safe.

Fox 28: South Bend, Elkhart IN News, Weather, Sports

My friend recently returned from a deployment in Guantanamo Bay & was on the news. She's the one hugging her mom saying, "don't cry." She was deployed for a year & the crazy girl just signed on for three more years. Glad she made it back home safe!

favorite things|Juy edition [link up].

1) This milestone reached:

 2) This silly boy:

3) These pretty Sally Hanson nails:

 4) Finding this lovely wrought iron lighting fixture at a art sale/rummage sale in Oshkosh, WI (actually there are two of them & he sold them both to me for $5!):

5) Getting to go to Packers training camp for my bday weekend:

exciting news|Whimsical Twist design team!

I'm excited to share that I was asked to be a part of the first design team for Whimsical Twist! Kimmie has a cute little site with lots of great products & new items from summer CHA will be arriving soon. There's a great group of gals lined up & we're planning challenges & blog hops (with prizes!) so stay tuned! 

28th year recapped.

1 visit a pumpkin patch & bring home a pumpkin

2 go on a hot air balloon ride

3 take a vacation to the east coast

4 get another tattoo (Sept 2012)

5 pay off my car

6 run in another race (possibly while in Green Bay July 27!)

7 take a wine tasting class (we did a wine tasting winter 2012)

8 take Bentley on an overnight stay somewhere

9 cut back on cussing

10 finish the Catcher in the Rye

11 paint the living room

12 paint the entryway/hallway (halfway done 3/12)

13 visit a new zoo (John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, MI 5/13)

14 go to a ballet

15 see Chicago at Christmas time (did go 12/12 but didn’t see Michigan Ave)

16 stay in a cabin in Tennessee in the fall

17 donate blood again

18 set up the basement for emergency preparedness

19 get my teeth bleached

20 buy something at a farmer’s market

21 go to the tulip festival in Michigan (May 3-5, 2013!)

22 learn to use my pressure cooker

23 learn how to use Photo Shop

24 ride my bicycle more

25 be published in a magazine again (Scrap ‘n Art online magazine July/August 2013!)

26 attend church regularly (regularly as of May 2013!)

27 be a nicer person

28 fix the patio doors

29 buy a house (looking...)

30 continue to foster/rescue work for Love of Labs (yes!)

 

Revisiting this list & checking the progress I've made. This list is actually saved on my laptop as 30 before 30 so I think I'm doing good. :)

welcome baby.

Two of my friends are currently pregnant with baby girls. 

I used the Little Buddies Gelatins Stamp set for this card but I only used the sentiments.

Here's the entire stamp set:

The sentiment was stamped with walnut stain Tim Holtz distress ink. I really like this rich brown. I also used Timeless Twine & a border punch along the bottom of the front of the card.

I also used my July Studio Calico kits for this. I loved all of the July kits. If you're interested in subscribing, please use my referral link.

sweetheart.

This sweet photo of Hunter is from my Instagram feed. I printed it using the Walgreens app - it's 4x4 size. They were ready in an hour & while I do like the size, the quality is a little lacking. I printed this same photo from my home printer (Canon Pixma MX882) & found the colors to be much brighter & more sharp. 

Anyway, we had a cook out for my mom's birthday back in April. Hunter is such a sweet, calm 11 year old boy. This is a stark contrast to my Bentley who at roughly 3.5 years old, is still a completely maniac, even tied out on the cable, away from everyone.

I used my July SC kits for this one & a lot of stamping. I used the stamps from the main kit + the two add on kits + the July stamp add on. I was inspired by the Paper Secrets sketch challenge HERE. The twist was to use a Project Life card. I don't do Project Life but I have a few cards left from the Echo Park everyday eclectic collection. I cut one in half here & included it in the layers above & below the photo.

little moments make life big [LCOM #29].

