Brave Girl.

I’m currently taking an online class through Brave Girls Club and Melody Ross (I adore her) called Soul Restoration, and it’s pretty awesome.  One of the first projects I made was this journal (we do LOTS of journaling).  I just bought a composition book at Dollar Tree and covered it with some Making Memories patterned paper which I LOVE.

The banner and birdie are chipboard Thickers made by American Crafts (Dear Lizzy line).  The house is something else I love.  It’s made by Creek Bank Creations.  They come as raw chipboard and I painted mine hot pink. 

Here’s a close up of my little house. 

You can also see here how I painted the edges of my book bright pink!  I have used more paint in this one class than with all the scrapbook pages I’ve made in the last 5 years I bet.  I’m having so much fun!  I’ve discovered that some of my paint has been sitting here for so long (unused!) that now it’s just a big ole yucky glob of paint in the bottle! 

Are any of you taking this class or attended Brave Girls Camp?  I’m really enjoying it, I can just imagine how much FUN it would be in person!

Engagement tag.

I got an unusual request recently from my granddaughter.  A friend’s long-time boyfriend was going to propose and she got them a bottle of champagne to celebrate (after the friend said yes) and asked me to make a tag to hang on the bottle so she could put it in the fridge to chill and they could pull it out after her friend said yes.  Obviously she was pretty confident that her friend would say yes, and she did thank goodness!  So I whipped up this tag super quick and she tied it to the bottle neck with the ribbon. 

(click photo to see it larger)

I started with a tag I cut from a gray-ish color Bazzill Bling cardstock (it shimmers…love it!), layered on a paper doily that I had previously inked up with some Tim Holtz alcohol ink, and used the chipboard boy and girl from an old Creating Keepsakes kit.  I used American Crafts rub-ons to put SHE SAID YES on the girl and added some Stickles to the chipboard heart they’re holding to add some sparkle.  Topped off with some pretty white ribbon and done!

I had never thought about doing a project like this before and thought it was a pretty cool idea!  Have any of you ever done something similar?

Curio Cabinet Redo Before and After.

Here’s a non scrapbooking project I worked my butt off on a few months ago, a very old curio cabinet that has the fake brown wood grain “laminate” stuff on it, you know what I’m talking about? Yuck. First, I hate brown furniture, trim, just about anything. Secondly, this was in my daughter’s bedroom and all the other furniture was white. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I got busy sanding and priming and spraying. It took me several weeks to get it all finished.

For once, I remembered to take before photos (barely). Here’s what it looked like before.

(please ignore the lady with the hips in the mirrored background)

And here it is in all it’s lovely white-ness after:

Isn’t she pretty? I’m afraid it’s going to get bumped and nudged and beaten up in my daughter’s room and it’s going to chip (and I’m gonna hate that!), so I tried to prevent that for as long as I can with lots of coats of clear gloss spray.

But in the meantime I love it! What do you think? Do you love it?

I’m going to share this project over here:

Not Just A Housewife

Teacher gifts!

Here are two teacher gifts I was hired to make last week. One is for the teacher and one is for the teacher’s aide that work in the same classroom, so I made them different so as to not have any mistakes about which one belongs to which teacher.

Here’s the first one:
front side:

and the back:

pretty handle:

And here’s the second one:
the front side:

and another pretty handle:

For some reason I didn’t take a photo of the back side of that one, but it’s the same paper used on the front. The papers used on both of these are from the Die Cuts With a View grade school stack, so they’ve got little bits of shiny foil and glitter in them. Love that little bit of sparkle!

And here’s the one I made for my daughter’s teacher:
front side:

Again, I don’t have a photo of the back. I used American Crafts Thickers letters to look as if she had written her name on the blackboard. The paper on this one I got a long time ago in the $1 section of Target!

We must always have pretty handles:

What I did was shop at the Dollar Tree and bought $10 worth of “teacher goodies” to put inside these boxes such as White Out, post it notes, red pens, highlighters, binder clips, small notebook, a Hershey’s chocolate bar (who wouldn’t love THAT?), and stickers to put on kids’ homework papers. My daughter’s teacher loved hers, and the lady who bought the other two called me to tell me that her teachers loved theirs also!

What do you think of these? Aren’t they cute?

I’m sharing this project over at:

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DIY Christmas soap dispenser.

At the same time I did my Halloween soap dispenser, I also made one for Christmas time. I originally saw the idea on the blog Brown Paper Packages so she totally deserves credit for my genius! Her blog is full of crafty ideas and I love it.

Here’s what I did. I took a $1 soap dispenser bought at the grocery store and spray painted it with a few layers of red spray paint (from the dollar store). Then I dug around in my scrapbooking supplies and found a rub-on that said JOY (so it wasn’t screaming Christmas and I could use it after also). I applied the rub-on and then put a coat of Mod Podge over the whole thing with a foam brush so it wouldn’t get ruined by the water since it was going to be in the bathroom. Found a pretty ribbon that was Christmas-y and tied it around the bottle neck (which is something I could change to white ribbon after Christmas, again so it’s not screaming Christmas and I could still use it in January) And here it is!

