Big, beautiful flowers

If you like big, beautiful paper flowers as much as I do, you might enjoy this tutorial.

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks so easy. I know I cringe when I see the price of those large flowers in Michaels, but this is great for price. :) Now I need to remember to pick up old music books at thrift stores because I just love how her flower turned out!

Free resource for "shrink plastic"

Do you remember playing with Shrinky Dinks when you were little? I was always fascinated by them. Now that I'm older and into crafting, I've seen a few things I thought were cute, but I didn't want to pay the outrageous prices they want for those few sheets of shrink plastic. Not only that, but I know my kids would love to make a project with these!

So I was ecstatic to find out there's a FREE source for this - #6 recyclable plastic. See this post for the details. Apparently pulling the two strawberry boxes out of my garbage can last week was a really good idea! :)

I'm thinking you could do all kinds of things with these - cut them out as shapes with templates or a die cutting machine, use stamps (StazOn ink would probably work best coupled with permanent markers like BIC Mark-Its or Sharpies), you name it! They would probably make some neat little keychains to give to the grandparents, if you used a shape that was big enough. Or they could be really cute card "charms", just not made out of metal.

If you try it out and make anything, please share! I'm not sure when I'll get around to it, but it might make a neat craft for my son's homeschooling this week. We'll see!

My son's phonetic spelling :)

My kids have been a little moody the last few days since they haven't been getting enough rest. We had a ladies' meeting tonight and my kids were supposed to stay and play with another little girl who was coming with her mother. They begged and cried to go with their daddy instead (go figure!), so my son went into his room and made up these signs for their doors just so she'd know that their rooms were "off limits" if she came:



This was the first one that he made for his door.



And the second one he made for his sister's door. They were supposed to read, "Closed."

I cracked up when I saw his spelling. I hope she doesn't mind my saying so, but my sister spelled like this for the longest time, too. It was a real flashback! :) (She has since pretty much mastered spelling, by the way.)

I thought it was hilarious that he actually thought it through this much but didn't take into account the fact that this little girl doesn't know how to read yet anyway.

Kids!

Altered spiral notebooks

I made notebooks for the evangelist's daughters last week, and I thought I'd share them with you. I was thrilled with how they turned out!

First of all, I have to tell you that I cut up a book of Ann Geddes' photography. Lest you think I'm out of my mind, I got it for $0.05 at Salvation Army for this exact purpose. As I understand copyright law as it applies to photography, I couldn't sell these notebooks, but I can certainly give them as gifts. So let's take a look:
I used a fold-out page for both of them, so I actually only used one page. This is a large book!

Here's the other one.

And here they are side by side so you see how the picture originally fit together. I had to trim them some, so I chose to trim the blue checked part and then use those scraps to die cut their names with my Sizzix Nouveau font. There was even enough left over to create a small notepad cover if I want to!

These look like those designer notebooks that you pay over a dollar a piece for, but reality is that they only cost me $0.05 each. Now that's a bargain! :)

You can find more of these notebooks that I've done here, here, and my tutorial here.

Altered composition book: tea theme

I'm late getting a gift out to my Ministerial Secret Sister (a fellow pastor's wife). She likes tea, so I'm going with that theme for my gift. I'm sending a pack of chamomile tea, the notecards I designed for her eons ago and this altered composition book that would make a lovely devotional journal:
I used wallpaper border that I picked up at the thrift store for $0.25/roll. I have three rolls and have never done anything with it, even though it's completely gorgeous and my style. So I decided this was the perfect opportunity. I had to cut off the ledge the teapot was resting on because it didn't match the rest of my project's colors, but I did cut the label ("Mint Green Tea") from the box it was resting on.

I don't know the name of the border punch I used on the spine. It belongs to my friend and I used it to make some double-sided 12" borders a few months ago, never thinking to note the name of the punch.

You can see more altered composition books I've made here, here and here.

Free digital images (aka digital stamps)

Digital "stamps" are becoming quite the trend in the stamping world, so I thought I'd share a link to some fabulous freebies. All of the images I'm sharing below can be found here. They are simply coloring book pages resized to a smaller image that will fit onto a card.

These are Sarah Kay images: Here are some Curious George:

Some Calilou (which I know nothing about - I just thought they were cute little boys):

And a few miscellaneous images (I recognize Franklin, but I can't remember who the other ones are):

I searched through the site I linked above and looked for kid-friendly, non-busy images that would translate well into a birthday card. Then I printed them onto 3x5" cards and colored them with my BIC Mark-It markers.

If you notice that a few images have stray pen marks, I plan to cut those off. I was just testing my colors! :)

The last of the scrapbook pages

Here are the last of the scrapbook pages I finished during our vacation in November. I'm sharing just in time because we'll be taking another weeks' vacation next month, and I'm thinking about taking more scrapbook pages along to get caught up. :)

So here are the pages, this time from my son's album ...

I love these pictures of my son and my husband! The sentiment from Creative Memories was perfect for this page.

Every now and then I get in the mood to do a "color block style" page, and I always like the result. I'm loving the clear alphabet stamps since I don't have to keep buying alphabet stickers!

I'm not sure what I think about the design of this page, but at least it's done.

I liked this page. See those red circles on the pictures? They tell about the gift in the picture, since my background paper was a bit too busy to journal on (but I loved it enough to use it).

And lastly, a double page spread from our first Cousin Camp. I like how this one turned out, especially with the decorative paper (which came from Dollar Tree, believe it or not).