My dear sweet mama placed a card order and it was just what I needed to get a little mojo flowing! I went to my fave blog and found this card. I LOVE the Green Tea designer series paper - blues and greens have always been my favorite color palette - cool & refreshing. This layout is simple and striking and would adapt to any occasion. Have a great week!
I need several cards this week for various occasions and while stalking another of my favorite blogs, Inking Idaho, I found these beautiful quilted cards that inspired me to create my own. I've made this type of card before, but it's been awhile, so it seemed new to me! I love this color combo - Baja Blue and Chocolate Chip - and using a 1.25" square punch makes this card a cinch to reproduce. I like to build my card on a piece of copy paper so I can trim the edges or cut the quilted piece into a shape like the last card in this post. So many ways to be creative with just a few simple supplies! Have a great day!
So I've gotten back into blog-stalking and I am finding that I have missed so much during these last several months!! I found this card on the Inkadinkado website (not sure how I found my way there!). I just love cards that use some that designer paper I have laying around. I've been hoarding it for far too long, too afraid to cut those gorgeous 12x12 sheets for fear of not having full sheets when I scrapbook, but I have banished those thoughts from my pretty little head. I can't wait to dig into new papercrafting adventures! Thanks for stopping by!
I LOVE macaroni and cheese! It is the ultimate comfort food, and I love trying new recipes for it, searching for the perfect one! The cooks on Food Network make it look so easy, but my mac & cheese never turns out correctly - the sauce is always grainy or chunky instead of smooth and it just lacks SOMETHING! I also love Tyler Florence. He is so handsome, he's from South Carolina (love me some Southern boys!), and besides being a fabulous cook, he also seems to be a really good guy. So when I found the recipe for his "ultimate" mac & cheese, I knew I had to try it. Since I never have any luck making this dish, I decided to read the comments for pointers and I am so glad I did! One home cook wrote that in order to achieve a smooth sauce, it's important to remove the milk mixture from the heat and very slowly add the shredded cheese, whisking until the cheese is melted and incorporated before adding more. This technique TOTALLY works! I am amazed! To take it up a notch to almost gourmet proportions, I added some chopped Benton's bacon, the Holy Grail of pork, to the mix. And Panko . . . Panko makes everything magically delicious . . . so I sprinkled a bit on top for crunchiness. I am literally chomping at the bit to get a heaping helping of this mac & cheese and I have a big ol' batch in the oven right now. I think it might just be the ultimate - thanks, Tyler!!
I don't know how it happened: it was a busy day of church (Morgan was christened), lunch out with my sweet parents, a few errands, and Morgan's micro-nap, but I actually made a card!! I have a very, very dear friend whose husband passed away almost a year ago, so I wanted to make a special card to let her know how much we love her and miss her husband. I haven't been blog-stalking much lately, so I went back to my old favorite, Me, My Stamps and I, and found this card that I thought I could CASE in some form or fashion. I like the combination of Old Olive & Ballet Blue and, since my flowers were a little hinky, I was glad I had clear crystal brads to put in the centers. Thanks for stopping by!
So here's a pic of the only Valentine I made this year. It's not terribly inspired, but I felt pretty good to get three of these made. I'm still not getting much around here with my sweet baby around, but she is completely wonderful, so I'll make the sacrifice in hopes that some day, she will be able to entertain herself for brief periods of time and I can papercraft once more!!
I only made three Valentines to send this year and I mailed them before I took a picture - rookie mistake, don't you think?! But, I did get a picture of the little boxes of truffles I made and I think they are super cute! One thing I learned is that wearing gloves if the BEST way to roll the truffles out without making a gigantic mess! This is a recipe I found on-line a few years ago and it's one of my favorites. They are surprisingly simple to make and taste delicious!
It's anniversary time over at Papertrey Ink and Nichole has challenged us to pick our favorite Papertrey project from the last year and post it for a chance to win an AMAZING prize pack.
One of my sweet friends gave me a Starbucks gift card for my birthday recently, so I decided to make her a coffee-themed thank you note. I LOVE my Verve set called Delightful & Delicious and I've bookmarked the company's gallery for the set. I chose this card to make for my friend and while it took waaaaaaay too long to make, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I sure don't have the patience for all those layers any more!!
