The 12 Days of Christmas Cards--Day One

It has begun. The quest for the perfect Christmas card is well under way. I thought I'd have a little fun with this stressful time of the year and attempt to post daily for the next 12 days with a new Christmas card creation each day. Call me a crazy freak but I just can't be happy with one mass-produced Christmas card. I think it has to do with wanting to use the mounds of Christmas cr@p accumulating in my craft room. The guilt of limiting myself to just one stamp set or just one punch is too much to bear. So, let's get this party started.

Here's the first one and quite possibly will end up being my favorite one this year(a little too early to call). This takes a little bit of goodness from a couple of my favorite product lines and a few fun techniques thrown in for good measure.

The background was embossed with the swiss dots cuttlebug folder and the scene background is the Labels One Nestabilities cut out of various cs. The reindeer is from the Stampin Up! Winter Post set and embossed , cut out and pop-dotted. I used the Martha Stewart christmas tree punch and added some puffy paint and pop-dotted them and used more puffy paint for the snow covered ground. The falling snow and the northern star are from the SU! Itty Bitty Backgrounds and Snow Flurries sets. The sentiment is from the Penny Black "this and every year" set and embossed in gold ep and pop-dotted on a little bit of SU! dsp from last year cut out with a scalloped nestabilities. The branches are the Martha Stewart branch punch in SU! chocolate chip cs and the ribbon is SU! Alpine Originals.

It was a little time-consuming but I'll only be making a few of each design and this one was a lot of fun to make and I'm sure will be a lot of fun to give!

A fun timeline of pics

Here is a 2-pager I worked on yesterday for the circle journal I'm a part of on sb.com. We were asked to put together a layout of pics from childhood to present and share some inside info about who we are. It was fun searching through old pics at my parents' house looking for shots that weren't completely and totally embarassing. You just can't do much though about all those high school pics with bad 80's hair (for those of us unfortunate souls who had the great misfortune of being in high school in that less than memorable moment of style and fashion history). I chose to cut it all off in '90 and start over. Good choice, I think.

I love the QK Nutmeg alpha that I used on this one! It's kinda chunky, kinda funky, and makes a statement. This spread is 8x8 so the alpha looks really large on here but would also look stunning on a 12x12 page too. (A great one for anyone on the fence).

Better luck next year guys.

It's a sad sad day here but somehow we found the strength to get up this morning and carry on. I couldn't even watch it last night. Had to keep flipping back on commercial breaks during The Race and The Unit and I just dreaded the moment when I knew Jeff would walk out to the living room and break the bad news. For any of you with a Red Sox freak at home--you KNOW what I mean. There was silence. And more silence. Then we went to bed. This morning was all business getting ready for work and more silence. He should be ok around lunch time. This will be a blip on the radar by next month. Maybe. At least there'll be no more weeknights staying up til 1AM. Can't win em all. But it sure would be cool.

WOOHOO!!

I just felt like saying that. It's Monday, I've been hangin' with hubby all day and doing naughty things like going out to lunch and scrapping! I just love days when the kid has school and the big kid doesn't have to work.

I used a few new goodies on this one that I've been dying to break out of their packages and a few techniques that I normally won't take the time to do. It was fun! I hand-stitched (some of my hand-dyed,hard to find and a little pricey cross-stitch floss--glad it went to good use) around the SU! Top Note die and pulled out the sewing machine too and added some zigzagging. I also love the look of thickers and love that I can make my own with my QK dies so I cut each letter 3 times and glued them together to get that "thicker" look.

I used the SU! scallop punch too. I like this one MUCH more than the Fiskars threading water punch. It's smoother, my Fiskars gets caught up and tears the paper, and I just like the tinier scallop this one gives.

And last but not least, I finally used some BG Boxer. I bought an obnoxious amount of this paper and this was the first time I used it. These are pics of my son on our trip to Orlando this summer. I may have mentioned he was like the girl on the cruise commercial??

The journaling reads:

I love how your dad captured this candid shot of you-the look that drove us crazy, the one that says vacations with mom and dad are just not cool anymore. I think you secretly had fun every now and then and maybe you'll take us up on bringing a friend next time.

Overcoming challenges...

I wish I could say I'm jazzed about the pics I took in Orlando this summer--but I'm not. It's just hard sometimes to focus(literally) on taking good pics when you're too busy having fun. But that's what life is all about, enjoying the moments--not worrying about capturing it on film. So, I started scrapping the pics from this trip a few months ago and I set it as a little goal to just go ahead and finish them up. My guys are excited to see them come to life on pages and that gives me the motivation to continue with these less than perfect shots.

I've really liked using the BG Ambrosia line for these amusement park LOs. These papers make me think of many very different uses like Asian themed pages, Halloween/autumn, and of course, these park shots. I'm sure I'll think of other themes these would be perfect for!

Getting back into it.

