Grade One Tradition

Two years ago when my eldest daughter, Marley,  was about to start Grade One I surprised her with a fun cone of goodies hanging on her door in the morning. I'd heard about the idea from Big Picture Classes Big Idea Festival (actually a combination of two different ideas) and ran with it. I almost forgot to do one for Paige this year but managed to squeak out this little beauty after she'd gone to bed. Sorry about the quality of the pictures but it was pretty late!!

The two ideas I combined were 1) to make a paper cone and fill it with summer goodies and 2) in Germany it is tradition to give a gift to your child on the first day of Grade One. Marley actually reminded me several times to do this for Paige!

Paige got to pick the paper but had no idea what it was for. She chose a paper from Floral District and I picked out some coordinating papers to make the butterflies. I made them using my Beautiful Butterflies Die for the Big Shot. Here's a close up so you can see the layers and the added rhinestones.

I kept the wings popped up by using Snail adhesive in the centre of the butterfly and Stampin' Dimensionals under the wings.

This butterfly was found at Michaels - it's a little clip. So ridiculously delicate (it broke pretty much immediately!) but so beautiful too!

I filled the cone with school-ish related supplies - a Hello Kitty mini white board, a journal with some matching pencils and another smaller journal with attached pen. All things I knew Paige would love to have and use. She is my little artist and as such is always looking for paper to draw and write on!

Another view looking deep into the cone.

Thanks for stopping by. It's been a crazy week and a half since school started. I am WAY behind in my crafting, my blogging and just about everything! Hopefully this is the first post of many as I catch up. 

Have a wonderful rest of your day!! See you soon.

Using Fabric on Your Cards and Layouts

Hi there! If you've jumped over here from the Practical Scrappers blog then Welcome! I'm so happy to see you!! Today I am talking about using fabric on your projects and I'm sharing a number of ways in which I have done just that recently.


Fabric is a pretty hot trend in the paper crafting world right now and there are many types of fabric you can add to your cards and layouts. Some have been around for ages - think ribbon and lace - and some are fairly new - fabric paper for example. Today I want to show you how to take ordinary pieces of cotton fabric and transform them!

First let's make some embellishments out of fabric like I did here on these two cards.

Both these flowers were made using a piece of cotton fabric and a sheet of Multipurpose Adhesive for the Big Shot. Let me show you how I made them.

1. This is the Big Shot Multipurpose Adhesive Sheet as sold by Stampin' Up (see below for links). It comes 12 sheets to a pack and each sheet is 12"x12" so you can make TONS of projects from one pack. And they're not just for fabric, that's just what I'm showing you today. In fact, Stampin' Up also sells adhesive rolls specifically for fabric but since the Multipurpose sheets are great for paper too, I think they are a better deal for layout makers like myself.

2. Lay your fabric on your work surface face down (TIP: iron it first!! learned the hard way that those creases don't magically come out when you lay the adhesive sheet on top of them!) Peel off one corner of the adhesive sheet, turn it over and stick it down onto your fabric.

3. Slowly pull back the rest of the adhesive backing using a bone folder to keep it as straight and crease free as possible until the entire 12"x12" sheet is adhered to your fabric.

4. Trim off the excess and then use your bone folder again (or a credit card or ruler if you don't have a bone folder) to get out any remaining creases or air bubbles. And no, I was not able to get out that huge crease but as I was cutting the sheet in half to fit through my Big Shot I decided not to worry about it. Remember, IRON FIRST!

5. Cut your sheet to fit your Big Shot die - I used the Fun Flowers Bigz L die so a simple cut in half sufficed. If your die is smaller you may want to cut your sheet smaller to minimize waste. Make your Big Shot sandwich (cutting mat - Die - fabric - cutting mat) and run everything through your Big Shot (or other manual cutting system - whatever you have.) 

5b. I found that some of my flowers didn't cut completely through, so when I ran my second piece of fabric through I used a scrap piece of card stock as a shim and the flowers cut out perfectly. In this picture you see the white card stock shim on top of the Big Shot sandwich - this is very important. If you put it under the top cutting mat you will just end up cutting out white card stock flowers as well as fabric ones. Maybe that's what you want ... maybe it's not!

6. Sit back admire your beautiful fabric flowers! :) I cut out two full sets plus a couple extra of the larger flowers to have on hand.

