Be Creative week day 1

So, so, sorry this took forever to post. I was wrestling with my internet for the ENTIRE day!

Anyways let's go on with the show, shall we?

The purpose for this special creative week is to share some fun ideas and projects that you can do to kick off your summer. Some of you might still have kids' in school but it won't be long till you can have "lazy days" and what better way to celebrate the beauty of Summer than with some projects, right?

So here's the deal, every day this week, I'll be sharing a project (some with instructions to copy) or ideas. I'd love for you to be inspired by them. If you happen to have the time to make the projects this week, upload it somewhere and share the link here and I'll put your name for a chance to get a rak/prize. Now if you don't have the time but came out with some type of inspiration from here, comment and I'll add your name in the rak too. So basically the more you play along (commenting or playing along with the projects) the more chances you have in getting a prize.

So are you ready???

Here's the first one......

"PLAY" MATCHING GAME

I got this idea from this site. I loved the concept of using your papercrafts supplies to create a fun game that your family, especially the kids, can enjoy. I modified mine from the original. I wanted it to be sturdy enough that it can be played more than once before it falls apart (my kids can be pretty rought on their board games) so I laminated each card with contact paper and cut it out with my pinking shears. The regular decorative edged scissors wasn't doing the trick for me.


The plan was to pick papers that have small and similar patterns that would be easy to match with each other so I picked geometric shapes, flowers and text papers.


This is a great way to use up those scraps.


I stamped on the other side for balance and unity.


tie with a ribbon to finish off the project.


My kids LOVE using this game. This can also be a good hostess gift.

So there you have it. Easy peasy and something you and your kids' would sure enjoy.

Oh and please spread this fun thing/week that we're doing here at my blog to anybody you know that might be interested. I'm all about sharing ideas.

Till tomorrow,
Grace

Be Inspired #33- Monogrammed containers

happy Sunday everyone. Whew! this weekend is finally coming to a close. It sure was a productive one for me. I will upload my creations soon but in the meantime here's a project featuring the Eye Candy line from GCD Studios, inspired by the most recent Cuttlebug challenge....

Monogrammed Containers

Before one of my dear friends' move to Alaska, she gave me some empty paper lunch boxes. She knew that I'd use em and I thank her for thinking of me when she was clearing her house. Anyways that's how I got the lunch box foundation here.


I covered it up with this great paper and inked the edges.


I then created a trim to go around the box with this paper. I added a chipboard monogram in the middle. I'm thinking of filling this box with some fun "bath and body" products to give to Maddie's preschool teacher at the end of the school year. I liked that this box personalized my gift to her.


I didn't have another box for Marcus' teacher so I resorted to altering a glass jar instead. I'll still fill it up with "bath and body" products but I'll pick smaller packages instead. Anyways, I fancied it up by covering the top with paper and chipboard, plus adding ribbon on the side.


I used the same border papers as I did in the lunch box here too. I loved how Cuttlebug embossing folders give cardstock much more character without it being too overwhelming for the rest of the designs in this project.

Thank you for looking and stop by again tomorrow cause I'm starting something fun!!!

Till next time,
Grace

CPS 117- Thank you card

I'm definitely on a roll this week. My scrap space is a big MESS but I'm definitely kicking the creativity in high gear. Thanks to challenges and dt responsibilities, I'm pushing myself to work out through my scrapbook stuff.

Here's a card inspired by this week's sketch over at Card Positioning System blog. I always print out and try their sketches but could never make it before the deadline. This week is definitely shaping up to be a good one for me.

Thank you card

I finally used up these We R Memory keepers papers that I bought at Micheal's over a month ago. Yes, I buy and it takes me a while before I can actually play with my new stuff. Sad but that's life. Anyways these papers were awesome! All of them are double sided and some have four small blocks on the other side. Great for smaller projects like this card cause all the designs were printed in a smaller scale. Awesome, awesome, awesome!


I created a simple sentiment. I'm inlove with rubons. They're the easiest way for me to create card sentiments nowadays, all I have to do is rub and it's like magic- a card finished!

Thank you for looking.

