5 things I'm loving right now

I don't have any layouts to post right now, I have to photograph a few more of the older shots that I'm happy with, but since I have nothing done at the moment I thought maybe I would make a post about things that are popular or things that I'm loving right now.
This list could range from a style, a design trend, or even a product or technique that I'm loving.  So without further adieu here is my love list for February

1. Chalkboard anything!  Okay I've put this in my February list, but I could definitely put this in my love for the year 2013 and continuing into 2014.  I am in love with any chalkboard products, whether it be in scrapbooking or home decor.  I know I'm kind of jumping on the bandwagon with it, but there's a reason why it's so popular, and as a very visual person I can totally see the appeal.  Here are a few examples of its awesomeness!



From the 36th Avenue we have an awesome list of chalkboard fonts that you can download for creating your own chalkboard printable.  You can find the list here so enjoy creating lots of printables for around the house or even small trading card size ones for your scrapbook!

Here are a few great examples of home decor projects you can do involving a chalkboard or chalkboard paint.  I love chalkboard paint and have a small stash of it.  I have used it to paint numerous items at home as well as used it on thickers to create an interesting black font that I could then chalk up!

I'm also including a free printable that I created for the holiday season.  I know it's been two months since Christmas, but well, when you're a crafter you are always making stuff for the holiday, no matter what time of year.  I'm thinking of using this on an upcoming layout when I get around to it!  You can download it from my Pinterest page here

2.  I'm picking a color scheme or two for my second love.  I pretty much love the majority of color schemes, but there are a few colors that I am constantly drawn to so I'm going to put up some of my favourites right now.  I know they seem more like spring colors but I love the soft wintery feel of them and paired with a snowy landscape they would almost give it a dream like quality :)

3. My new tiny attacher!  I don't get to buy new tools to play with very often.  On my current short list of new things I want so that I can tinker is a heat tool, a paper piercer, a Silhouette Cameo, and I could go on.  But in the meantime I was able to get my hands on this little guy for a great price. Working at Michaels can sometimes have its benefits!  I am going to staple sooooo much stuff I swear that cats tail will be stapled to my projects.  Now if only someone made a stapler that would go all the way to the middle of the page.  Seems like a no-brainer to me for a scrapbook company to create one, but alas nothing so far. 

4.  Wood veneer products.  I just can't seem to get enough of these.  I see them on so many layouts and I absolutely love them every time.  I wish I could get my hands on a ton of them, but again being where I am I'm stuck with the few that I can manage to find, and I of course hate using them up and hoard them like an old lady in a cat sweater.    You can pick them up at most online stores.  I love Two Peas in a Bucket myself though it's been awhile since I've ordered anything from them.

5.  Owls.  I had to include this on here cause, well, how can you not love owls.  I've been obsessed with the owl trend since it first arrived and for me it's been going full steam since then.  I have an owl in almost every room of my house.  I have owl accessories, an owl purse, I love pictures of them, paper and embellishments with them.  You name it I love it.  So it seems fitting that they would be here.  Honestly they would probably end up on every list, but I'll put them here in this first list so that I don't repeat myself.

Bye bye, see you soon!

Paris will have to wait

So it occurred to me that I have been posting lots of stuff here lately, and I do get a few pageviews, which is nice, though I have no clue if my posts are actually read, but in case they are, I haven't actually been writing or posting like myself.
I'm an inappropriate, sarcastic, wildly geeky person, but my posts don't really reflect that, also, I haven't cursed or anything, which I do heavily from time to time.  I also don't talk much about my life or anything here, and I had wanted this to be a blog about life as well as crafting.
Well, in the spirit of that I promise to make my posts more amusing whenever possible and infuse them with more of my personality.
Now on with todays scrap layout.  This one is another one of my daughter Lily.  I know I have way more layouts I should be creating about my son, since I have more photos, but I still find it hard to scrapbook boys, and there's just so much more girly inspired supplies out there.  This page in particular took way longer than I had intended.  I had it almost done but ended up setting it aside for quite some time.  Figured I'd better finish it while I was in a scrappy mood.