7. Time to assemble your card. Obviously, you would use whatever papers coordinated with your fabric, I am lucky enough to get to work with Stampin' Up papers and fabrics which are already pre-coordinated. So here I am showing you a piece of Riding Hood Red card stock (5.5" x 4.25" folded in half) and two pieces of the Twitterpated Designer Series paper which coordinate with that pink Twitterpated Designer Fabric.

8. I love to ink my edges. I find it gives added definition and "finish" to my projects. Here I am showing you how I do that using a Stamping Sponge that I've simply cut into a wedge shape. I am using Soft Suede ink - my favourite colour for inked edges!

9. Don't forget about your fabric flowers. They gain a lot by having their edges inked too!

10. For our first card I simply adhered my paper pieces as shown using my Snail Adhesive runner. Then it was time to start building my fabric flower embellishment. Carefully peel the backing from the largest die cut flower and adhere it to the card as shown below.

11. Continue this with the smaller flowers laying them down in a offset pattern being sure to keep them centred.

12. Finishing touches. I finished my card off with a button tied with some bakers twine and a sentiment stamped onto a piece of Whisper White card stock. Here is a close up of the finished flower.

13. For a more 3-dimensional flower like this one, I simply left the backings on each flower layer and used my bone folder to curl them after they were adhered together. With the addition of a Vintage Faceted Button, it looks like this on the finished card.

Well, that's one way to use fabric on your cards and layouts ... are you still with me? Want another way?

How about using it in place of paper? That's right, you heard me. Instead of pieces of patterned paper on this layout, I used pieces of fabric.

There are literally 3 pieces of paper on this whole layout (okay, 5 if you count the photos!) - the background card stock and the two pinked circles under the rolled fabric flowers. Everything else is fabric!

The large square of brown fabric was adhered using another Multipurpose Adhesive Sheet and the smaller pieces were adhered using Sticky Tape. (If I had a functional sewing machine I would have sewn them to the card stock but ... I don't, so tape and glue are my friends!)

This is what my layout's starting point looked like.

Here a close up of the layers of fabric. Oh yeah, I also wrote my journaling right onto the fabric! Easy peasy!!

And now for my third way to use fabric on a layout or card - make a rolled flower embellishment like this one.

Here's how I did it.

1. Start with a giant glue dot - take off the top layer of plastic to expose the glue.

2. Twist your fabric and place one end in the middle of the glue dot.

3. Keep twisting your fabric as you roll it around and around from the centre out until you are left with something that looks like this. The longer and thicker your piece of fabric the bigger and fuller your finished flower. I punched out a 2.5" circle of white card stock and used my pinking shears to pink the edges. Once it was mounted onto this I added a button and called it done! 

I used smaller scraps of the brown fabric to make another flower - here's a close up of that one.

The strips were narrower and shorter so the flower is looser and smaller than the other one on the page.  

One last way to use fabric on your layouts ... as trim like I did to anchor the photo on this layout.

Yes, that is yet another variety of fabric flower but this post is already reaching epic proportions so I think we'll save that for another time. 

Thanks for joining me today as we explored my second favourite thing to stock pile ... FABRIC! As always, please leave a comment sharing ways in which you've used fabric and I'll be sure to pop over and check it out. 

Here are your links for products featured in today's post:

Big Shot Multipurpose Adhesive Sheet 

Twitterpated Designer Fabric

Big Shot Die-Cut Machine

Bone Folder

Fun Flowers Bigz L Die
Twitterpated Designer Series Paper
Stamping Sponge
Snail Adhesive
Designer Buttons
Baker's Twine
Essentials Designer Fabric
Jumbo Sticky Rounds
2-1/2 Inch Circle Punch

Starting Point Layout - Party Monsters

I managed to finish the latest Starting Point Layout this afternoon. If you stopped by earlier today you saw a sneak peak on this post. To see Shimelle's Starting Point post please go here. I am having so much fun with these! I think I like this idea better than a sketch. Gasp! Is that wrong? :) I have my reasons though. Sometimes I find sketches tough if I have more pictures than it shows (not surprisingly this frequently happens to me) or my title and/or journalling don't fit where the sketch suggests putting them, or my embellishments are the wrong size, etc. I know that the whole idea of a sketch is to help with the placement of design elements to make the whole process faster but to be honest, using them almost makes me scrap slower. Maybe it's the rules follower in me that feels the need to actually follow the sketch!! LOL! Whatever the reason, I find Shimelle's starting points freeing. It's like once the background is in place I am free to fit my photos, title, journalling and embellishments where ever I want. Sound crazy? Give it a try and then tell me if I'm crazy or not!!