A friend of a friend recently posted a chocolate chip cookie recipe on FB and, since I have a terrible time making cookies successfully (except cake mix cookies), I decided to print it out and give it a try one day. Well, "one day" turned into last night!! The recipe calls for 3 sticks of butter - my heart goes pitter patter (probably because I'm going into cardiac arrest!). It also calls for 3 different kinds of chips - milk, semi-sweet, and white chocolate. YUM! Since I didn't want that many ingredients to be ruined by my ineptitude, I researched on-line whether cookies should be baked on Silpat, which is a silicone baking mat that prevents foods from sticking. I am so glad I did my homework, because everything I read recommended baking on parchment paper, NOT Silpat. So I gave it a try, and the cookies came out beautifully!! Parchment paper is the key to cookies that don't spread out all over the pan (that ALWAYS happens to me!) and are a cinch to remove from the baking sheet. And let me tell you, these cookies are magically delicious!! This is definitely a recipe I will make again. Bailey took some to her teachers today and I hope they like them as much as we do. Chris even ate some and he's not typically a sweets eater - I know, right?!?!
I often see cards and projects that seem simply too complicated or difficult for me to make. This may seem ridiculous because what could possibly be hard about paper, stamps, & ink? So many things!! I have recently developed a new fascination with sponging - I love the softness it creates and the warmth of having a hint of color versus a stark white background. So, as I was looking through the numerous projects I've saved to my hard drive, I was drawn to a card very similar to this one and decided to take the plunge. It was so much easier than I thought it would be and turned out beautifully. Branch Out is an amazing stamp set, and randomly stamping all those beautiful colors on a humble brown tree trunk is almost therapeutic! The hill and the grass are done with markers in a very free form way, and the red boots add a bit of whimsy that's unexpected on a sympathy card. I'm so sorry to have had to make this card for a friend who recently lost her father, but I hope the colors and the idea of a tree representing life will comfort her during this difficult time. I might just be on a roll here so come back soon to see what I'm up to!!
I just dusted off another wonderful stamp set from the current catalog - Aviary. I think those bird cages are simply irresistible! I found this card on SCS today and couldn't wait to case it, but I wanted to make it even easier than Grandma Overboard did, so I simply stamped the most ornate cage on the right side of a a piece of patterned paper that has a bit of a bolder pattern on the left side. This is probably the simplest card I've ever made! My birdcage stamp fell of its block mid-stamp so it didn't quite meet the stand, but I fixed that right up with a little bit of tangerine grosgrain ribbon. Don't ever think of a mistake as a mistake - simply an opportunity to embellish!
My dear friend, Karen, who I mentioned yesterday, ordered six sympathy cards and six note cards, so I immediately looked on SCS for all the projects using the Thoughts and Prayers stamp set. There's just something about trees, greenery, and foliage that lures me in every time. This stamp set has beautiful images and heartfelt sentiments and I just love how the tree looks in this card that I found online. I was so thrilled that I had the Labels 4 Nestabilities set that Diamond Angelfish used on her card! Usually, I have to improvise, but not this time!! The technique is so simple that even with my rusty skills, I figured it out right away! After you cut out the largest label from the set, leave your paper in the die, turn it over, and sponge on the ink color of your choice (I used So Saffron), using the die as a mask, which leaves a crisp white border around your image.
I am beyond thrilled to finally be posting papercraft projects again!!! I have MISSED stamping so much in the months since Morgan was born in September. I think I've had performance anxiety coupled with the fact that my craft room looked like a tornado blew through!! I have been scrapbooking a lot, but I haven't put ink to stamps to paper since last year. A dear friend of mine ordered a dozen cards last week and that order was the inspiration I needed to clean up my craft room (a gigantic task!) and get out all of those wonderful stamp sets and beautiful ink colors that I love so dearly. My first card was inspired by this lovely card on Splitcoast Stampers. Since it was been so many months since I've created anything stamped, I felt obligated to consult SCS, and I'm so glad I did. I had forgotten how many amazing stampers there are out there and how much I love "stalking" their blogs and checking out their work. So here's the first of what I hope will be many more posts in the coming days and weeks!!
