue and lilac inks, piece of notebook paper for journal area in blue writing pen and pop dots. 

Time for a walk- a walk in the park.

Here is a fun page of my girls Jenna and Izzy and a page for one of my kids scrapbook (my favorite photo of the dogs). This is for the sketch at Sketches in Thyme #23 this week and I will be also applying this at Ella's Pink Scrapbook Challenge this week for colors of Red, Blue and Yellow.

Materials used: TPC Studio background paper, American Crafts flower pattern paper, blue cardstock, cut out fire hydrant from the TPC Studio paper, Cricut cuts (tree and limbs) Home Accents, all embellishments stickers from Walk in the Park and a couple of tickets.and pop dots. This was a fun sketch to work with this week and I enjoyed working with the Walk in The Park sticker set kit that went with each other and the colors of Red Yellow and Blue worked out great with this layout too- it made scrapping this page a little easier.

Izzy's favorite treat "My Favorite Bone"

This is my take for Sketchy Thursdays this week titled "My Favorite". My dog Izzy's just loves to chew on her bones-which is just fine with me that's better than chewing up my rugs or furniture...which I still need to hournal that on the page forgot to do that...oops.

 Materials used: Stemma papers, Cricut cuts Accent Essentials,Recollections border punch, ribbon, copper glitter, black marker for doodling, white cardstock, piece of notebook paper for journal area, bone stickers from Stemma paper pack and pop dots.

Layouts for Creative Scrappers Challenge #128 & 129

I just got home from a scrapbooking retreat and have a few pages to enter for Creative Scrappers challenges that I worked on this weekend and want to get them posted as soon as I could. This entry is the newest challenge #129-which is a sketch. This was a painting project I did this  past September- I repainted the sign into our subdivision-which was badly needed and I changed the color of the windmill so it stood out better-which alot of the neighbors really like-now. In the layout I used Fancy Pants, DCWV and Recollections papers, textured brown  and some white and tan cardstock. I inked all the edges and used Cricut cut from Lyrical Letters for the Title "before & after", which I ran through the crimper before I sprayed with coffee bean glittter mist. I hand cut the cattails and added some flowery soft to the tips for dimension. Added some cute Fiskars stamps of some frogs and a few cricut cuts-windmill (heritage) dragonflies with stickles.

 This next layout is for Challenge #128 to use a 12" wide photo- I really enjoyed this-something new to try. So I had this photo of fall colors from a  subdivision that I drive thru everyday and I just loved looking at all the burning bushes _"like a Sea of Red in the fall. So I printed a large 12" version to work with. I used several fall papers, a pre die-cut of leaves, ribbons, stickers, a book mark, border punch, 3 metal leaves by Karen Foster, inks, chalks, vellum saying on picture, my Expressions using Home Accents for the leaves and Wild Card for the title. I sprayed a piece of white paper with several Tim Holtz's distressing Inks and then used a single leaf stamp on top of that and then did my cricut cuts on my own handmade color designer paper

Welcome to Frugal Fridays week #28

Hello Everyone!
     Hope ya all had a great fall week-the weather has been wonderful here in Northern Illinois. And I'm excited for this weekend to start-because I'm going to a Heart & Soul Scrapbooking Retreat in Palatine, IL from Friday till Sunday and can't wait to meet all the girls and scrap for 36 hours or more.
    Well this week its all about GLITTER....since the holidays are coming up it seems to be in order to use glitter on everything to give it some shine. So here are some ideas to put to use on your layouts, cards or craft projects in the next month. First of all, I will show you how I store and organize my glitter stash-I have them in a drawer (that is one of 10) in a rolling cart and they are stored on there side- so when I open the drawer I can see exactly what I have-instead of them being stored upright ,when all you see are the caps or tops of all the bottles.