Got a little scrappin done over the weekend and it felt good. I think it's definitely time to focus on the hobby again instead of the state of the country. Yuck. If there's one good thing to come out of a recession, it's that I will be forced to use the stash I already have. I'm sure we'll see less product available and stores closing their doors. Hope that's not the case but it sure helps to justify all this stuff I bought and haven't used. I used some BG Ambrosia on this LO and QK Fiesta.

A very simple scraplift

I was pretty excited when I opened up the August issue of CK last month and saw Becky Higgins' very simple yet very classy and totally perfect framed piece on page 49. Yes, it's true. We've lived in this house for nearly 3 years and I have yet to hang one picture (well any piece of home decor at all) on the walls of our master bedroom. We finally got the paint color right 2 years ago and then the bedding came together a few weeks ago while shopping in DC and I found the absolute perfect art piece to hang over the bed just last week. AND-we hung it 2 days after buying it. That's a record around here, folks. Then, I see this classic beauty and knew this was what I have been looking for.

So, I found one of my pics from the desert garden in San Diego's Balboa Park that really showcases my favorite colors of lime/chartreuse green and peach/orange. The frame has a natural linen mat and coordinates perfectly with the other natural elements in our bedroom. And I'm hanging my own version of Becky's piece on the wall at the foot of our bed so I can wake up every morning to this beautiful sight.

It's all in the packaging.

Sometimes I like the giving of the gift bag and card more than the gift itself. I love it when someone we know has a baby. I love browsing all the new cute baby stuff and hey-it's a great opportunity to use my giraffe die (which I see is going for several 100 $ on ebay lately). wha?!? This gift bag, I'll admit, sucked up several hours of my time one afternoon but isn't it too stinkin' cute?? I stamped all the little giraffes and then painstakingly colored them in and added some glossy accents to the snouts. Found a good use for what's left of my paper stacks(what I didn't already donate to area schools)-just trying to use up the stash-and I think the green paper was perfect! Then I used a couple border punches including the leave it to weaver punch that I couldn't pass up with a coupon and really had no idea if I would ever use it. Now I know what it's good for!

It's fun packaging gifts in a special way. Even if it just ends up in the trash at the end of the day!

There's really no excuse...

I'm just a bad blogger. Life just gets in the way sometimes and I forget to update this with cool pics and other fun stuff. So we made our what's now becoming annual trek up to the DC area and I always love going up there. Know why?!? It makes me really appreciate where we live and how we live now. I have to admit it. I HATED living there 8 years ago and sometimes I long for big city life and excitement but then I get my quick fix on a week long trip like this and I'm good again for awhile. I don't miss things like the ever present parking lot called roads up there and I'm oh so thankful for my driveway and garage!! We truly are spoiled down here in the middle of nowhere and sometimes I need a swift kick in the a@# to remember that.

So last year we rode the train down into DC and I got some amazing shots down there-all of which I have yet to actually scrap-- and this year we decided to revisit one of our favorite spots, the Annapolis waterfront. It was gloomy and raining on and off all day but I was feeling nostalgic and really wanted to go see if the old restaurants were still there and if it just looked the same and it did!! It just felt like fall down there and made me not miss the passing of summer so much. We also checked out the townhome we lived in there (our military quarters that we also lived in there for awhile had long since been condemned and bulldozed-seriously) and the old neighborhood looked exactly the same! Well, they now have an extremely cool playground for the little ones that I would've died for back then for Chase and they don't take care of the yard nearly as good as we did :) We visited with my brother and his family too and it was just a nice trip all around. These are all shots of Annapolis.

Another year...Another CKC...

So hubby and I are back from Charlotte and hubby had such a great time he wants to go back next year :) No, he didn't hit CKC with me. Scrapbooking is just not his bag. Actually, his bag holds a butt-ton of Taylormades and he managed to find himself in golf heaven on Friday. He just went on and on about what a great day of golf he had. I couldn't get a word in edgewise about the sb convention. Too funny! I have to say I'm stinkin' proud of myself this year. A few days before leaving for Charlotte, I was really a little bummed that we had made these plans since I'm drowning in product here. I have a stack of paper sitting on the sofa in my scraproom desperately seeking a home and not enough layouts in my lifetime to use it all. But-I focused my energy elsewhere and scored BIGTIME on new QK alphas!! What's a girl to do when they're all on sale like that?? So, I picked up a slew of new ones (well, pretty much the rest of the new release I hadn't already bought) and just 20--yes, that's right--20 new sheets of paper. Some Pink Paislee and some sheets of the new BG lines. Oh, and some really cute Pink Paislee owl stamps. I couldn't resist. So, unlike last year where I came back with stuff that wasn't even product I really use, I bought stuff I LOVE and had a FAB time!! I think it made a huge difference that I knocked out all my shopping in a couple hours and then went to lunch with my friend Yvonne and just had a relaxing time. Hubby and I had the rest of the day to ourselves and it really felt like a little mini-vaca. I might even do this again next year...