Resolutions

Happy Holidays to everyone!!!  I hope your holiday's are going well so far, and that the rest of the next week and a bit are full of love, laughs, friends and family!

I've always been very bad at the whole resolution thing, I think it's the fact that in order to make a real and lasting change in your life it has to be something that you are doing for reasons that resonate and are important to you, not just because it was time to make a New Year's resolution. 

My sister posted an idea on Facebook a week or so ago about having a mason jar and some note squares and writing the good things that happen each and every day down and storing them all in the mason jar for review the next year.  This is a great idea for remembering what's important and realizing that there are so many good things happening each and every day.  My husband has also started something over this last year called a "rainy day letter".  It's along the same principle, that you keep note of the good things that happen each and every day and the things that make you happy, but rather than waiting until the end of the year to read and review them, you take it out on a rainy day, when you are feeling down and out.

I decided to combine the two and I made this for my hubby for his Christmas present.  I think now I'm going to make one for others in my family, including a cousin just starting her journey through cancer.

Here's the box from the outside.  It's a drop spine box that I made from scratch using some book board that I had in my stash and paper from the Pemberly paper pack from CTMH.

 

Inside the drop spine box is a hard covered journal that is made with a chain stitch binding.  The journal fits perfect inside the box and leaves lots of space to add pictures and other bits and pieces.

 

Here is a picture of the spine of the journal showing the chain stitch binding.  Above is a view of how nicely the journal opens because of the chain stitch, it opens flat and is very easy for writing in!

I'm waiting for the CTMH Spring/Summer 2013 catalog to arrive here before I design the vacation mini-album that I'm going to offer for my March class, but ideas are already going through my head and I'm thinking that maybe a drop spine box with both a journal and a mini-album inside sounds great and I'm sure once the catalog arrives (I can't wait!!!) and I see the wonderful summer and vacation papers and stamps in it that I'm going to have tons of ideas going through my head!!!

 Sending you wishes for happiness and joy for the rest of the holiday season and for the entire new year!!!

I wish I owned embossing folders.....

One tool that I do not have in my scraproom "yet" is an embossing machine of some sort...I have a couple of the old fashioned embossing plates and an embossing stylus, but making this card reminded me of just how long and tedious it is to use those!  Some day I'll collect enough $ together to get myself one...until then, don't think I'm going to do this hand embossing thing again!

Here's the card I made while watching Big Bang and Glee with the kids last night.

I only embossed 4 snowflakes on the card base and that took forever!

The large snowflake is cut with my Cricut Art Philosophy cartridge and stamped with two images from the snowflake stamp set.  I love the two stage stamps and the look you can get so easily with the clear stamps.

I'm entering this card in the Unscripted Sketches piggyback challenge #185 as well as the CAS-ual Fridays challenge CFC79.

H2H Christmas Challenge!

This week's challenge at Heart 2 Heart is another Christmas week.

It's amazing how quickly Christmas is sneaking up on us so fast!  What crafty things are you doing to prepare for Christmas?  Are you making a special album for someone, beautiful hand made cards to get in the mail, or some other project?

I've been busy with lots and lots of cards, I have had 3 Christmas card classes and had a great time at all three, now I need to make up some more and get my cards in the mail :-)

Because I've been so much in card mode, I decided to do a layout for this challenge, and I'm happy I did.  I now have a layout ready to just add this year's pictures to.  The photo mattes I just adhered with removable adhesive, so that I had some options depending on the pictures.  The sketch for this layout is from the CTMH Make it From the Heart book, great inspiration and I love that I can get 7 pictures on this layout!

Head on over to the Heart 2 Heart Challenges blog to check out the other awesome Christmas inspiration.

I’d love to see your Christmas creations too!  Here's how to join in this week's challenge:

1. Use mostly Close To My Heart products, though it doesn't have to be 100%.
2. Create your Christmas creation
3. Post your project to your blog or other online gallery.
4. Come back here and directly link to your blog post, not your blog home page. 
5. Mention Heart 2 Heart somewhere in your blog post indicating that you are playing along with us and link to our site. 
6. Consider adding the H2H badge to your blog. We'd love to spread the word and see more crafters participating! 
7. Finally, you have the whole month of November to join us on any of our November challenges and be eligible for our Top Ten!

Getting some scrapbook pages done!!

I've been so busy making cards lately, that I'm starting to miss scrapbooking!  I was able to spend some great time scrapbooking this week, and it felt so great, definitely going to keep the balance!