 Here is a photo of some of the ways to use or apply glitter to your projects-as you can see -glitter doesn't always show up to well in photos-but it will make your project shine or pop. If your looking for this double-sided adhesive tape in different widths really cheap, go to scrapbuck.com and you can get it for $1.00  a roll and glue pens for $1.50 -what a deal this is. (shown below in top right corner)

Now onto 10 ways to use glitter and I'm sure you will come up with a few more .
  1.  Apply glitter to designer paper to highlight areas( like green snowflake in photo)
  2.  Cover chipboard letters (run through Xyron upside down) and apply glitter (number 0)
  3.  Add course glitter to edges or borders
  4.  Use your stamps and a glue Pad for "simple designs" like circle, stars, hearts, etc....(gold stars)
  5.  Use a glue pen-write and apply glitter ( word Love)
  6.  Make shaker cards and use course glitter to fill
  7.  Adhere glitter to double-sided adhesive tap in strips (silver and bronze strip on brown paper)
  8.  Adhere glitter to back of clear buttons( on bottom of photo)
  9.  Use a precision glue pen to decorate edges of chipboard or other embellishments with dots or dashes 
        (scalloped yellow chipboard) 
 10. Using double-side adhesive tape- create designs then add glitter
GLITTER-comes in a wide array of colors and sizes of grains from ultra fine to course...and you can also mix colors-(like the chipboard letter C)--- endless possibilites. So have some fun and get out that  glitter and add a bit of glitz to your next few projects. And if you get a little bit on you-thats ok- you will just shine a little more too!

Champs-basketball

Here is my layout/project for FCCB #35 this week for the color and shape challenge of green and a circle. I had a bit of a different take on this week challenge-since I do alot of layouts and I was working on my boys sports pages. I thought basketballs are circles and their school colors are green and white so why not enter this. So I used some sports paper for background and matted the photos in green cardstock and then got my Gypsy out and went straight to the Sports Mania cartridge and found exactly what I needed for this page. Champs for the title, some basketballs and a clipboard-perfect.

Oversized Photo for Frosted Designs-

I just love this layout - one of my favorite photo's- simple and sweet...This is a family portrait of my four children -when they were all young in 1996. I used a lazer cut for half of the page and placed yellow paper behind just a few of the flowers and then stamped daisies on black and white cardstock and cut them out and added stickles to the center of them and scattered them on the page. If you look close- my one daughters dress has daisies on it - that was my inspiration for color choices and embellishments.

This is my oversized photo for a layout over at Frosted Designs this week. This was fun and easy to do.

3 Cousins

Here is my take for PageMaps this month, using there sketch which I really like and will probably use again in the future. The photo's of my 3 young 3 year old cousins taken in Michigan during the 4th of July weekend at the parade in town. I used all K&Company 2 sided designer papers from paper stack to coordinate with each other, put all on white cardstock which doubled as my matt for the photo's. I used several floral punches for the flowers and added rhinestones in the middle. Some individual rub-on letters for my title and more rhinestones around the edges of my own handmade tag area with "Cousins". Inked all the edges in brown and pop dotted the three photo's.

Halloween Colors on a 2-pg layout

Well I used Halloween colors and Trick or Treat photo's of our girls (eskimo dogs) when there were all dressed up as clowns this past Sunday on Halloween. They were so cute and got alot of attention from all the trick or treaters that day. This is my take for SOUS this week, its a little wild in color-but that is what the challenge is- so here it goes.

Materials used: lots of scrap papers from my holiday stash, white cardstock, stamps from Hero Arts, black and coral inks, Le Plume markers, black sticker rhinestones, Reminisce Alpha stickers, handmade and cut candy corns, and pop dots,black marker, black ink for edges and all stamping for the cut outs.

Thirteen - for Sketch along Tuesdays

This is the first sketch for Sketch along Tuesdays over at Frosted Designs and I just had to enter in this challenge. For some reason I was stumped on how to do this layout-maybe it was the pictures, or that I wasn't sure what to do for embellishments-but it took me awhile to figure what I was going to do. So I ended up doing a fairly simple looking page. I used papers from My Minds Eye Complete Boy paper stack, Martha Stewart die-cut on the whole page-back with paper in certain areas (this was the hardest part), white gel pen and Cricut cartridge Wild Card for the title.I put ice blue stickles in the center of each of the blue diamonds( which doesn't show very well in this photo) also used dark blue cardstock, sanding block, and spray adhesive.

This is my son's thirteenth birthday-he's now a teenager! We celebrated it in Lake Geneva ,Wisconsin back in June of 2002

Saluto's for a birthday Celebration

This layout if for a color challenge at Ella's Pink Elephant #27 using brown and orange. Even tho this was a birthday dinner in the month of July for my husband the colors of orange and brown worked well with the photo's.

Materials used: K&Company designer papers from a stack pad, Chipboard letters sprayed with Glimmer Mist -Tiger Lily, then glossy accent added to top,  Stickles in lime green, gold sticker rhinestones, sticky ribbon leaf pattern, pop dots and Fiskars circle cutter and cut outs of flowers from paper stack.