I strayed quite a bit from the sketch on this challenge but the sketches are just meant to be inspiration. A starting point. So here's the sketch we used: 

I was flipping through an old album & found a page with photos of my little cousins (when they were much littler!) that I wanted to re-do. I don't often re-work pages when they're done but I really wanted to give this page an update. Here's what I came up with:

First, I turned this into an 8.5 x 11 page. I used the strips to a lesser extent. I did use my typewriter for journaling on the strips, which I just took word for word from the previous page I had made. The papers are all Echo Park love story & I also used the sticker embellishment sheet from that collection as well.

The stamps are Technique Tuesday (Simple Joy) & Studio Calico (from the Wildberry Court add on kit for the circle & the ampersand, not sure which kit is the sentiment quote stamp). Inks are Prima chalk ink in ladybug & Versafine in onyx. I also grabbed some of the chipboard embellishments from MME Lost & Found3.

Check out the LCOM blog today to see what the other DT members did. Here are the rules so you can play along...

Our July prize is a 10$ gift certificate to the LCOM store and a copy of new Summer issue of Scrapbook and Card Today magazine!

How to Play Along: 

1. Make a newly created project using the provided sketch and upload it to your blog or online gallery.

2. Then leave a link to your project using the Inlinkz widget. Please use a direct link to your LCOM Sketch post and not just your blog address.
3. If you upload to online galleries, please also use tag/keyword LCOM29. LCOM products are NOT required to participate, and you can enter as many times as you want. If you don't have a particular shape indicated in the sketch, feel free to substitute.
4. There is no time limit - you can always play any week at any time, but the linking form will close on the last day of the month at 8:00pm (Atlantic Standard Time) to allow us to find a prize winner.

first perm.

When I found this photo of my first perm, it reminded me of my last perm. I wanted to try something different my senior year in high school. It did not go well & I think it's safe to say I'm not going to try a perm ever again. 

This is mostly the Sweet Valley High main SC July kit. The red sequins & the stamps are from the Molly add on & the buttons are from the Jennifer add on. I also used the July stamp add on as well. 

I didn't want to lose my mom's handwriting documenting my first perm from the back of the photo, but I knew I wanted to crop the photo because of a busy background. So I scanned the back of the photo & printed it on kraft cardstock. Then I included it as journaling on the layout.

this was amazing.

I finally had some time to scrapbook so I dug into my July SC kits & I busted out two layouts today. Here is one I did about an eagle release we stumbled upon back in February. 

I used mostly Jennifer + the label stickers from Molly. Last month I only got the main kit & I wasn't a fan of it. It was the first kit since I've been subscribing that I hardly used any of & I started subscribing in March. This month I purchased two add ons + the stamp add on, which I used here. I don't usually get the stamp add on because you get a stamp set with each kit but this July stamp add on was so amazing & I know I'll get a ton of use out of it. If you're thinking about subscribing to the SC kits, please use my referral link.

I was inspired by the Scrap Much? week 2 sketch HERE. I changed the size from the sketch to 8.5 x 11.

top 100 books|how many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible  

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman  

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare  

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier   

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

 40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel[This was a no go for me. I didn't like it.]

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac 

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante 

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt (Own It but haven’t read it yet)

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle     

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

life needs more half days & happy hours.

I recently got an order from Unity Stamp Co & this was one of the stamps I ordered that I've been dying to use. How true is this?! 

I am not good at following sketches but I was inspired by this sketch at Sketch N Scrap for my card.

I used some older October Afternoon (Sugar Shack) label stickers & a Studio Calico mask with (Doris) Mister Huey's. I also grabbed a Freckled Fawn arrow wood veneer & used moss lawn Prima chalk ink on it. My sentiment is stamped with onyx Versafine ink.

what I'm looking forward to from CHA summer releases...

•  I'm not typically a huge Cosmo Cricket fan but the Creative Girl collection is so girlie & pretty. Especially loving these two patterned papers:

• Glitz Design can do no wrong in my eyes but they hit it out of the park with the Finnley collection. Love the color combinations & the designs are so modern.