Anyway, enough rambling. I knew I wanted to play with the new Hallowe'en DSP and when I went hunting for photos I found ones of Marley's first Hallowe'en party. I even had the exact number and sizes of photos that Shimelle had used. It was total kismet!! Here is my finished layout.

And here's a reminder of how I started.

The new papers from Stampin' Up! (Howlstooth and Scaringbone) don't have any red in it but my pictures did so I used my designer discretion to add a block of Real Red to mat the photos onto.

The title was (of course) cut out with my Big Shot using the Typeset Alphabet dies but before I did that I embossed the Tangerine Tango card stock with the new Wood Grain embossing folder. I also lightly brushed  the raised parts with Basic Grey ink.

And then I had a bit of fun. In the soon to be released Holiday Mini Catalogue is a kit to make treat bag labels. It uses a new stamp set called Googly Ghouls and comes with googly eyes. I used the spider and BOOOO images elsewhere on the layout and then came up with the idea of turning the middle of the O into a mummy using the googly eyes and some white bakers twine. Isn't he cute?

Here's a look at the spiders. Also in this picture are some large ink splotches (straight from my re-inker bottle), some smaller ink flecks (using my Aquq painter), a rhinestone that I coloured black with a Sharpie and a red and black stamped butterfly image from Papillon Potpourri. I felt I needed to bring some of that red out from behind the pictures and spread it around a bit.

Well, that's it. Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your weekend everyone and here are your links to available products featured on this layout.

Aqua Painter

Typeset Alphabet Bigz Die

Big Shot

Papillon Potpourri stamp set

Basic Rhinestones Jewel Accents

White Bakers twine

Project 12 My Way

Hello fellow crafters!
I've got another layout to share with you today as well as a card.

For the past 2 years I have played along with Davinie Fiero and Scrapbook and Cards Today in their Project 12 Challenge. The idea was that each month we were given a Becky Fleck Pagemaps sketch to play with and we created a month-in-review type page. I loved getting a new sketch each month and loved seeing how all the different participants interpreted them. This year they have changed the format. There are no new sketches (although we are welcome to mine their archives and re-use a sketch from the past 2 years) and instead of making it strictly about the entire month we can pick any topic, week, day, whatever to scrap. They have (and I think this will be a monthly thing) given us a colour scheme as an added challenge. I'm not thrilled about the changes but have decided that since my favourite part of the whole thing was documenting each month in one layout, that's what I'm going to take from it and continue doing.

So ... I decided to use a new sketch and used PageMaps' January 2012's double page layout sketch.

And this is what I came up with.

As you can see I used the sketch as a jumping off point but my pictures seemed to want to be arranged in a slightly different way. So I went with it!

Here are some close ups.

The left side - I used Crumb Cake smooth card stock as my base and layered two pieces from the Everyday Enchantment line in the background. 

The right side - I moved the title and journalling block to this side - again, it just seemed to want to be there!

I had a lot to say so I decided to type it up. I printed it onto Very Vanilla card stock and cut out the individual paragraphs for a more casual look.

My snowflakes (kind of fun that we actually had snow so I could use them!) were made with the Snowflake #2 die for the Big Shot (the large snowflake) and the snowflake punch. To attach them to the page and to add some sparkle I used the flower Brads. And speaking of sparkle, I also gave the snowflakes a liberal spraying of Vanilla Shimmer Smooch Spritz. The shine is subtle but it's there!

Here is the smaller snowflake with the smaller size of flower brad.

For my title I used the Alphabet Soup On Board letters. They are raw chipboard so I coated them with two coats of Very Vanilla Craft Ink and a liberal coating of Vanilla Shimmer Smooch Spritz. 

Here is another of the snowflakes and you can also see that I popped up my title letters with Dimensionals for even more texture. I think the snowflake is curling up so much because it was slightly wet when I attached it to the page. I'm sure it will lay flat once it's in a page protector!

Everything I've highlighted is available for order through me or through my on-line store (just follow the links). The Everyday Enchantment DSP is only available as a Sale-A-Bration purchase through me. The best way to get it is to host a workshop and for every purchase of $60 you get to choose one free item from the Sale-a-Bration list. 

