One Year Birthday Card from Sketch

I made today's card from a sketch from Unscripted Sketches. The final card didn't turn out quite as I wanted.

What am I saying? This was one of those don't-plan-just-design-as-you-cut-and-glue projects. It's not my favorite card, but it was too much fun to create. I was trying to make the balloons look like they were all floating at different heights, but the end result looks like I just didn't line one of them up quite right. Makes me chuckle. Anyway, less talking, more imaging:

A New Card Sketch Site

I have recently discovered some new card sketch sites that I added to my blog reader. One of my favorites is Card Positioning Systems. After having received my new order of stamps in the mail, I quickly went to work using one of their sketches, CPS 234. I wasn't pleased with my first attempt, but I was somewhat satisfied with this one:

Happy crafting, everyone.

Summer Crafting Update

I always expect to get more crafting done during the summers than I do. It's part of life, I guess. I have finally decided to table sewing as a hobby for a few years. When new hobbies come on board, something has to go. Let's face it: too many projects, too little time. I know this is the same for most people.

Nevertheless, I did have some creative fun this summer. Here is a sampling:

 Roz and I made a seascape box for her dolls.

 Roz designed a card for a friend. The top is the front; below is the inside. She even designed the dog. I love it!

 I had fun playing with Elmer's glue to make a crackle paint background for this card.

 Yummy margarita coconut cupcakes. Various cards below.

 Some of the tie-dying we did. It was a fun afternoon, although I wouldn't recommend using a color remover for a reversal technique. Bleach would probably be better. The color remover creates fumes.

Loving the colors. Hope you have some creative play time soon.

More ICAD

Well, I haven't been keeping up with the card-a-day, but I am not in the slightest bit concerned. I have enough on my plate. Still, I have been playing with the 3X5 cards, and the other night I gessoed up a bunch so they are ready to go. Here are some of the ones I did:

 For the above card, I just wanted to play with my colored pencils. Nothing crazy. I was thinking about the woman who has taken care of our son for the last two years. We really appreciate the love and car she gave our little guy. They bonded, so the goodbye has been hard.

 Playing with a new stamp and my new Stayz-On ink pad.

Just doodling.

Overwhelm

I spent almost my entire day thinking about education - developing materials for my class, participating in a school improvement meeting, and meeting with Milton Chen. All of this, the evening meeting with the educational guru Chen especially, got me really excited about educational innovation and about my classroom next year. Although it is all very exciting, it is also overwhelming at the same time. Hence, today's card.

This card is definitely very cheesy, but it's art journaling at its journalingist. (Yes, it is a word now, thank you very much.) To me, art journaling is about the process, not the final product, although I often like my final products.

Hopeful for a Renewed Meditation Practice

Tonight's card is about my desire to get back on track with meditating. There was a time when I dreaded meditating, and now I look forward to it. Despite this, I have been far too inconsistent with my practice. Our meditation at sangha tonight inspired this card:

An Index Card a Day

So I have been playing in my studio quite a bit lately. I have discovered the world of art journaling, which is good for me in that it is helping me break away from my creative rut. I am a very left-brained person, and art journaling is very right-brained, which makes this a nice break from the structured, rule-oriented person I can be.

While exploring some art journaling web sites, I discovered an index-card-a-day challenge and decided to do it for a while. I am not committing to any length of time because that would be another rule for me to follow, but I really liked the idea of something small and playful to work with. So here is my first ICAD:

So go play!

Cake Pops

Tonight I broke into this book to make some cake pops. I have always loved the way they looked, and after a friend bought me this book, I decided spring break provided a great opportunity to try the process out.

The process:

• Bake a cake and let it cool completely
• Mix in 3/4 of a container of frosting (This acts as the glue.)
• Roll into balls
• Freeze for about thirty minutes
• Melt melting candy
• Dip balls into candy

Here's what I learned:

• Kids love the taste; adults don't. (Bleh!) Maybe they would be better with different mixes. I used chocolate and vanilla frosting. Mostly, I think it's just the texture. It's like when that kid at lunch time would roll up his bread roll into a hard, moist ball. Just thinking about it gives me the
• We tried making egg shapes for Easter. This was definitely more difficult than just balls. They didn't come out right, and we ended up re-rolling them into balls.
• It was fun, but a lot of work. It's more about enjoying the process and the family time, especially since I can't stomach eating them.
• It helps having a friend there to keep you company and to speed up the process.

 The best part of the evening was the sale on both limes and mint, which means a mojito awaits me. Yum!