So, as you have probably noticed, my paper crafting has dwindled significantly since Miss Morgan was born, but my baking has definitely taken off!! I think I have been channeling Martha Stewart and have found some delicious recipes to make and share this Christmas! Yesterday, I made pecan sandies, caramel chocolate cookie bars, Oreo truffles, & mini caramel tarts, and I had already made buckeye bars & orange balls. Bailey made the reindeer cookies and they are fun and yummy, too! I am in the process of making bacon grits fritters that I found in this month's "Southern Living" Magazine that are absolutely to die for! Of course, yesterday was a snow day, so Miss Bailey was home all day, which turned out to be a tremendous help to me. But I was totally pooped by the end of the day and was looking forward to a quiet evening and early bedtimes when Bailey dislocated her knee!! It was horrendous! Had Chris not been here, I know I would've passed out! Thankfully, Chris was able to pop her knee back into place and after a while, she calmed down enough to take an ibuprofen. She was so scared and I know it hurt terribly. She's doing better today and will probably go to school once Chris gets home and wraps her knee. Add to this, Morgan screaming her little lungs out last night and I was starting to wish that I was a drinking woman!! Today seems to have started off a little more calmly and I'm definitely not going to get into any baking projects today so I'm hopeful for a better day!
Believe it or not, I made a couple of loaves of pumpkin gingerbread for 2 of Bailey's teachers so, naturally, I needed a cute tag to go with them!! I found the inspiration for this tag on one of the PTI's design team member's blogs (can't remember which one!). I couldn't believe I had the stamps to recreate this project! The tag was super simple to make and I love the way it turned out - I think the teachers will, too! Have a wonderful week!!
OMGosh!!! I cannot believe it's been an entire MONTH since I made ANYTHING out of paper!! It's a good thing I made so many baby thank you notes before Morgan was born or I never would've had any to send. So, Morgan was born on September 16, and she is doing wonderfully well! In fact, we celebrated her one-month birthday today with a cake and a little party at my parents' house. So much fun! Then, Chris took the girls to see his dad so I had a bit of crafting time ALL BY MYSELF! I still can't believe it! I broke out my new owl punch and combined two craft projects I found on-line. One was a cute treat box by Angie Juda and the other was this adorable card I found on SCS. I LOVE my Martha Stewart fence punch, but it is a bear to cut cardstock with! I've prepped several of these to fill with Halloween candy for Bailey's teachers. I am so thrilled that I actually have the mojo to make these little gifts! I sure didn't have any mojo while I was pregnant :D I hope to post another project in a day or two, so come back soon!!
I found this cute card on Splitcoaststampers and I don't even remember what I was looking for! This card turned out to be a cute baby thank you note - I love the sweet little button flower! Luckily, I've written all my thank you notes because tomorrow is the big day! It's hard to believe that almost 10 months of mental and physical preparation have all led up to tomorrow's C-section. I am nervous and excited and about 100 other emotions, but I am trying to focus on the fact that by this time tomorrow, we will have our sweet little baby girl! What a wonderful blessing!!
Sorry I haven't posted in awhile, blog friends! I have been feverishly working to update Bailey's scrapbook so I'll be ready to start Morgan's when she arrives this week! I have gotten so much done but, unfortunately, my 12x12 layouts are very hard to photograph and post here. Today, I made this card for Chris's grandmother who is turning 90 soon. The family is celebrating with a party tomorrow, but we won't get to go since it's 3.5 hours away and I can't travel that far. I really hope she likes her card, though! I love the way it turned out! I was inspired by none other than my favorite blog, Me, My Stamps and I. Do you ever feel like your traditional half-sheet cards don't really convey your feelings or the importance of an occasion? I do, so for Grandmama's special day, I decided to use a full 8.5x11 sheet of cardstock as my base. I also used my scallop circle Nestabilities which helped me keep the entire card proportioned. Nothing looks worse on a big card than a tiny focal point!! Can you believe the flowers came from SU!'s "Heartfelt Thanks?" I have had that set for years and it is one I turn to again and again. I'm so glad I've kept it all this time. Thanks for stopping by - have a great weekend!!
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