Welcome to Frugal Fridays #27

Wow-its November already! I have to get busy making my holiday cards and soon. And I'm not sure what I'm gonna do- so I guess I will be looking thru some of my books/magazines in my library to get some great ideas. Here are a few of the great books I keep handy for inspiration and great ideas for either card making or page layouts. I love to look thru magazines that I get monthly-and sometimes I look thru them again and again-and I mark the pages with colored tabs for a quick find.

 I keep all the current ones handy (in box on right) and then store in another area  the older ones, which I can't throw away so I put them in garage sales for $1.00. Other great books/magazines that are great for ideas are your Stampin Up/Close to my Heart/Angel Company and Kaiser Craft pamphlets that you can buy or get from your demonstrators or at craft shows for a discounted price. They are loaded with sketches, products, stamps and so many projects to see already made up. I have all of those to the left of my magazines.

 Then many years ago when I was making only cards- I found and bought these two wonderful books- Ultimate Card and Ultimate Word by Linda LaTourelle. They are filled with quotes, titles, poetry, words, expressions, sentiments and words and tips for both the card maker or for the scrapbooker. I often go to these books for ideas for Titles for my pages, but great if your like me and can't come up with ideas for sentiments and sayings for the inside of cards. You can find these at at your local bookstore for about $19.95 each.

Last year at about this time I was in Archiver's and they were running this special on a library filled with 12 books-one for each month filled with ideas for cards for every occasion- wonderful  & beautiful cards. So if you know me it was a sale -so I had to get it for a great price of $39.99 for the whole set. It's called Season's of Cards for every month by Scrapbook Trends magazine by Northridge Media publishing Co. I'm not sure if they come out with this set every year or if this was a one time deal-but I know I'll be looking thru these books in the next few days for ideas for my holiday cards. 
I thought I'd let ya know if your haven't already seen my post earlier this week I hit my goal of 365 scrapbook pages on October 31st- and I had my drawing for the Family Themed Blog Candy and the winner was Beatriz Guzman...so I will be coming out with some new blog candy in the near future. Well happy scrappin , enjoy and see you next week.

Happy Birthday to You...

Here is my take for Sassy Lil Sketches this week of my son's birthday party back in 2003-we had just moved into a new neighborhood and new school system so my son had a few new friends over for a sleepover for his special day. And he wanted a Dirt Cake instead of the traditional birthday cake-so that I did make for him and his friends- they loved it...

Materials used:blue cardstock and misc red banner paper, stickles, cake cut out from paper, versa mark and birthday stamps on blue cardstock,cut out my own #14 and hand wrote the birthday song on the white stripes.

The 4th of July-one of our favorite holidays.

As a family- we really enjoy the fourth of July every year, because we go to Upper Michigan to spend a long weekend with our large family and we such a great time, laughing, telling stories and great memories are made . So here is another layout of the 4th of July, for my son's scrapbook.I will be applying this over at Sketchy Thursdays for the weekly sketch which I really lied this week.

 Materials used: white cardstock and misc red and blue papers from my stash, polka dot ribbon and a rosette made from wide flag wired ribbon with a star button with scrappers floss in the middle, also metal stars with floss tied on, star buttons, chipboard painted in primary blue.

A close up of the red, white and blue ribbon rosette that I stitched and then gathered to make this, anded a star button and Karen Foster's scrappers floss tied on.

Viking Football- 2 page layout

I really enjoyed doing this layout this weekend-FOOTBALL....These photos bring back some great memories of all the games, practices and cheering (alot of cheering) of my youngest son. He put 110 %  effort into all of his games and it worked out great he was always the star player, which I was so proud of him at every game. I'm entering this layout over at Sketches in Thyme #21 this week for a 2 page layout which worked out great for these photo's. I used black cardstock and some football sport papers by Moxie, Scrappin Sports, and Teresa Collins. I inked all the edges in brown or black. I used my Cricut cartridge for the clipboard from Sports Mania. But what I really liked on this layout is the football laces I did with cream satin ribbon on 4 areas of the page, using my Big Bites to punch all the holes and then lacing them up. Other embellishments used were alot of the cut-outs from the papers and football brads, epoxy cheer sticker, and some black and gold stars, and Alpha's tiles for the Viking title. I have not journaaed on the clipboard yet-because I have to ask my son exactly what positions he played I can't remember, he played so many of them.