• MME is introducing a chalkboard collection called Chalk Studio. I'm a fan of MME & I think this line is super modern but I also think the stickers & embellishments seem more usable than the full 12x12 chalkboard patterned papers.

 

• Pink Paislee's Sentiment Series will be a huge hit. Labels & icons are so "in" right now. I love this entire collection.

• Because everyday eclectic by Allison Kreft/Echo Park was my favorite collection to date, I think I will also love the Allison Kreft/Webster's Pages Recorded collection.

 

• Lastly, We R Memory Keepers is releasing their Chalkboard line. (Oddly enough, I think I like it better than the MME line) 

Stencil

Sketcbook

embossed stickers

Vday 2013 using 'love knots' Gelatins Stamps.

Valentine's day in July?! I'm only five months late! Well, I don't scrapbook in chronological order so it's ok with me.

For this layout, I used the SC Wildberry Court kit + the Love Knots stamps from Gelatins Stamps. I love this stamp SO much. I used tin can Prima chalk ink on black cardstock for a really striking, pretty stamp impression.

The focus of the layout is not a photo, but of the little card that my bf put in my flowers for Valentine's day this year.

I added a couple of Chic Tags "love note" mini tags + a wood arrow from Freckled Fawn (inked with raspberry pie Prima chalk ink) & the Potty People wood veneers from Studio Calico.  

I also added a couple of other stamps... the ampersand stamp & the "me + you" stamp are from the SC Wildberry Court kit. I used raspberry pie Prima chalk ink & Versafine onyx ink for those. The 'you & me..." is a Unity stamp, also stamped with the raspberry pie Prima chalk ink.

Home.

Our SC kits are shipping late this month & this is giving me some time to use up some stuff from my stash. I found a sketch on the Elle's Studio blog & I was inspired by the color challenge at Scrap Much? Here's what I came up with: 

 

The papers & enamel dots are My Mind's Eye & the labels are Elle'sStudio. Freckled Fawn makes the wood veneers. I used the Memories of Home Technique Tuesday stamp set with Prima chalk inks in farmer jeans (house) & tin can ("Home"). I used teal damask Prima chalk ink to color one of the wood veneer arrows & farmer jeans for the other.

Love to Scrap! also has an anything goes challenge going on right now - you can use any stamp on any project.

Sketch N Scrap winner!

I just saw on the Sketch N Scrap blog that I was the winner for the June sketch contest! 

Here was my layout...

Their July card sketch challenge has been posted &you can see the sketch HERE.

happy tails to you [Gelatins Stamps card].

I've used the Cosmo Pups Gelatins Stamps set this week.These doggies are so cute!

I used some papers from teh 6x6 Dear Lizzy Lucky Charm paper pad & a resistable chipboard heart from Pink Paislee. The sentiment is stamped with tin can Prima chalk ink onto a chalk label from American Crafts. The pups are stamped with Versafine onyx black ink which gives such a great, crisp impression.

JBZ. [LCOM sketch #27]

I used my June Studio Calico kit, Roundabout + an SC mask, Chalkboard Glimmer Mist (seven seas), & some Prima chalk inks (English ivy & garden grass). I also grabbed some Glitz tape from a previous SC kit. Here's the sketch we used:

& here's my layout:

Our July Prize

Our July prize is a 10$ gift certificate to the LCOM store and a copy of new Summer issue of Scrapbook and Card Today magazine!

How to Play Along: 

1. Make a newly created project using the provided sketch and upload it to your blog or online gallery.

2. Then leave a link to your project using the Inlinkz widget. Please use a direct link to your LCOM Sketch post and not just your blog address.
3. If you upload to online galleries, please also use tag/keyword LCOM27. LCOM products are NOT required to participate, and you can enter as many times as you want. If you don't have a particular shape indicated in the sketch, feel free to substitute.
4. There is no time limit - you can always play any week at any time, but the linking form will close on the last day of the month at 8:00pm (Atlantic Standard Time) to allow us to find a prize winner.