Oh and to my papercraft blog readers, I'm starting a "creative" week next week. I'm going to post projects and ideas that you can do during the summer break. I don't know about you but I'm counting down till school ends and what better way to welcome the vacation months with some projects. These are going to be easy ones and you can even get your kids involve in them. Sounds good? alright well I'll see you next week and until then have a great weekend.

Till next time,
Grace

Be Inspired #32

Got a card done yesterday morning and it was inspired by the Cuttlebug's latest challenge. They wanted us to mix hearts and butterflies. Here's what I came up with...

Be glad card

I used the cuttlebug nested hearts die to make my background. I placed them on top of my white cardstock like a mask and sprayed glimmer mist on it.


I then punched out a butterfly from pattern paper and layered it with a smaller butterfly to create movement.

thank you for looking.

Till next time,
Grace

My weekend

Woohoo it's Sunday! To some people, they look at today as the start of another week, to some it's the end. Whatever it is, this is my favorite day of the week.
On Sunday's I get to go to church and renew my baptismal covenants to the Lord, and then go home and take a cat nap plus have family home evening with my family. I usually sneek in some craft time while the kids are either napping or have gone to bed. Just thinking about it makes me so excited.

So as I mentioned in this post that Mitch and I just had our 7th year anniversary. He got me some flowers on Monday and then we celebrated yesterday (Saturday) with dinner and movies.

I loved that he picked a mixture of red and dark pink flowers for my bouquet. So cute!


We had dinner here....

both of us have never been here before.

We ordered their seafood special plate to share.

it had everything on it- lobster tail, crab legs and shrimps. The food was ok. I guess both Mitch and I can say that we are not big fans of seafood dishes. I'm not sure about you but I don't get the big deal about lobster. I didn't think it had enough flavor on it's own for me to want it again. I was not impressed, even after squeezing a lemon and dipping it in butter. I guess I'm not the sophisticated kinda gal. I do however really liked the "hush puppies" bread they had.

and since we shared a plate we had room in our stomachs for dessert. Mitch got the warm apple cobbler with ice cream and I got a new york cheesecake with strawberries. I LOVE cheesecakes but this one was not impressive either. Don't get me wrong, I ate it, but the whole time I was wishing I was having a slice of caramel cheesecake from the cheesecake factory instead.


and of course pictures of us....



After seeing these photos, we were both commenting that we looked tired. Do we? hehehehehehe.

After dinner we saw this movie...


It was very cool! Not one moment was boring. Now I'm not a "trekky" fan but I really liked this film. One thing I noticed though was that there's a lot of punching scenes, especially with Capt. Kirk's character. It was always a brawl with him.

And here we are before the movie...


After the movie, I managed to get Mitch to get into one of those photo booths with me and we got some fun pics. I can't wait to scrap those!

Anyways that's all for now.

Till next time,
Grace

Crazy for Crazy Daisy

Woohoo!!!
It was announced today at the Crazy Daisy kit blog. I'm part of their new DT and I'm so excited! Did you know that they have mini albums in each kit? You know me and minis, I love em! That's why I feel so at home with this kit club.
Check em out here. We're planned to work on the june kit and I can't wait!

till next time,
Grace

Let's talk numbers....

No I'm not talking about money, I don't have any so why bother talk about that! *laugh* This post will have to be random things that have some kinda numeral in it. Ready? let's go....

4.7
That's the magnitude of the earthquake we here in SoCal felt last Sunday night. My family was home and we were all just lounging around when Mitch noticed the unusual shaking. I quickly and calmly got my kids to go under the table. Maddie was afraid of it but Marcus seemed excited about the quick jolt.

12
Today at noon, I went and voted for some state propositions being decided on today. Felt good knowing that my voice was heard.


3
My 3 favorite scrapbook things right now are: apron lace punch from fiskars; swiss dots from cuttlebug and "ld vanilla" font from letterdelights.com. You'll see all of these things in my most recent layouts. Fun stuff!!!


14
You can have a chance to win 14 glittered letters pack if you participate in the sketch challenge at the GCD studios blog today. check it out cause the deadline is tomorrow afternoon.