Here is another project I did using this DSP.

I made these cards for an upline group meeting last week. We have card swaps so in return for making these, I got some really cute cards for my display board. 

To make this card I took a piece of the Everyday Enchantment DSP, cut it to size then ran it through my Big Shot using the Framelits Dies Hearts Collection. Behind the heart cut out I mounted both a smaller heart and a doily made using the Paper Doily Sizzlit Die which I had lightly sprayed with Log Cabin Smooch Spritz.

The bit along the bottom was created by rolling one of our Stampin' Wheels along a piece of Very Vanilla card stock with the Decor standard wheel in Calypso Coral ink. I then tied a piece of Calypso Coral 1/8" Organdy ribbon around it and through a Designer Series button from the Neutrals collection.

Hope you like these projects. If you are interested in making something similar please use the link at the side to email me. Space is still available in the Mommy and Me Valentines class so sign up now!

Thanks and Happy Crafting!

New products to showcase

I've been playing a bit (lot) lately in my craft room (hole) and wanted to share some of the items that I've cranked out. First up are some Valentine's Day cards using new products from the Occasions Mini and the Sale-a-Bration catalogue.

I will be sending these to 4 of my fellow ScrapHappy members for our Valentine's Day Card Swap.

They were fun and fairly easy to do so I am thinking I may have to offer a class!

For this one I started with some Very Vanilla card stock (cut and folded to make a 5.25" x 5.25" card) which I inked around the edges with Poppy Parade. The patterned papers are a DSP from the upcoming Sale-a-Bration and called Everyday Enchantment. I used the new Framelits Dies Hearts Collection to cut out my hearts and edged the largest one with the 3/8" Pleated Satin Ribbon in Pear Pizzazz. The stamped image in the centre is from Take it to Heart as well as the banner image. I used stamps from I {Heart} Hearts and Itty Bitty Bits to decorate the banner.

I played with the colour scheme on this one but the general design is identical. The ribbon I used here is Victoria 5/8" Crochet Trim which is normally vanilla but I ran it over some Poppy Parade ink as that matched the paper better. Love how the look is completely changed! 

Note: make sure the ribbon has extra drying time before you start manipulating it or you will be left with red fingers!! :)

And since I had all the papers out and was in a crafty mood I created this.

This is my most favourite layout to date! It was pretty involved but I am so in love with the results I think it's going to get framed!

I started with the HUGE rosette. I'd started making one weeks ago when my friend Sandra came over to play with all our new products. Once I saw just how big the rosette was going to be I put it aside until I could figure out how to use it. 

Well, inspiration hit yesterday! 

This is a new die for the Big Shot called Designer Rosette. Here I used the die 4 times and glued the 4 rosette quarters together to form this giant one. Then I went hunting for some paper to set it off and found myself drawn back to the Everyday Enchantment that I'd already been using. 

I had cut out this scalloped heart earlier using the Heart Framelits and tried layering a doily I'd also cut out earlier using the new Paper Doily Sizzlits Die. I liked the look and when I added a the stamped image on top I was in love. I stamped the image in Basic Grey to match the framing of my black and white photo.

This picture was one taken in December when our family went for formal portraits. I mounted it first on Sahara Sand and then on Basic Grey card stock. Then I wrapped it with some Calypso Coral 1/8" Organdy Ribbon from the Sale-a-Bration catalogue. I affixed the bow with a matching Printed Designer Brad - the brad and the ribbon are being sold in a combo pack and they match the Everyday Enchanment DSP. Yummy! Finally I punched out a butterfly, added the date and tucked it under the bow (see below). 

A close up of the bow/brad/tag combination.

And last, but certainly not least, the title. I took some of the On Board Alphabet Soup letters, covered them with Calypso Coral ink and then put a layer of Crystal Effects over top. Love them!!

Here's a shot showing the dimensionality of the layout. The letters look precarious but they are glued down pretty well!

Oh, and the spray you see was achieved using the Color spritzer Tool and my Basic Grey Stampin' Write Marker. Now that I've finally figured out how to use it properly, it's become a bit of a go-to tool. I love the fine mist it creates. Perfect for a slight antiqued look.

Well, there you have it. Thanks for stopping by.