A Banner Day...

Hello everyone!

May is National Scrapbook Month, and, more specifically, May 5th is National Scrapbook Day.  There is much going on at the store in preparation for this awesome event.

Today, I stayed after work for a few hours.  I'm working on making some attention grabbing items to put around the store to promote NSM.  Last Saturday at crop, I began making a banner.  I found a Recollections paper pad that I really like.  It's a light weight paper - not anywhere near card stock weight - but for what I'm doing, it works well.  I like the colors and I'm hoping we can hang it over the scrapbook aisle.

I've talked about Martha Stewart's Scoring Board before.  I love using this tool.  Martha's products are well made and they often include built in storage for all of the little pieces you need to use with the tool.  This one is no exception.  The scoring tool itself stores inside a little compartment at the top of the scoring board and the triangular piece that's used to make envelopes slides into a convenient slot on the back of the tool.  Excellent!

Primarily, I use this scoring tool to make rosettes of varying sizes and colors.  To make these rosettes, I started with a 12" x 12" paper.  I cut three strips measuring 12" x 3 1/2".  I scored each strip at every 1/2" mark and folded the strips in an accordion style.

In the foreground, two folded strips.  In the background, the last of the three strips, waiting to be folded.

When making rosettes, glue the folded strips end to end.  When all of the strips are glued into one strip, glue the ends of the one strip together to form a perfectly pleated circle.  Set it aside.

Cut out two circles for the center of your rosette.  In this case, the circle I used was 4 inches across.  I wanted a larger circle because I planned to put a letter in the center of each rosette.  The size of the circle is a matter of preference.  It just needs to be big enough to cover the center of the rosette.

The next part is a bit tricky.  Set the pleated circle on end.  Gather the top part of the circle together in one hand and gently pull out the bottom part of the circle with the other hand.  With practice, you'll get a feel for it.  The circle should  kind of splat out.  Glue one cut out circle to the center on the front and one to the center on the back.  Keeping the rosette in formation while gluing on the center circles comes with practice, as well.  I like to use hot glue because it sets and holds almost immediately.

The banner that I'm working on is in shades of green, blue and pink.  Below are some pictures of the completed rosettes on their pennants.

I did get the letters cut out and glued on to each rosette today.  I also glued on the loops for hanging the banner.  But, alas, I forgot to take pictures when they were done.  I will post them as soon as I can.  I will also post pictures of the banner when it's hung.  Stay tuned....

Kath

Summer Frame of Mind

Hi everyone!

Wow, it's been a while.  I've been pretty busy with several things all at once - some paper related, some not.  I'll be posting as much as I can over the next few days to get you all caught up.

I'm going to begin with the project I finished most recently.  Michaels offers a class called Paper Crafted Gift Frame.  This class was first constructed for Christmas.  Sporting the word "JOY", the background papers were the traditional Christmas colors of red, green, and white.  Obviously, I didn't want to put something related to Christmas out on the store floor at this time of the year.  I'm also kind of beyond spring right now - I'm kind of done with the flowers, chicks, and lace.  So, I opted for a summer theme.  Those of you who know me will smile because I've gone with a beach theme - and I love the beach.

Unfortunately, because this is a class that Michaels offers, I'm bound by their public relations policies, so I can't show you this piece in its entirety.  If you live near me, it's on display at the store and you can check it out back in the frames department.

• The flowers, some trim, and tag are handmade using paper from the "Four Seasons" pad by Die Cuts With a View.  I LOVE this pad and plan to use every bit of it - not something that happens with every pad of paper I buy, trust me.  
• The solid colors of paper are French Vanilla, Avalanche, and Turquoise Mist by Bazzill.  
• I sketched in the seagrass using three different shades of yellow green markers by Copic.  I borrowed one of them from the store, so I can't give you the number for that one, but the other two are YG93 and YG95. 
•  The tag is hand lettered using a brown Zig marker.  
• The punch is Martha Stewart's Punch Around the Page in Deco Fan.  
• The large letters were cut on the Cricut Expressions machine using the Jubilee Celebration cartridge.  I think this was a promotional cartridge that was given away last fall with the purchase of two other cartridges.  I couldn't find it on the Cricut site, so if you find it somewhere, please correct me.  :)
• The frame is a 14" x 8" (I think) float frame from Michaels.  It comes in black, but I painted it because - ya know - it needed to be kind of beachy.  :)
• Paints on the frame are by Martha Stewart.  They're Beach Glass and Porcelain Doll in the satin base.    It took several coats of the Beach Glass paint to cover the black, but I love how the frame turned out.  I brushed the Porcelain Doll paint on as a very, very light topcoat.