2
There's 2 new posters up on our wall today and those are my kid's reward/chore chart. I finally finished it up this past weekend and the kids, especially Marcus, is very excited and motivated to get check marks on all of his chores, all throughout the week so he can get his reward on Friday. He got to pick it and he chosed Pizza. Didn't surprise me since that boy can eat 4 slices (regular slices) in one seating.

and finally 7
That's the number of years Mitch and I have been married. Yesterday was our anniversary. Didn't really celebrate since I had to work and it's a weeknight. I'm going to take this Saturday off from work though so we can do something fun. He did bring me a beautiful bouquet of flowers. He's soooo sweet.


So there you have it. This was a fun way to change up a post, try it for yourself.

Till next time,
Grace

Bliss

Over at the American Crafts blog, the challenge this week was to make a wedding theme layout using non theme products. Mmmm sounds really good, right? The only problem I had with it, is that I've already scrapped my wedding photos and despite my pleading and begging, hubby wouldn't let me pick a couple from our wedding photo album which has all of our professional photos. Darn!

So what does a scrappy girl do? Go through my stash of pictures and to my surprise found some pics of hubby's cousin's wedding. Mitch took these photos while we look on during their ceremony. Yippee! so I went to work and here's what I came up with....

Bliss

Since it was an outdoor ceremony, I was inspired to use this leafy pattern paper.


to break up the earthy tones in this page, I added red. Which worked well cause we are also talking about "love" in this layout. I have it in my ribbon and hearts.


I ran my big heart through my cuttlebug with the swiss dots template and distressed the edges a little. I love these puffy letters that I got from American Crafts.


I thought two small hearts would be a good detail for this wedding page.

Supplies used:
Cardstock- (brown) Bazzill; (Green) Die cuts with a View
Pattern paper- Hummus, Ala Carte, American Crafts
Ribbon- Elements, American Crafts
Letter stickers- Umbrella, Thickers, American Crafts
Embossing folder- Swiss dots, Cuttlebug, Provo Craft
Border punch- Apron lace, Fiskars
Black pen- Millenium, Zig
Others- Thread and Sewing Machine

Till next time,
Grace

Be Inspired #31 plus a toot!

Hello Sunday!
Today I wanna share my project for the Be Inspired #31 challenge over at the Cuttlebug blog. This week, the design team wanted us to use cuttlebug tools to make a board book. Here's what I made.....

My Childhood Years minibook

For the roughly five years that I've been scrapbooking, I've collected some odd things that I (at that time) thought would be cool to alter, this AOL box was one of them. I don't think they even mail these out anymore....


I liked that this box was sturdy and the way it opens was perfect for a minibook.


so I turned it into this....

I used the fun girly colors from the Eye Candy line of GCD studios for this project. I incorporated the swiss dots cuttlebug embossing template for added design and texture.


this book's purpose was for me to document memories from my childhood. Sometimes you might think minibooks are a daunting task because there's so much more pages to create but in actuality if you got your theme, journaling, products and pictures all prepped, the task is not that difficult to accomplish. I was able to work on this project for 2 days. Now I didn't work on it all day for those two days since I was working (my regular job) both days so I would say that the project took me about 3-4 hours to make.

I like accordion style pages bec. they're the easiest thing for me to do. Here's the left part....


and here's the right part.....


Here's the inside cover of the book. Used the swiss dots here again to show unity all around the book.


One of the best things I've ever done in my scrapbooking, is to make a quote book. Whenever I'm stumped with something clever to say on my own, I just grab my book and almost everytime I instantly find what I'm looking for.


I kept the products to a minimum here working with just one line of paper and sticking with the same color scheme with my embellishments. My fave thing right now is transferring rubons on cardstock, cutting the image out and adhering it with a pop up dot onto my page. It brings more life to them!


I used 10 questions about childhood for my journaling. I got the questions from the Simple scrapbooks idea book called "Scrapbook shortcuts with quizzes and questions" I totally recommend this book to add to your collection. And since I got 10 questions, I also used 10 photos. Random photos of me when I was young.


here's the back. Nothing too fancy done here since it's the back of the book/box.


Sideview of the project. I used mod podge as my adhesive for altering this book.


