Good day all and thanks for coming to see me today.  I've certainly missed blogging and hope to get back at it on more regular basis.  Allot has happened and I will catch you all up with some posts in the coming months.

So I've come to realize I've got more crafting supplies than any one person should have.  I do wood projects, vinyl projects, htvinyl projects, resin projects, jewelry projects and on and on and on.  Yesterday I decided to take this week and do some serious purging.  I filled up an entire large recycling bin and our garbage also.  Today I filled one tote with garbage and two with recycling.  These will be put out when our bins are empty.  Gotta leave some room for the every day stuff.

While I was purging I found so many things I had forgotten about.  It was kinda like Christmas.  I decided I'd let myself do a little bit of crafting and this is what I did.

So a long, long, long time ago I went to the South Dakota State Fair with one of my very best friends to see Charlie Pride.  It was a great concert.  As we were walking around before the concert I watched this young lady do spray paint art.  I was in awe with her talent.  A couple cans of spray paint, some swiping of the hand and some cardboard and she created beautiful masterpieces.  We headed to the concert and I couldn't get this one picture out of my mind.  I'm very much a patriotic person and she had done an amazing job on the twin towers.  (This was many years before 9/11).  After the concert I went back and it was still there just calling my name.  She had painted it on some standard tagboard and while it was sturdy I knew I would get it framed.  When my husband saw it he said we should should put it in a light up frame and let the colors shine through the front.  Well it sat for many, many years til this morning.

I started with an old canvas frame that I took the old canvas picture off.

I measured the frame against some foam core and hot glued them together.  Then I took my LED lights and cut a hole in the foam core for the battery pack to nestle in and taped the strings of lights onto the foam core.

Here you can see the battery pack is accessible to turn on and off

I did add some silver washi tape around the edge to keep it in place.  This picture above is without the lights on 

This one the lights are on but it's kinda hard to see the true beauty.

This is what it looks like in the dark.  

So beautiful! 

#911neverforget #unitedwestand

So I hope you've found my tutorial somewhat helpful and I hope to show you some more in the coming months.  Thanks for coming and have a beautiful day!

It's a Jungle out there

Hello again

***If you are looking for my Festive Friday's card, please scroll down***

I know, I've been absent the last couple of days and here I am with 2 posts in one day....geesh.  LOL  

My very good friend Amy over at Love to Crop asked me to be a guest designer for this week's challenge on her blog.  I was thrilled that she asked me because she is such a wonderfully talented person.  Have you seen some of her stuff?  Amy and I have been blogging buddies for quite some time now and when she joined the Getting Cricky DT we became even better friends.  She is such an inspiration so you better hurry on over there and check things out.  When she told me the theme was going to be "It's a Jungle out there" I was even more thrilled.  As most of you know my favorite animal is the Elephant; I have such a collection of them from the tiniest stone carving to the biggest wood carving.  I love them so much that I even have a tattoo of one.  I know, a bit obsessive...But the one thing I didn't have was a wall hanging...so this is what I came up with.

Isn't this cool?

 The base is made from foam core, covered 
with some elephant print paper.  I cut the elephant
head with my E-Craft and the file I got here.

 I cut the head out in 3 layers each shadowed a bit larger

 I inked the base layer and the top layer for dimension

 and then popdotted them on top of each other

I also used an svg tag, but I'm not sure where I got

it from and stamped the sentiment with the Amazing You

stamp set from Getting Cricky and inked around the edges also.

Now make sure you head on over to Amy's blog and link up your "jungle themed" project and you just might be a winner.

• You may enter as many NEW projects as you would like as long as they fit in the challenge theme.
• Please include a link to www.lovetocrop.com so that others may play along.

I also have a winner to announce from a previous blog hop, but that will have to wait until tomorrow...sorry for the delay, but life has gotten in the way of things this week.