Milk & Cookies

I put this month's Stamp of the Month to good use yesterday as a surprise for my children when they arrived home from their first day of school!

Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies were waiting for them in the kitchen. You bet that they dropped their backpacks, poured some milk and let the stress of the day roll off! Hey, it's tough to get back into the routine!

How cute is this stamped image? It's not too late to get your own and get it for free! Check out the Current Specials page to see all the details. Orders can be placed here before August 31st.

Little Thank You's

I have always included a little thank you card in all my customer's orders. It was my way of showing gratitude for their loyalty and helping support my humble crafting business. I realized lately that I have a core of customers that have been loyal to me for a number of years now and I felt they deserved more than just a single note card of thanks. So I decided to include a set of thank you cards in their order. I create them with the latest products and lots of love!

I may not have a lot of customer's, but I have the BEST customer's!

 

Merry & Bright in July!

Today I am playing along with a Christmas in July challenge on The Paper Players! When my daughter saw me creating this card she said "It's too early for Christmas cards. Why do people have Christmas in July?" She really is not fond of this idea, she prefers to keep Christmas in December!! {silly girl}

I have also used a mix of patterned papers which happens to be the challenge on Heart 2 Heart this week. I love mixing and matching different papers from various kits. It really stretches the possibilities of projects when you do this. I often find it is necessary in scrapbooking, because the photographs have a mix of colors!

The papers I chose are from the kits Stella, Rockin' and Dotty for You. My "merry&bright" was cut using the new Cricut Artbooking collection available August 1st. I added some red sparkle glitz to the "bright" for some festive fun!

Hello, I Miss You!

Today I am playing with Freshly Made Sketches. They have a clean and simple sketch with a popular flag banner sentiment. I pulled in some older Dotty For You striped paper and some practically ancient sassy strands. The end result is a fun card that would bring a smile to someone you've been missing!

A Spring Hello!

I'm so excited for warmer weather, colorful flowers and Spring break vacation!! I pulled out an older irresistible chipboard flower and inked it up to coordinate with some fun new Chantilly papers and fabric! My goal was to use the Freshly Made Sketch to create a fun and bright card! Now that's a "happy" hello!

 

Chantilly & Dotty papers, pleated fabric and a chevron stamped tag....so many of my favorite things!!

Inspired By Blue and Yellow Dots

The inspiration photo on Inspired By this week has some very bold colors of bright yellow and dark blue on a lighter blue background. Polka dots seem to be everywhere now lately, fashion, home decor and paper crafts of course. This is what I came up with for this challenge~

I strongly encourage you to check out the artwork this week on Inspired By. There are some very creative entries that will truly inspire you!

Merry & Bright

I wanted to share some clean and simple Christmas cards I made using up some scraps I've collected throughout the year! I've been doing this quite a bit lately hoping to empty my scraps bag before the new year!

I am entering these cards in the Heart 2 Heart Christmas challenge since they will not be posting a new challenge this week with the Holiday and all! Also, I was super excited to see that my "glitter" card was chosen in November's top ten, check it out here. Woo~hoo!!

Rainbow colors were a big trend this year! Why not incorporate that in Christmas cards, it makes them so bright and cheery. My cards were also inspired by a photo greeting card I received by one of my customers. Her beautiful family dressed in black & white in front of bright colorful panels and the sentiment "Happy Joyful Twenty Twelve Merry & Bright" in rainbow colors. It was so cute and different! {Thanks for the inspiration Nikki!}

See Ya Later!

Just wanted to share a card I made for some friends that are leaving us. We met them through our church about 5 years ago. Our kids got along great, in fact my daughter and their's are best friends and having a hard time with the move. Why move then? Their dad is in the Navy and being deployed to Japan. It's a BIG move! We hung out last night and had a few good laughs remembering some fun parties and celebrations we shared. I prefer to keep goodbyes on the lighter side, as you can see with my playful card!

Their youngest daughter is our god child. Her and I were playing dress up lastnight. I'm really going to miss this cutie pie!

Be You

Take a look at this lovely card I created for Ribbon Carousel Challenge this week as well as the Inspired By Challenge #30. It was also inspired by a card I saw on Dawn McVey's Blog. I love the vibrancy of the colors, layered flower, mis-match of embellishments and the distressing.

The challenge of Ribbon Carousel was to do paper piecing. I chose to stamp the flower 3 times and then cut around the petals to give it dimension. Piecing it all back together on the card really makes it a focal point!

This was the inspiration photo on Inspired By. The colors, flowers and bit of polka-dots is what really caught my eye!

i do

It's wedding week on Heart 2 Heart Challenges this week. What does marriage and Heart 2 Heart Challenge Blog both have in common? Commitment! As a Design Team Member for the past 6 months, I have fully committed my time and passion for creating. My term as a DT member has come to an end sadly and this will be my final post as a team member. Don't worry you'll still see me playing along with their challenges though! Enough about that...what's the challenge?!