J'adore

Trying new techniques

So after watching an endless amount of videos over at Two Peas in a Bucket www.twopeasinabucket.com  especially ones by Wilna Furstenburg I decided to try some of the techniques myself.  As I usually state when posting layouts I am a frugal scrapper/crafter.  Not by choice, but I do what I can.  I am also located somewhere with only one store to get supplies (Michaels) and the shipping costs to order online are staggering which definitely limits my options.
So without a Sillouette Cameo I ended up drawing and cutting out my own feathers, which I think covered in glitter.  I also used watered down black craft paint to write the title "Brave" which I then also cut out.  I added a minimal amount of patterned paper, which wasn't my first idea, but in the end I really liked the vellum on the white paper, it gave it an almost ethereal feel.  I hand drew a few little arrows above the title since I had no veneer or chipboard arrow.  I ended up leaving my stapler where I was teaching a class and haven't replaced it yet but once I do I think I'll add a few staples around the top and bottom strips.  And there you go, after enjoying experimenting with glitter and paint I came up with this.  I'm very excited to get my hands on some watercolours soon and give them a try with my layouts.
Happy scrapping, see you soon :)

Be Brave

More oldies but goodies

I decided to skim back through my older scrapbook pages and find a few more that I really wanted to post.  I came across these next two ones about my son.  One was completed sometime in either 2012 or early 2013 and one I did quite a few years ago but it seemed to hold up against the test of time pretty well.
The first one is my older layout.  The picture I took of my son was from 2010 when he was just a bit over a year old.  Back then he has the most gorgeous curls and I hated having to trim them.  He was terrible for getting out the patio door and down the stairs before I would even notice him missing.  He ended up being the reason we had so many locks on doors.  I guess boys will be boys.

Boys Will Be Boys

This particular layout was created to show us enjoying a great snack at a local greasy spoon after a day

spent at my in-laws cottages. It was nearing the end of summer and I just felt that this moment of enjoying some fries and ice cream together as a family captured my feelings about summer perfectly.

I ended up only taking pictures of Seth this time as Lilith (Lily) was only a few months old and asleep in her car seat at the time.

Summer Fries

Thanks so much for taking a peek, I'll see you soon :)

Something new . . .

And now it's time for something new.  I know this is a Christmas page, but well in scrapbooking sometimes you just have to go with your creative mood.  This picture has been kicking around my computer for sometime and I finally decided to give it a whirl.  I have a massive Christmas paper and embellishment supply, well, at least huge considering what's available on the Island.  This means that I sometimes get tripped up when trying to create a page, since I have so many different styles to choose from.  For this one I went with a style I rather enjoy and a color scheme that I love for Christmas.  The picture is from my son's first Christmas, when we went out to a tree farm where you choose a tree and they cut it down for you.  I loved doing this and this year we got to do it again, so much fun!  Anyway, I enjoyed putting this layout together, making the little "Hunt" banner and mashing up a bunch of different supplies from different brands.  The only thing that is bugging me is the journaling.  I can't stand the look of my own handwriting, and I wish it looked as good as some of the more well known scrapbookers.  Oh and yes I do know that it's not straight, sigh, this is sometimes the case when you're left handed, but well it happens.  I may tweak it and I'll add the date at a later time but for now it's done and I'm happy!

The Hunt

Something old . . .

Well, it's only the middle of February, but I feel some spring cleaning coming on, out with the old and in with the new, but in order to ring in the new I must first focus on the old.  So for the next few posts I'll be playing catch up, showing some of my favorite older projects, and hopefully some new ones too, just to mix it up.  That way I can eventually just focus on new projects.
For this post I have 3 scrapbook pages I'll be showing.

 

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There Was a Little Girl Who Had a Little Curl

  I loved this picture of my daughter in a little bandana with her curls popping out in the back.  I had a lot of fun mixing patterned paper for this one, it has a very busy look, but that was kind of what I was going for.  The summer colors and flowers are a great cheery accent.  For the title I didn't have letters that were the colors I wanted, so I ended up painting light green foam letters white for the "Little Girl" and painted white letters pink for the "Little Curl".  I just used regular old acrylic craft paint that I had laying around.  I loved adding doilies to this layout too, they just add a little feminine pop.  This was a scraplift and you can check out the original scrapper at www.jamiewarren.typepad.com

Little Monster

 

 

The sole purpose of this photo was to showcase the cute hoodie my son was wearing, but I don't care!  I love just taking pictures of the cute things my kids are wearing, it takes up less space than saving all of the clothes!  This is an extremely simple layout I created in either 2011 or 2012.  I loved that octopus stamp from K & Company and was glad I got to use it.  I just love octopus images :)  This was a scraplift from an older Scrapbooks Etc magazine layout, have no clue who originally did it or what issue it was from!