Sorry for the size and fuzziness of this one, but I cropped it so as not to show too much.  The seashells came from the DCWV pad that I listed above.  I just cut them out and adhered them to a trim strip made of papers and punches that I also listed above.

The word down the middle of the project is "breathe".  I always seem to relax and breathe at the beach - something about that great, uninterrupted expanse of beach and water....

Remember to breathe....

Kathy

Emily's Book

Hi all:

So, after I got all three of my cards done for the Stamping Royalty challenge, I started to focus on other projects that were lined up.

Last year, I experimented with making some small graduation albums for my nieces and nephew.  They measured about 5" x 5", making them small enough to be pretty portable if they wanted to take them to school. I'm not sure if they ever used them (they are teenagers, after all), but the adults seemed to appreciate all of the effort that I put into the albums.  :)

This year, my mom asked if I'd do one for my cousin's daughter, Emily.  I promised her I'd get started with it as soon as the cards were done for the challenge.  Tonight, I finished it.  It was kind of fun to do this album for Emily, as she is graduating from my alma mater.

 That's our little mascot - the Lakota Raider.  :)  I got him off the Raiders' facebook page.  I printed him, cut him out, and then highlighted him with glossy accents.  The words were printed off and cut to fit the matted piece.

The corners of the striped paper were punched with a Martha Stewart punch, then blue cardstock was placed behind the punched corners to bring out the detail.

I like how this page turned out.  The matted areas can be used for pictures, memorabilia, or journaling.  These are different colors of cardstock, one matted on top of the other.  A couple of them were highlighted with patterns using a white gel pen.

I drew the volleyball and then filled it in with glossy accents.  The words were printed out in blue ink and then matted on matching cardstock.

The paper lace was cut out with a Fiskar's punch called "lace".  The tag was cut with a spellbinders die.  The pearls were colored with a copic marker and the words are handwritten.  The page on the left is actually a pocket page.  I like to include pockets to catch things the folks might not want to glue into a book.

Just cardstock and blue glitter letters.  I included all of the textspeak to make it more teen friendly.  :)

Emily was in the school play this spring.  The rose under glass is hand-drawn.

 The paper with the lace edges is punched with a Martha Stewart "Punch Around the Page" set.  The word is printed off and then adhered to the page.

I hope Emily enjoys filling this with all kinds of memories from her senior year.

Take care ~
Kathy

Spring Bird

From time to time, Michaels schedules In Store Demonstrations.  This past Tuesday, the demo was called Decoupage Egg.  Here is my rendering of this craft project.

The instructions called for the use of a wooden egg.  Unfortunately, all of the wooden eggs at our local Michaels store were recently marked down for clearance and they were all gone.  We decided to substitute a styrofoam egg.  

Step one was to decoupage the scrapbook paper with the music notes on to the egg.  This was probably much easier to do on wood.  The porous texture of the styrofoam didn't allow the Mod Podge to stick very easily.  It helped to tear the paper into smaller pieces and be very patient.  

The egg is resting on a wooden napkin ring, painted white, and sprinkled with Martha Stewart's Sugar Cube iridescent glitter.  Spanish moss is glued on top of the napkin ring and the finished, decoupaged egg is hot glued on top of  the moss.

The bird and the flourish were supposed to be cut with dies, but neither the store or I had the necessary dies.  Instead, I sketched the bird and the flourish to the best of my ability, transferred them to colored paper, and cut them out by hand.  They were both sprinkled with the same glitter before adhering them to the egg.

The final touch was the ribbon and bow.  The ribbon is wrapped around the egg and glued.  I made the bow and hot glued it on separately from the ribbon.  This whole project can be made for right around $10 or less.  