This week we want to see your creative and elegant wedding or wedding shower projects. My initial thought was to create something in black, white and gray, a very classic color combination. Then I thought of my own wedding {years ago!} where my colors were black and white with a pop of red. The funny thing is that the venue for our reception had crazy neon lights so all my red looked like hot pink and a little orange. For my elegant, slightly quirky, wedding card I pulled in some Tulip, Cotton Candy and Baby Pink. Hope you like it!

Some of the elegant touches I included were fabulous frilly ribbons, sparkly buttons and pretty pearls. All of these embellishments and other products to complete this card are all Close To My Heart.

P.S. Thank you for the opportunity to be a Design Team Member at Heart 2 Heart. I've had so much fun participating in all the challenges and providing inspiration to all who visit. I enjoyed creating along side the other fabulous members. You are all so creative and really kept me on my toes. A special thanks to Mary V. and Haley for your commitment to the blog, it's members and coming up with all the challenge ideas. You girls rock!

Golf Tournament

Summer is here, the perfect time to get caught up on my scrapbooking! Until we travel on vacation and I come back with more photo's! For now though my book will be somewhat up to date. If you need some scrapbooking inspiration please visit all week as I will share my pages.

This first page is from my daughter's Adult/Athlete Golf Tournament where she played with her Uncle and they tied for first place! There is some fun details throughout this page, but my favorite is the little girlie golfer. The stamp set I used is really a male golfer, but with some paper piercing it resembles my daughter perfectly!

Mojo Monday 243

Just in time! I wanted to use the sketch this week on Mojo Monday. I have lots of Thank You cards to complete this week as it is the last week of school for my children. Check it out~

The assortment of papers and embellishments on this card are all Close To My Heart!

you give me {HOPE}

This week on Heart 2 Heart Challenges we want to see how you use photo's on your projects. The whole reason I started scrapbooking was to preserve my family photographs. After having my own children I felt that it was really important to record those family moments. Photo's tell a story and capture feelings and memories of special occasions or simply everyday life!

The story behind these pages is one that will remind me of the unbelievable strength, courage and hope shown by my mother-in-law. Just a few weeks after her final chemo session for breast cancer, she walked with us in the Susan G. Komen event. She is well on her way to recovery. She has inspired me and gives me HOPE!

Let's Party with Mojo Monday!

I love, love, love the sketch on Mojo Monday this week! It was perfect for a Birthday card I needed to create this month. I dipped into some older Elemental papers and a really old stamp set called A Birthday Wish, too cute to stop using!! The pennants are created from some Dotty For You papers and the sentiment comes from the border of the Elemental papers.

Polka Dots & Stripes

This week on Heart 2 Heart Challenges we want to see your creations with Polka Dots or Stripes.

Or...I double dare you to use both!!

I took the challenge to use both dots and stripes! This trend is everywhere lately; fashion, home decor and especially paper crafts. I've used some Dotty For You papers as well as a dotted stitch stamp for my "dots". I looked for the perfect striped paper, but in the end decided to create my own "stripes" with some older lagoon Hooligans paper. Just a few "dots" of opaque pearls finished the cards embellishments perfectly!

Be sure to check out the Heart 2 Heart blog this week for more inspiration using both stripes and polka dots on your crafting projects. Enter your own artwork too, I triple dare you!!





Sometimes I'm "Negative"!

With the Cricut Art Philosophy Cartridge it's good to be "negative"! On this layout, I used the "negative" image from some ticket shapes I cut on the cricut. I chose some of the gray Dotty For You papers and cut the shapes out across the bottom of my page. I trimmed it to 11x11 and adhered it to my base pages. I then stamped the sentiment in each cut-out space. Not to be wasteful...I saved the ticket shapes to continue the border across the second page as well. Pretty "thrifty" and creative! So go ahead and be "negative", I encourage you!

Teacher Appreciation

This week is teacher appreciation and my daughter wanted to give a favorite teacher a special gift. She liked the Fry Box Card set that I created for my May Cricut Club {posted on Monday}, so I made another version. She gave it to her teacher earlier in the week and she said she loved it!

Again I used the Dotty For You papers, but this time I chose the butterfly pattern and tied it all together with the A Tree stamp set and a tag to let her know that both my daughter and I appreciate her.

May Cricut Club {an H2H challenge}

May Cricut Club and the Heart 2 Heart challenge this week are a perfect match! I am absolutely in love with this month's promotion "Dotty For You" paper kit. Last month we created a Dream Banner for our project and this month I've decided to use the Dotty papers again. We will be exploring another box that can be cut on the Art Philosophy cricut cartridge, the fry box! It will hold four cards that feature the lovely floral paper which happens to coordinate with the Card Word Puzzle stamp set, one of my favorites this season. I have also incorporated the fun Birthday sentiments from the Just a Number stamp set, also a favorite! This will be a great project to keep for yourself or give as a gift!

Each card with humorous sentiments inside~

Just a bit of glitter glitz finishes the flower perfectly~

Please visit the Heart 2 Heart blog to see more floral creations from the design team and play along with us!