You all know how much I love to use sketches for inspiration, one of the scrapbook sketch sites I love is Sketch N Scrap.  They are looking for design team members right now, and with the Heart 2 Heart Challenges design team coming to an end, this is the perfect time!  Here is a layout I created based on the Sketch N Scrap DT call, the left page is the DT sketch and the right is the companion page I came up with for the other two pictures in this series and the journaling.

 I was also inspired by the current Moxie Fab World Challenge and found a cool new use for the CTMH burlap ribbon. I used it to stamp the background behind the title and I also used some strands pulled from it to wrap around the first letters in the title to make them stand out.  Small touches, but effective I think.

The paper used is one of my current CTMH favourites, Avonlea!

Cutting 4 card bases from one 12x12 paper

A week ago I had the privilege of meeting a wonderful group of ladies who get together regularly to make cards.  I introduced them to CTMH and we created two cards and had a great time!

One thing I learnt from them is that not everyone is a scrapbooker (gasp!).  Because they do not scrapbook, they do not regularly use 12x12 cardstock.  They usually use 8.5x11 cardstock cut in half to make two 4.25x5.5 cards.

There are many ways to get the most out of a 12x12 sheet of cardstock when making card bases.  I'm going to make an effort to create and post a few of them over the next week or so.

Here is my first one.  This one will give you two standard 4.25x5.5 cards, as well as two 3x3 cards, with one 1x8.5 scrap and two .5x5 scraps.

Here is a picture after I cut the papers, with the measurements written on it.

To cut this, first cut the 12x12 sheet at 3.5 inches, you will then have a 3.5x12 piece and a 8.5x12 piece.  Now cut 1 inch off the long side of the 8.5x12 piece so that you are left with an 8.5x11 piece of paper that you can cut in half at 5.5 to get you your two standard card bases. Now, cut the 3.5x12 piece in half at 6 inches, then trim .5 inches off each one so that you end up with two 3x6 card bases.

3x3 cards are perfect size for quick little pick me up cards and they also work great if you punch a hole in the upper left corner and use it as a tag on a gift bag or gift.  If you are wondering about envelopes for this size card, CTMH does sell them, they are so cute and tiny..

The previous two posts are the standard sized cards I made with these card bases, below are the two 3x3 cards I made with the other two card bases.

For this card I used a mosiac tile technique, to do this technique, start with a piece of cardstock about 1/8th of an inch smaller than 3x3 and stamp the stamp image on it. Then I used the great CTMH alcohol markers to colour the image. Then I cut the image up into squares, these are not very even, but I like the effect anyway.  Then I glued the pieces down to a 3x3 piece of Olive cardstock leaving a small amount of space between each. That then became the card front.

For my second 3x3 card, I used the Perfect day stamp set and chocolate ink to create an all stamp card, I really like the effect, especially with the Desert Sand ink sponged around the edges of the card. What a perfect pick me up card!

I hope that helps give some ideas for using 12x12 paper for card bases.  Thanks for looking.

Playing with some new products

I've had the CTMH Create-A-Shade Pearl Paint for a while, but hadn't had a chance to play with it.  I really like it, it creates a translucent shimmer on the paper when used untinted.  Next I'm going to have to try it tinted with some reinker, I can see that will look great!  On the card below, it's hard to see in the picture, but the swirl as well as the edges of the petals on the flowers are painted with the pearl paint.

This card was created using the retired Roxie paper pack.  The swirl and the flowers were cut using the CTMH Artiste Cricut cartridge.  Also used on here is the hemp twine from CTMH.  The edges of all the paper was distressed using a distressing tool (love mine!!) and I used my handy sewing machines to sew around the edge of the card base, another look that I love.  I need to re-organize my craft space so that I can have my sewing machine available so that I will use it more often.

I'm entering this card in the Mojo Monday sketch challenge this week.

Thanks for looking!

Really Cool Chevron Pattern

I was spending some time in Pinterest today (wow, it's easy to spend too much time there!) and a saw a couple of different cards with a neat Chevron pattern that I just had to figure out. Here's the card I ended up making, I'll explain how to do the chevron's below.

For each row of chevron's I cut 5 pieces of double sided patterned paper at 0.5 inch by 1.5 inch. Then I folded over each end of the strips to make the little triangles. Then you glue the strips down, with the triangles matching up to make the little squares that are not glued down.

All supplies used for this card are from CTMH.  The paper is from a retired paper pack called Roxie that I still have in my stash.  The burlap ribbon is my favourite embellishment from the current catalogue.

I'm entering this card in the Retro Sketches challenge as well as the Simply Create Use your stash challenge and the Moxie Fab World Challenge.  Check out these challenge pages and play along!!!