I'm worse than the Grocery Stores!

We haven't even had Halloween yet and I have my Christmas stuff out already.  It always irked me when the day after Halloween, ALL the Christmas candy started coming out in the grocery stores.  And now they just have an aisle for Halloween and an aisle for Christmas at the same time.  It also really annoyed me when Christmas decorations were displayed in shopping malls before we even had Thanksgiving finished.  Ah, the joys of marketing.  Anything to get you to panic and start shopping because surely, Christmas is just around the bend!!

So look at me doing the same thing. Ha ha ha.  I guess I'll have to forgive the retail industry and if not forgive, at least understand.  For as all we scrappers know, the Christmas lines have been released on the scrapping world and woo boy are there a bunch to choose from this year.  Let me introduce you to the Tis the Season line by Kasiercraft...yes, the company that makes all the wood mdf projects we love to alter.  Tammy, from Lil' Lambs Boutique, created a wonderful Deluxe Scrapping Kit with this paper line.  So after receiving my kit, I went in search of some Christmasy goodies to go with it.    I'm sure most East Coasters will remember the blizzard of 2010...my girls certainly did.  And even though it was way past Christmas, it did not bother them to keep wearing their favorite Christmas outfits.  The photos below were taken from a "dress up" day where they were Santa's Helpers during our blizzard that caused cabin fever to set in.  It's a bit hard for 3 1/2 foot kids to play in 5 feet of snow.  But in this case,  I took them outside and captured a little North Pole action with all the snow.

My first step, since I wanted to pick up the red of the dress in the photograph was to cut the tan background off the sheet with the scrolling die cut.  I cut around the edges and used a dark red background to replace the old one.  The edges of the red cardstock are inked with the Mudslide Colorbok pad included in the kit. 

TIP: Since the Colorbok pad is ink instead of Chalk ink, you can dab a makeup sponge onto the ink pad and use the sponge to ink your edges for more of a brushed and softer look.  Using the ink pad directly on the edges of your paper can give harsh, dark lines that do not give an aged look to your project.

Next, I created a Christmas tree of sorts by cutting out wavy triangles out of the green damask paper and distressing the edges with the Mudslide ink using the tip above.  I wanted the scrolling die cut to work as a frame, so I used my Swivel Exacto knife to cut out an edge on the inner part of the die cut...this is known as fussy cutting.  I set my Christmas tree inside the cut and removed any green edges sticking out the other side.

The mat for the bigger photo was created using the Martha Stewart Deco Fan around the page punches.  I only did two sides since I was tucking the photo behind the tree and another cut edge of the die cut at the bottom.  The snowflakes are made with the St Nick/Newspaper sheet and Joys of the Season Cricut cartridge. 

To give the snowflakes a more vintage and finished look, I inked the edges with the Mudslide ink.   I used both sides of the St Nick paper to create the snowflakes.  The fatter ones above were made with the Newsprint side and the skinnier ones were made with the St Nick side. I used Mudslide over the skinny snowflakes to darken them up a bit to contrast with the fatter snowflakes and yet still keep the design visable underneath.  My next step for all the snowflakes was to coat them with Rock Candy Crackle Paint.  While the paint was still wet, I grabbed some translucent sparkly embossing powder between my thumb and index finger, and gently rubbed my fingers together over the snowflakes as it lightly dusted them with the powder.  Using your fingers to rub the powder over top of your snowflakes will keep it light and even.  I used my heat gun lightly over the snowflakes to just melt the embossing powder so it wouldn't leave a milky sheen on the snowflakes and Crackle Paint, then I let the rest air dry to create the crackling effect.

So now I feel obligated to go buy some Halloween and Christmas candy today.

Christmas Bay Window

Lil' Lambs Boutique has packed this Winter Wings Deluxe Kit chock full of goodies for Christmas. This is my first project using the Bay Window MDF by KaiserCraft, which is also in the Deluxe kit. I made this for my Mom for Christmas and had a grand time cutting out all the fancy prints from the Webster's Pages. Check out more pictures below for closer details.

I cut apart the Holiday Lights Flutter Vine, so I could use a little bit on each panel. I even had some leftover for one of my tags in the post below.

Below you can see the accents I added with Glossy Accents and Stickles to give lots of shimmer and shine to my project. It's a bit hard to photograph shimmer but the butterflies, flowers and berries are glazed and the swan, snowflakes and flower edges are glittered.

Because of the beautiful gold color of the Flutter vine, I chose to accent with Gold Acrylic paint for my title and top borders.

Are you making any Christmas gifts this year? Let me know what you're making in the comments section below.

My First Board Book

And it's done! My very first Board Book. Sorry for the delay in getting up the new pictures up but work must come first (keeps those bills paid). This beautiful Grandeur Board Book (Kaiser Craft) from Lil' Lambs Boutique, was very easy to work with. I'm sure this will not be my last one.

Here's the quick story behind this project. The Moms in my neighborhood all get together, twice a month, for Bible study. We are currently working on a Bible Study about parenting our children. Every week, we pray over a new aspect of our childrens' lives. I thought this would be a great cap off to the study and an additional reminder to continually pray for my girls day in and day out.

The whole book is done using Basic Grey Eva collection. The front page is where I added my dimensional Primas, so they wouldn't get crushed inside the book. The flourishes are Grunge Board from Tim Holtz Idea-ology, which I inked with Distress Ink (Peeled Paint) and then sprayed with Glimmer Mist for the shimmer. Throughout the book, I used Crackle Paint to give it a worn effect (you can see a close up in the Sneek Peak post below).

If your pages seem to have a lot of blank space because of a solid background, then sewing or doodling (if you don't care to sew) is a great way to break up a sea of solid color. All the flowers on this page were punched out and made by hand. A very sweet lady, on one of the scrapping boards I frequent, posted this wonderful tutorial here on how she does these types of flowers. I added additional white accents in my solid flowers for highlights.

Don't forget to make use of your pattern paper for die cuts as in the pictures above. They make wonderful accents for board books.

If you don't have a sewing machine, no worries. You can always hand sew on your projects like I did above. I used a circle template and a paper piercer and punched holes all the way around the template. Embroidery floss works great on scrapping projects. I picked up some Slate colored floss and hand stitched my way around the circle using the pre punched holes. If you want a thicker thread or are uncomfortable sewing anything but straight lines, then hand stitching is a great alternative for you.

I used the Martha Stewart border punch here. I love these punches. And if you don't get your corners perfect, don't worry about it. Use your design to cover up any blatant corner problems.

Another Martha Stewart border punch on this page (Arch Lattice). I really like this one.

Finally I picked up the sewing/doodling technique here again to fill out some of the less embellished space.

Thanks for taking a look and go try a Board Book today!

Promised Sneak Peaks

Here they are...sneak peaks of my current work in progress. Tammy sent me this wonderful album by Kaiser Craft. Love the scroll work front page.

I have a couple more pages to finish up and then put on the finishing touches, but here's some peeks until I finish.

Here's an interesting tid bit of info: I grabbed my Eva paper from Basic Grey, scratch paper and a pencil and sketched the entire book (front to back) all while watching March of the Penguins. Aren't baby penguins just the cutest!

Does anyone else out there sketch out all their layouts before they do them? It must be the logical/mathematical part of my brain kicking in, but I cannot start a layout without sketching it first. I can never seem to just throw something together like some many amazing scrappers do. But if it works for me, I'm not going to change it. What kind of scrapper are you? A free spirit or sketch artist?