Wednesday, May 19, 2010

My Sentiments Exactly!


There is a great on-line store for acrylic and wood mounted stamps and supplies called My Sentiments Exactly.  Every Thursday they send out an e-mail with new products and specials. They recently had a Mystery Box that included all sorts of goodies from paper to card stock, embossing powder, eyelets, ribbon, inks and of course stamps! It was really exciting to open the box because it was like opening a big grab bag!!! They issued a challenge ( I love a good challenge, lol ). You have to design a card or project using only the supplies in the Mystery Box  and you had to use the pear stamp. I came up with this easel card. The pear was embossed and then hand cut. I used colored pencils and gamasol to shade it in and added a few touches of ciao copic pens for a little highlighting. The card really goes together quite easily. The hardest part of this challenge was to figure out what goodies to use!! I wanted to use the green sparkle yarn so I needed to use the eyelets to do something a little different rather than buttons.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Peachy Keen Girls!

This week there have been some great challenges, at least for me anyway! Peachy Keen Stamps are incredible acrylic stamps with faces to fit Provocrafts' Paperdolls, their winter collection for snowmen and now for little critters!
     I loved the sketch they used this week and thought what fun to use the film strip from Mickey and Friends. I cut it at 4.27 wide and 1.87 high. When I placed it on the mat on my gypsy. I positioned it so only 3 frames showed rather than the 4 that are in the image. By placing it off the mat, your cricut will only cut that which is physically on the mat (how cool is that!)

Buttons Layout




I love the site Stuck On You Sketches (SOUS)! They come up with some unique ideas. For example this weeks challenge is to use buttons in your project.
As luck would have it, we had spent our anniversary at Disney World with our grandchildren (Alexis, Nicholas, Matteo, Mia and Cecilia)  and their parents. When they had registered at the hotel, they told them we would be there on our anniversary so the hotel gave us these Mickey Anniversary buttons. It turns out that when we boarded the bus to go to one of the parks there were 4 other couples also spending their special day at Disney also! No matter where we went in the parks people were wishing us a Happy Anniversary,what a way to feel special!!!
     Anyway I wanted to hold onto these Disney buttons so this challenge could not have come at a better time! I had a Disney paper pack and lo and behold there was one with the button pattern! The title was from the Mickey Font cut at 1" for both letters and shadow. I must start doing more journaling so I decided to cut the sign @ 3.93 wide x 2.04 wide. Since the challenge was to use buttons, I secured the tag to the sign using, tada: buttons! I went thru my wedding album and found this pic taken at my Matron of Honors home after the reception. I love this pic. The frame is cut from Accent Essentials@ a height of 4.25 which gives you a perfect inside frame of 3", just what I needed for this pic. Of course, keeping with the challenge, I used my CB to emboss the frame with "buttons" and decided to add real buttons to the frame.

Happy Anniversary!

Today is my daughter and her husband's 1st year anniversary. Sadly he is deployed and will be gone another 5 months, so to cheer them both up I thought I would surprise them with a secret I've been keeping. When my daughters got married ( yes there are 2 more daughters and 2 sons!) I had their bridal bouquets freeze dried and preserved in glass cases. I did the same for Chris and Andy but since they are stationed in Hawaii I didn't want to take the chance and have it shipped (plus it would cost a fortune , lol). So I decided today to at least send a picture of it so if they return state side I could send it then. I sent the greeting to her on Facebook because I know she checks things out there and that Andy does too when he can. These time differences kill me! Sure enough I got one very excited phone call from Chris on her lunch break, don't you just love surprises! Her bouquet was gorgeous with cymbidium orchids, dendrobium orchids, mokarta orchids spider gerber daisies, hypericum berries and of course some crystals floral glued to the flower centers. She also had a rhinestone holder!