If you aren’t the scrapbooking type, you could also use a paint pen or sharpie marker to write a word in pretty handwriting or draw a snowflake if you’re artistically inclined (I can’t even draw stick people).

Anyway, I love it! I want to make them for Valentine’s Day and Easter. Maybe one with a leaf for autumn. There are tons of possibilites really. So what do you think? Cute, huh?

I’m showing it off here:

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Pretty butterflies.

Here’s a very clean and simple little card I made a few months ago. I used the Martha Stewart classic butterfly punch and punched my butterflies out of an old music book page. Then I inked them up with a Versamark ink pad and added some little jewels in the center. The words underneath are a rub-on from Pebbles Inc.

It’s weird, because sometimes I look at this card and think the butterflies are yellow and other times I swear they look orange! It was SO hard not to glitter these butterflies up a bit, but I am going to donate this card to Operation Write Home (no glitter allowed) so some soldier can send it to his or her loved one “just because.” I love that organization.

Here’s your sign.

Hellooooo!! Oh my gosh, I’ve been going through blog withdrawal. There was some weird thing going on that wouldn’t let me write! I just kept looking at a blank box but it wouldn’t let me type any words inside it! Ugh, so frustrating. But tonight I stumbled upon a fix. I’m back! And with a new project too!

Recently I showed you a canvas sign project I made for my dad here and another one slightly different I made for a friend here. After that I was contacted by a very nice lady who inquired about my making a sign for her, and I was thrilled to do so.  She gave me the quote that she wanted it to say and asked for it to be warm brown, and this is what I came up with!

Now, seriously, brown is one of my least favorite colors, but oh my gosh after I was done with this I just may have changed my mind.  The white words against this gorgeous brown background just pop and I love the end result.  I almost wanted to keep it! Savannah, thank you for requesting this canvas and I’m glad you love it!

So what do you guys think? Do you love it too?

P.S. If you’re interested in one of your own, e-mail me (sumsmom528@yahoo.com)

I’m going to join the party here:

Creating with kids.

I was part of a new feature this month over at Practical Scrappers called creating with kids.  We were asked to have a child help us make paper for scrapbooking. 

Well, my kid is the resident “artiste” at our house as I’ve mentioned before, so I gave her a sheet of white cardstock and said make me something.  ha ha!  She had this idea that she was going to paint a rainbow and make leopard print on it to match these crazy socks she loves.  And I thought that was great because I had taken a photo of her wearing those crazy socks and wanted to make a scrapbook page with it!  But then somewhere in the making of the paper she went off course and it looked nothing like her original plan.  (she must be related to ME…)  She was very excited at one point and came into my studio to tell me about her painting and that she had wondered how it would look if she flung paint onto the paper so she tried it and liked it.  When she was done I went in to check it out and I liked it too.  But then I realized she had flung paint everywhere ELSE also.  Splatters of paint were on my dining room table (her work surface), the floor, the chairs, homework on the table, etc.  We’re still scraping it off some places.  So anyway here is what she ended up with:

(pretend the lighting in here doesn’t totally suck and that paper really looks WHITE, ok?)

And this is what I did with Summer’s lovely painted paper:

You can see what the other designers at Practical Scrappers did here.  They’re taking submissions to do this every month, so have your kids help you and submit your projects!

Altered Bra.

I have shown this project on here before a couple of years ago but wanted to share it again for new readers of my blog who might have missed it.  I meant to do it during October since it was breast cancer awareness month but I’m “a day late and a dollar short” as usual.  I’ve gotta be late or it ain’t happenin’. 

I made this for a contest for a Melissa Frances (scrapbooking manufacturer) contest she was holding on her website (she had breast cancer at the time) in October 2008.  I made it in honor of my Aunt Teresa, who was battling breast cancer at the same time, and I thought of her and prayed for her during the hours it took me to make this.  I was also thinking of Anita at the same time because I was working on her scrapbook too during that period.  This project means even more now, with both of these beautiful women having passed away.  My bra didn’t win the contest, but it did end up being displayed in the indie design section of the CHA winter show in California in January 2009, which was a pretty big deal for me.

For this project, my supplies were a $6 bra from the dollar store and 3 jars of Prima’s pink “got flowers”, and a whole lotta Stickles and tiny little rhinestones and finger cramps.  For real.  I started out using Glue Dots to glue them on and when those ran out I switched to some clear glue I had and when THAT ran out I switched to Mod Podge.  

And here it is:

What do you think?

I’m showing off my bra here:

Blue Cricket Designs

Fallified gate.

Remember my fireplace screen, the gate I rescued from the trash pile?

Well, I “autumnized” it.  Or “fallified” it.  I decorated it for fall, y’all!

I know, big deal.  But this berry (or whatever–bittersweet maybe?) wreath was already in my basement so it cost me zero dollars to decorate.  That’s my idea of a good time!  ha ha  And since I had the beachy-themed pennant banner on it earlier, I just moved it over a bit to the bookcase and kinda hung it there for a little bit until the holidays are over.

I can’t believe Christmas is right around the corner…..