I thought it looked very springy and Easter-y - a cute little decoration on a side table or as place holders for Easter dinner.  Once supplies are purchased, you could make several of these little guys from the same sheets of paper, bags of moss, and spool of ribbon.

A few more shots....

Enjoy this lovely summer-like weather we're having!  :)

Take care ~

Kath

Cure for the Winter Blues

So, last night I'm reading through the blogs and websites on my Google Reader list.  I like to read "A Blog Called Wanda"  (check it out here).  She was talking about The Cure for the Winter Blues Challenge at Moxie Fab World.  I followed the trail of breadcrumbs and was shortly off on another project.

Yesterday, I was thinking that I didn't really have anything creative in the works at the moment.  I've been so busy getting ready for Open House and doing the samples I needed to get done that when Open House was over, I suddenly found myself with some choices and had to step back a bit to look for direction.  This Winter Blues Challenge came at the perfect time and it really did challenge me a bit.

I'm not a huge fan of navy blue.  It's "professional".  I mean, I don't hate it, but I generally don't use it to decorate and I don't dress in it.  As a consequence, I'm kind of short on navy blue items in my stash.  Was I up to this challenge?  Did I even have enough to create something worthwhile?

Winter.  Navy blue.  Night sky.  Crisp.  Clear.  Cold.  Peaceful. "In the stillness of a frosty winter night....peace."  Love that, but...too Christmas-y.  (And in the end, too long for my project.)  Oooo...a Tim Holtz stamp with three pine trees in silhouette.  I can use that.  And.....Martha Stewart's Silver Ink Pad.  Oh, here's some muted silver paper and some glittery snow white paper from the Immortal Stack by Die Cuts with a View.  Oh, yeah...now I'm on a roll.....

I started with white cardstock then layered the silver and the white glittery paper on top, finishing the base of the card with a navy blue layer.  I did find a nice shade of navy blue from Recollections by Michaels, by the way.

With the base layers complete, I pulled out the silver ink pad and inked up the stamp with the three pine trees on it.  I made two impressions.  The first layer was bolder, of course.  To bring one tree out to the forefront, I filled it in with a silver Sharpie paint pen.  Stamping again without re-inking the stamp created the lighter impression, giving the look of trees in the background.  I inked the stamp up again, and stamped a piece of white paper.  I cut out the center tree, colored it in with the silver Sharpie paint pen, and popped it out with some tiny foam pop dots.

To create the look of the hills in the background and write the words, I used a white gel pen by Gelly Roll.

The "stars" are dots made by the silver Sharpie paint pen.  Three Swarovski crystals by Jolee were added for sparkle.  I finished the card off with a sheer navy blue ribbon from Michaels.

Enjoy my cure for the winter blues...  :)

Do be impresssed, won't  you?  It took me forever to get that "star" (crystal) to twinkle just right!  :)

I took this one so you could see the silver trees.  In quite a few of the pictures, the trees looked white.  You can also see two of the crystals in this one.

I like the depth of the trees in this shot.  I really brings out all of the levels.

Twinkle, twinkle little star....  A closer shot of the trees and stars.

Peaceful, isn't it?  See, now....winter isn't quite so bad, is it?  :)

Take care ~

Kath

Inspiration from Tim Holtz for March

Hi all!

Due  to Open House preparation, I feel a little behind on my blog reading.  Yesterday, I was able to catch up a little bit and...there was Tim's March 2012 Tag!  Yay!!!  I told myself it was too late to get started on it, I have tomorrow off, I can do it then.  That lasted all of about an hour before I gave in.  At 1:00 AM, I decided I was getting dangerously loopy and didn't want to ruin what I'd started.

Again, I did a card rather than a tag.  Tim's tag was a promotion of spring - butterflies and flowers - whereas mine is more about St. Patrick's Day.  You could say I have a little bit of Irish in my background (my maiden name was Ireland), so I love this holiday.  I love the green, the gold, and the rainbow.  I love the wry, humorous Irish blessings.  I love QVC's Irish show - all of the wool sweaters and capes, the Galway crystal, the Belleek china...but I digress...  :)

So, forgive me, Tim for doing something so blatantly "March", but....I couldn't help meself....  :)

The finished product.  There are many parts of this I'm very happy with.  I loved learning the new technique Tim taught us.  The "tiled" or "stained glass" butterflies were the focus of this month's project.  