Smash Book Droolings

One more thing before I sign off completely. I am totally (read with a valley girl accent) drooling over these SMASH books. As soon as they are available, I am buying two - one for me and one for my daughter. Enjoy this happy little video.

Some Recent Creations

I love card-making because you can create finished product in a relatively short period of time. I am not a fan of using sketches for scrapbook pages, but for some reason I enjoy using them for cards. This one was inspired by Tuesday Morning Sketches. Here's the sketch below.

 Here are a few pages I have done recently:

I love the simplicity and the colors in this page. I am fond of blue and brown together and did my son's baby album in this color scheme.

I adore the little monster guy created with the Cricut. This page is a scraplift of a tutorial from Paper Clipping. I love Noell' approach - instead of providing you with a sketch, she teaches basic design concepts that can be applied to any layout. This summer, I plan on dishing out the money for her membership. In the meantime, if you are a scrapbooker, I highly recommend checking out her site and subscribing to the Paper Clipping Roundtable via iTunes.

 

At the retreat I went to a couple weekends ago, my friends and I all scraplifted the same page from a magazine. I don't have the issue, so I cannot properly give credit.

Because I am a fan of simple pages, this is one of my favorites. I also like that I combined photos from two different outings.

 Happy crafting!

A Shift in Approach

I have been contemplating my approach to scrapbooking for quite some time. The chronological approach has me frustrated and overwhelmed. There is a lot that plays into this - the fact that I printed over 700 photos from half of 2010, the fact that my scrapbooks are starting to feel repetitive, and the fact that I want my albums to be more meaningful for my children later in their lives.  When one night I realized I felt stressed about how "behind" I was, I acknowledged the absurdity of that situation. My hobbies should not feel like chores. I also realized that same night that I have three pages in one album titled "Joy." Someone was getting stale.

Because I was ready to start thinking about things differently, I found the iScrap class I took from Stacy Julian at Big Picture Classes to be perfectly timed for me. I was ready to play with a different approach to scrapbooking. Within two weeks I completed an 8X8 album, which could be considered a 2010 introspective. What I liked about this approach is that you start with the story or the message and then find the photo to go with that message. What I also found interesting is that by connecting the photo to the statement I originally brainstormed, I learned something about myself. For example, one of my statements was I went on a lot of train rides. This sounds simple and frankly not very meaningful beyond reporting on an activity, but as I journaled using Stacy's technique, I discovered that the reason I love trains so much is because they allude to a simpler time, a time free of iPods, cell phones, video games, and email.

So while I am not ready to completely drop the chronological approach - I will still scrapbook major events - I am ready to branch out more into the other approach. When I have some sun light and some time, I will photograph and upload images from the project.

In the meantime, here are some other projects. This is a card I made. The flower is made from a scrap of black cotton quilting fabric.

 These are hearts the kids and I made for Valentine's Day. Sawyer is clearly in love with scissors.

This page reflects my new approach in that its topic isn't event-centered, but rather relationship-centered.

Gearing Up for a Serious Weekend of Play

I will be spending my weekend with other scrapbookers this weekend. I hope to have lots of pages to share with you next week. I am also taking my first online scrapbooking course through Big Picture Classes. Although they all sounded fun, I chose iScrap, a class in which you make a mini album using I-statements with prompts from the teacher. I can't wait to get going.

I haven't been very good about uploading pictures, so I thought I would share some of my recent creations. The first three are cards I made using sketches from Card Patterns. I rarely use sketches for scrapbook layouts, but love them for cards.

 The next two are for my album I am making that is all about me. I want my children to some day know me as a person, not just as their mom.

 This is my resolution page for 2011. My goal is to simplify my life. I haven't been too successful yet, but I am working on it. So far, I have cleaned about my email in boxes and started cutting down on methods of email input.

These two are not my favorite in terms of design, but I love the topic because it is about the relationship between my husband and and son. They play a game called "Break the Pickle," which makes my son crack up. I was glad I caught this moment on film.

Cards, Cards, Cards!

One of the benefits of cardmaking is that - unlike sewing - you have a finished product in relatively short amount of time, which is why during the winter break, I enjoyed making lots of cards. Here are just a few.

Some of my favorites are the first two for which I made tags out of packaging left over from Christmas. . Plus I got some really cool Eastern stamps with a Buddha face and a meditator and whatnot. You don't see those kinds of products much in the paper-crafting world, so I was thrilled to use my Michael's coupon on them.

 The one above is hands-down my favorite. I copied the overall design from a sketch in a magazine.

 The one above is my least favorite.