With You

This simple layout showcases some selfies I took with my kids one day.  I'm usually the one behind the camera and I hate, absolutely hate getting my picture taken, but I sucked it up since I have almost no pictures of myself with my kids.  I stapled a simple grid of hearts on the side to fill in the space and added several stamped images of the phrase "Lucky Me" which I pretty much had to cause I messed up and needed something to cover up my mistake.  I kept the rest of the layout really simple, only adding one other chipboard element.

Superhero party to the rescue

Back in January we celebrated my son's 5th birthday.  I love creating a theme for parties.  I don't usually have much to work with and a pretty strict budget since we are a low income family but with a little creativity and some great free printables found by searching Pinterest I did my best.  Originally it was going to be a Scooby Doo themed party, not a bad theme, I grew up watching and loving Scooby Doo and now my son loves it too, he does love a good monster (and so does mommy). But right when I was putting my plans together on what to serve for food and what to make for decorations he changed his mind.  He had seen a picture on my Pinterest page that was a superhero themed cake and he decided that he wanted a superhero themed party.  So after much perusing and contemplation and with about a day to put it together I came up with this little display for it.

I took some old boxes I had laying around, wrapped them in black wrapping paper cut out yellow paper rectangles and created a simple cityscape. The pompoms and fans were pre-purchased, I just added printed superhero symbols and words like "Kaboom" and "Pow"  I replicated those for the cake and for the cupcake toppers.  In true fashion I ended up cutting myself with the Xacto knife while cutting these out.  The banner on the wall was one of my husbands old comics that I was given permission to cut up (he had to check it's value online first!).

I decided that for food we would have Super dogs for the kids and a make your own "Super" hero sub sandwich bar for the grownups :).  I always make a homemade cake for my kids birthdays.  I grew up getting homemade cakes and I loved it so I do it for mine.   Now I may be creative, but I'm no cake decorator, and I don't have the money for all those awesome supplies or for fondant so I just try to go with simple designs.  In this case I just did polka-dots to mimic old comic book colors.  It didn't turn out the greatest but it tasted great!  It was 4 layers and I dyed them red and blue.  I also made a ton of cupcakes with yellow frosting, . .mmmm.  Seriously getting hungry just thinking about them now.

Mod Podge for the win!

In an attempt to get my blog up to date I'm posting some previous projects that I've completed that I am happy with.  For this installment I'm posting the door hangers I made for my son and daughter.  These were super simple to make, I used 6x6 paper pads for each one to take the guessing game out of combining papers and I inked the edges just to have them stand out a bit more.  I finished them off with a few simple embellishments and voila, cute male and female symbols for their doors.

Attempting a new Design!

Okay, so I'm trained as a graphic designer, two whole diplomas under my belt, so you would think this would be a cinch.  Nope, not even close.  I can't design for myself to save me life.  So far I've tweaked my blog a bit more to my liking, though my lack of HTML knowledge is setting me back.  Good thing I have a twin with a fiance who is trained to be a programmer, and since she wants some help planning her wedding I think a little pay back will be in order. 

So for now I'm "Nerd Girl in the Craft World" where I'll be doing random scrapbooking, paper-crafting, baking and DIY posts.  When I get a chance I'm going to get a blog up and running for my art and design posts.  I'm thinking of calling it "Nerd Girl in the Art World".  Really stretching my imagination there!

In the mood to scrap

I finally got a chance to sit down and work on a few layouts, aannnnnddddd finally got a chance to actually photograph them and upload them.  I usually never get that far in the process so already 2014 might be shaping up!

Always Keep Wishing 

 A Girl and Her Dolls
This layout was a scraplift from another scrapper, you can find her at www.corejones.blogspot.com

 

Merry and Bright