The butterflies are cut out of grungeboard then covered with double sided super sticky tape.  The tiny pieces of paper are cut and adhered to the butterflies.  Once the mosaic look of the paper snippets were done to my satisfaction, I sprinkled Ranger's Distress Embossing Powder in Black Soot over the butterflies, shook off the excess, and then heated the embossing powder, melting it and making it shiny.  I applied Glossy Accents to the paper pieces, giving them a glassy look, then attached some Swarovski crystals by Jolee to the wings for added sparkle.  This picture doesn't show the colors well.  The paper snippets are in varying shades of greens and creams.  The crystals are peridot or pale yellow in color.  (For more detailed instructions regarding the butterflies, please visit Tim's blog at timholtz.typepad.com )  While the butterflies were drying, I worked on the background.

I started with a sheet of pale gray textured cardstock and ran it through my Vagabond, using the Tim Holtz Sizzix Woodgrain Texture Fade.  To bring out the wood grain, I highlighted the raised parts with the C5 Cool Grey Copic Marker.  I roughened up the edges by scraping my Cutter Bee Scissors along them and then I used Tim Holtz Distress Ink Pad in Weathered Wood to darken the edges.  The scroll is made from regular old run-of-the-mill copy paper.  I went to DaFont.com and downloaded a font called Stonehenge.  (By the way, I know folks are used to seeing Erin Go Bragh, but as I was researching this, I found that the words I used are actually closer to the authentic Celtic version.)  The font size is set at 44 for this one.  After printing off the words, I tore the paper, around the words, leaving extra lengths on both sides of the words.  This allowed room for me to roll the scroll.  I pretty much antiqued the whole paper with Tim Holtz Antique Linen Distress Ink Pad and then went over just the edges with the Vintage Photo Distress Ink Pad.  I rolled the ends of the scroll in opposite directions, holding them there for a few seconds and then, adhered the scroll to the cardstock background.

To make the charm, I used a piece of paper from Tim Holtz Seasonal Paper Stack.  I traced the facet I wanted to use onto the paper, so I could get the sizes correct.  The gold flourish is simply painted on with gold acrylic paint.  

I painted the shamrock with watercolors on watercolor paper and cut it out.  I adhered it next to the gold scroll work on the paper then cut the shape out.  Using Glossy Accents, I adhered the facet to the paper backing, set a heavy object on top of the facet and left it to dry.  When the Glossy Accents was dry, I trimmed the excess paper around the facet.  This is an acrylic facet, also by Tim Holtz.  I used Copic markers G09 - Veronese Green and YG93 - Grayish Yellow to color the ribbon that's threaded through the ring on the facet.  I hotglued the ribbon to the card and voila! - done!

Lots of fun and lot of green St. Patrick's Day goodness!

See you soon ~

Kath

Punched Cards

Hi all:

I'm still working away at samples for Open House.  In the midst of preparing for that, our bathroom is undergoing some minor renovations, so we have a couple of workmen in the house this week, too.  Also, I worked an extra day this week, so the pressure is on.  I'm tired, tired, tired - but cautiously optimistic about the Open House on Saturday from 1-3.

I still have to put my storyboards together.  One will showcase the classes I offer, so I'm trying to finish up a few things - like paper flowers and cards - to attach to that board.

On Friday, April 13, I will be offering a class called Punched Card Tricks.  This class teaches you how to use a punch in some new and interesting ways.  Most of the time, we simply use a punch to put a decorative hole in the project we're working on, but this class makes you think about other ways to use your punches.

The class offers five cards, but I only have three done so far.  Here are pictures of the three that are finished.  The third one is a little blurry.  I didn't realize that until just now and it's too dark to take another good picture.  I apologize...

I'll try to get the other two finished and posted tomorrow.  I will also work on posting pictures from the open house.  Take care....

Kath