Dad rules the roost!

I am so excited! I went to Michael's today for a few supplies and came across the gcd studios provence paper collection. I picked up a few single pieces at a local scrapbooking store recently and was so excited to find the whole collection today! When I came home I found the gcd studios blog and was excited to see that they have a Father's Day card challenge right now. I still needed to make a card for my own dad, so I got to work. I thought the rooster paper in the collection was so funny and came up with this card:

I had a lot of fun with this simple card and I think my dad will get a kick out of it!

First ever Dawn McVey challenge!

I just finished my FIRST EVER Dawn McVey challenge. I've enjoyed all of her color challenges and the awesome creations her other readers come up with. Today I wanted to create a birthday card for a friend of mine. These colors were so elegant together so I wanted to create a more elegant card. The sentiment is heat embossed with black embossing powder. I give Dawn all of the credit for that black embossing powder because I first saw it being used on cards on her blog!

Here is Dawn's challenge photo:

And here's the card I came up with:

The value of vintage

I've been really enjoying using pages of old books to create repurposed paper crafts. I was especially inspired to the Moxie Fab World's Value of Vintage challenge. I helped co-host a couples' baby shower last night for some good friends of ours. The couple is named Becky and Brandon and they are doing a bee theme in the baby's room. I found the perfect sentiment from a Mother Goose book (published in 1941!!) and designed a shower card for the two Bs and their "bb."

Here are a few of the girls:

(from left to right; Miranda and baby Sophia, Becky, Ellese and moi!)

I wanted to use the nursery rhyme as the focal point of the card and found it a bit challenging to incorporate other design aspects because the sentiment was so large! I heat embossed the "B" with black embossing powder and used some sticky strip and black glitter to create the stripe across the yellow polka-dotted paper. All in all, the theme went together really well with some AWESOME designer burpies and diaper clutch from my super-talented friend, Jenna, and some sweet-smelling baby bath products from Burt's Bees.

Bright and bubbly birthday

We attended another 5th birthday party yesterday and I once again used Kristina's Color Inspiration Challenge to come up with a fun, boyish card. Here's my card:

I almost forgot the white for the card and the number 5 added just the right pop. Hope you like it!

School's out for summer...

I'm so sad! My super-grown-up daughter has her last day of preschool tomorrow! We LOOOVVEEE her preschool teachers and wish that they could be her teachers until high school! I made some LARGE cards for them so that all of the moms could sign them in appreciation of everything they've done for our kids. These cards are made with a full sheet of cardstock, folded in half. I used vintage illustrations from a Mother Goose book that was published in 1941! (I am a total book hoarder, so I felt REALLY guilty about defacing this book. It is marked up on a lot of the pages and appears to have some water damage on the bottom of most of the pages, so I wasn't feeling too guilty!)

Kristina's color challenge completely inspired the cards I made because of the bold, primary colors. Seemed so appropriate for teacher cards!

Here are the cards I made:

View #2:



View #2:
Hope you enjoy these cards and thanks for stopping by!

Woohoo and Fathers' Day, too!

I'm so excited! Last week, my 5th birthday monkey card was one of Kristina Werner's top 10 picks! You can see all of the other top picks here.

Now onto this week's challenge:

For this week's challenge I decided to do a fathers' day card. I was totally inspired not only by the colors of the photo, but also the image of the car. I went for a vintage-California-personalized-license-plate-look for this card. (Can you tell I'm addicted to Thickers?!) I stamped the wood-look background with an All Night Media stamp from Michael's and then, GET THIS, I whipped out my dusty paper CRIMPER and crimped that super-cool pearl aqua paper! I really like the texture it created to give the paper a metallic corrugated siding look.

I will be trying to get a card done for another challenge tomorrow...Twilight-inspired! Stop by again and stay tuned!

A little fifth birthday monkey madness...

I don't know what it is, but I've caught the creativity bug lately! We have a fifth birthday party to attend on Friday and Kristina had another new color inspiration challenge, so this card emerged from the crafting madness!
Thanks so much, Kristina, for the inspiration and Amy for the inspiration photo!

Stay tuned for a baby shower invitation featuring a bee theme.

Watch out craft room...HERE I COME!

Kristina Werner's 50th Color Inspiration Challege Extravaganza!

Kristina Werner is celebrating her 50th Color Inspiration Challenge and I decided to join the par-tay! Mothers' Day is fast approaching and I thought I'd make a card for my super special mother-in-law for the occasion.

Here is the challenge:

Love the colors, Kristina! So cheerful!

Here's my submission:

You'll never guess where I got the felt butterfly from.... Okay, do you give up? I got it from Pier 1 Imports! They have different packages of "table confetti" and the butterflies come in a package of 12 (turquoise and green) butterflies for $3. I felt so cool when I found these neat accents!

A Menagerie

It was a busy weekend full of organizing, tossing, gunking and spelunking! Our closets are clean, new pictures are hung and the laundry is did!

Our new little art menagerie is awesome. Most of the components have been sitting in our closet since December. Now it's actually fun to stare at the walls! The large, scrolly thingy is from Pier 1. The cool giant star was a steal that I found in Oregon while visiting my aunt and uncle. $7! I love having a big art statement...especially featuring my fave little munchkins!

Vintage Pearl giveaway!

If you love personalized jewelry, then this is the giveaway for you!

Shealynn Benner's blog is a new find of mine and I am definitely going to ask for one of her camera strap covers for my 30th birthday coming up in about 2 months! She's hosting a great giveaway right now for this beautiful personalized necklace from The Vintage Pearl. I love all of Erin's products, but the handstamped baby spoons are absolutely fabulous. What a great keepsake! I'll be ordering one for my niece for her first birthday.

Go check out the crafty goodness right now!

Canon love...

I love taking pictures! I have been loving it even more lately with my awesome new camera, the Canon Digital Rebel xSi. It rocks.

I love all of the details of close-up shots:

And I LOOVE the 55-250mm lens that came as part of the package. It takes breathtaking photos of landscapes:

I need to get a lot more practice and become more familiar with all of the secrets of digital photography. I need to do this camera some justice!

Awesome crafty blog!

I love that Blogger now has the "following" feature. It is so much easier to get a glimpse of my favorite blogs right on my Blogger dashboard. I was starting to get a little peeved about lame-o Feedblitz sending me posts of a few of my fave blogs 1-4 days after they posted and I missed out on some great info. or giveaways.

One of the blogs I discovered is My Lily Eden. Shelly has a really cute Etsy shop called Lemon Tree Studio and she posts some neat-o projects and photos and she also does fun giveaways. Right now, Shelly is having a 7-day giveaway. Head over there and take a look...but don't enter the contests because then I have less of a chance!! Heehee!

Winter hibernation...

The new laptop is here and UP AND RUNNING! My hubby is handy in many, many ways; however, computers are not his forte. It only took 2 months to get the internet up and running.

I guess I shouldn't complain. Picture uploading and web browsing now moves at lightning speed and makes up for all of the days I spent trying to just check my email.

Here's a photo diary of the events of the past two months.
(Courtesy of my *super awesome new* Canon Digital Rebel xSi):

Kira and Marcus get the ultimate 4xing machine for Christmas.

We take MANNNNYYYY trips to park because (until this week) it's been 75 degrees for the majority of January.

We go to my Aunt and Uncle's house in Bend, OR for the New Year's holiday.

Kira and Marcus help daddy plant their first almond tree at the end of January.

So, that has been a small part of our lives for the past few months.

It feels good to be back.