And finally the "toot". If you're not a scrapper, tooting is not an inappropriate bodily function term (LOL), it's a way for you to brag! Toot your horn! get it? Hehehehehehe.

Anyways for me this week, it comes in the form of this book....



It's from Creating Keepsakes. My layout is on page 75. I'm so excited about this one cause it features my two precious babies.


So there you have it. Thanks for looking and have a great Sunday.

Till next time,
Grace

I'm grateful for these two

I'm having one of those weeks were things are just looking up. *insert a big smile here*
We only had one day of preschool this week since today (Thursday) is a field trip day. I opted to skip the trip since it's just at the Heritage park where we've been before, then yesterday I had the day off, so anytime I have a big bulk of time to scrap, I'm happy. I was able to whip up some pages for challenges. Woohoo!

One little word challenge blog celebrates its second year this week and it was just fitting that their word challenge was TWO. I had "two" much fun with this one. Get it?! Here's what I made...

I'm grateful for these two

this page is all about my precious children. I picked baby pictures of them since I'm kinda missing that stage right now. This sketch was based on the Kraftgirls sketch for this month. I loved the simplicity and white space of the sketch, perfect for my theme.


I played with a lot of stuff here. I've been collecting a lot of new things lately and it's nice to finally dug through that basket and break open some fun things. I used the Oasis line of SEI for the papers, some prima flowers, Pink Paislee letter stickers and Basic Grey rubons. Wow can't believe I've waited all this time to bust them open.


I love layering flowers right now. I also added some stitching around the blocks of pattern paper here.

Journaling:
My children are definitely one of my greatest blessings. These two have taught me a lot. It's a little weird that they're just kids and yet raising them have made me a better person. They're my constant reminder to be unselfish, forgiving and to have patience. Thank you Marus and Madelyn.

and thank you for looking. Have a great Thursday.

Till next time,
Grace

Mother's day recap

I hope I'm not the only blogger out there that will be posting a Mother's day recap three days after the event. The beginning of the week is always very busy for me.
Anyways, Mother's day was great. I really didn't have any expectations on that day. Work got me all tired prior to that day so when the day came, I was just on the "going with the flow" mode.

So the morning started with a breakfast made especially for me by Mitch.

A little story about this breakfast.... I know Cream of wheat and a piece of toast was not that all grand but it's kinda my fault too, I didn't go to the grocery store before Sunday and so we didn't have any food and since we don't buy on Sunday's, he resorted to going through our food storage and made this. I guess he figured I wouldn't appreciate a cold cereal bowl so he provided me with a different variation of our usual breakfast bowl.
Hey, I'm not going to complain, I was able to sleep in a little and food was served to me. Whatever kind it was, I was happy.

We went to church that morning and boy was I busy bee that day. I had sharing time lesson to do for the kids and I also spearheaded their Mother's day project. I took photos of the kids two weeks ago, printed them off, then the kids made a mother's day frame for it.

Then when we got home, I "forced" my family to take pics with me. I say force cause I literally had to drag them out in the backyard and made them smile with me. I coached Mitch as to what kind of pictures I wanted him to take of me and the kids and these are what we got...







and this is my favorite one....



and here's my Mother's day gift from the family. A funny story behind this......While I was at work on Saturday, the family went to Home depot to get stuff for the kitchen and they picked up some flowers (one for me and another for Grandma Tolman) Dad instructed the kids that it would be a surprise so they shouldn't mention anything to me.
Well when they picked me up from work that day, the first thing Maddie told me is this...
"Mama we got you some flowers for Mother's day but it has to be a surprise!"
I guess the word "surprise" is not in a three year old's vocabulary yet! Too funny!

That evening we went to my inlaws house for some family time. We enjoyed our stay there and I got some fun treats from my mother in law. She gave all the moms truffles and candied apples. Isn't she the greatest? That was my fave gift of all that day. Don't get me wrong, the flowers and a book from church was good but c'mon if Dads get chocolates and candies for Father's day, I think mom's should get some treats on our day too. Don't you think? *laugh*

Anyways, so much for my yapping. Hope your week is going great.

Till next time,
Grace