Spooktacular!

Hi everyone!  Hope you all are having a wonderful holiday weekend.  I have been having the most marvelous last few days.  Since Thursday, I’ve been doing all sorts of playing and cavorting, including hanging out with my best girlfriends, shopping, scrapping, and eating out.  What could be better than that?  Honestly!   Truly nothing much could top that list……..except to perhaps throw a little Halloween goodness in there, as well.  I know it’s only the first week of September, but I am in the mood.  Of course it doesn’t hurt that I stopped off  at one of my all-time favorite places, and saw enough Halloween decorations to jump start even the most luke-warm of spirits.  I’m thinking I need to get a job there, just so I can purchase pretties all year long!  This place NEVER fails to put a smile on my face.  Check out these great photos I got.

Wrap it all up!  I’ll take it!

So now that I got you in a Halloweeny mood, I will share my page for the current challenge over at the Creative Pandemonium blog.  I scrapped one of my favorite photos of Nik on Halloween night about 4 years ago.  She called this costume her “elephant trainer” outfit.

She is just too cute to spook, isn’t she?  Hence the irony of the title, “something wicked this way comes”.  Meant to be a little bit of a joke there.   The challenge is to use some sort of stitching, hand journaling, and non-alphabet stickers.  I used zig-zag rub-on stitches, hand-written journaling strips, and some Creative Imaginations stickers for my challenge requirements.  Paper and orange, chipboard alphabet is from Little Yellow Bicycle.  I covered a Melissa Francis chipboard bat with patterned paper and added gemstone eyes for a bit of Halloween-themed fun, and finished off my title work with some older Reminisce alpha rub-ons from my stash.  Always love using old stash items!

Thanks so much for stopping by everyone!  Enjoy the rest of your long weekend!

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Rock On

In looking outside today, one would never guess that in just a few short days, summer will be officially upon us.  What a miserable, cool, gloomy, and rainy day we’ve been having.  I know we need rain, but I’m more in the mood for sunshine and the beach than downpours and flash flooding. Oh well……at least my grass and plants must be happy!

Life is still busy these days as we wind down our last few weeks of school.  I’ve just returned from the school where Nik was participating in a “young author’s tea”, and now we are heading out for her first swim meet of the year.  I’ve also been having a few houseguests these past few days which keep me busy, too.  I don’t know why I ever agreed to take care of this little guy, because he is a tremendous amount of work.  Take a look.

This is Otis, my friend’s hermit crab.  And I am completely kidding about him being a lot of work.  I mean, the guy doesn’t DO anything.  Nothing.  Just look at him.

That is the extent of what he does!  Slooooooooooooooow down, Otis….you’re going to hurt yourself.

Also have this little dude visiting with us.  As you can see, he feels quite at home here.

It’s a hard life, isn’t it?

And before I run off to the swim meet, I have one quick scrappy share for today.  Did this page for a little friendly challenge over the weekend to use 3 or more photos, Thickers, something old and something new,  and a stamp.

I love these pictures of Peter rocking out on the paper mache guitar he made in art class at school this year.  The guitar cracks me up because it’s missing the bridge, the pickups, and even the strings….but that doesn’t stop my boy.

I used a bunch of old goodies on here, including papers from Basic Grey’s Granola line and music rub-ons from Reminisce.  My something new is the Basic Grey Marrakesh paper, which I realize isn’t all that new..but it’s new to me.   Used two different fonts of Thickers, and mixed them in with some mini ledger alphas from Making Memories.  My stamp is the journaling lines from a 7Gypsies stamp.  It looks at first glance that there are only two photos, but I did sneak a third one in by the title.  That guitar accent is actually a photograph that I cut out.

Better get going or we will be late!  Thanks for stopping by everyone!

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Sketch This #68

Hey everyone!  Happy Tuesday to you!  I don’t know about you all, but I’m in a pretty good mood right now.  I’ve just come home from shopping and lunch out with Glammie.  Nothing like a little retail therapy to cure all that ails you, right?  And we even managed to find a few sales, and that makes things even better.  Needed to find some pants for Peter, as now that the weather is getting cooler in the morning, we’re starting to think about pants again.  Went through his dresser and discovered he was down to one pair of khakis and one pair of jeans that still fits.  That’s just not going to cut it.  We found a couple of jeans on sale for him and now I’ve just got to try to twist his arm to try them on, which is a whole other struggle in itself.  Also found a couple of clearance shorts, so snagged those up, too.  Found one small thing for Nik, and picked up a little something for myself while we were at it.  I am SO excited about my little find……..but I’m not going to tell you all yet.  The thing that we found leads into other things that are needed to complete the whole look…..you know how that goes. (I need to stay away from Pottery Barn).  Glammie and I decided that we can try to make this project ourselves, and that’s what we are going to work on this afternoon when Nik gets home.  Hopefully I can show you all tomorrow!!  Tee hee!  I’m practically giddy.  Hope it turns out half as cute as the display at Pottery Barn.

But before I go get Nik, I want to share my card for the Sketch This blog this week.  Sketch #68.

So cute, isn’t it?  Here is my card.

I’m sure you all are not in the least bit surprised to see a Halloween card, are you?  I’ve got Halloween on the brain.  It just makes me happy, and……..I used up some old, old scraps for this so I feel thrifty, too boot.  The paper is from Reminisce and KI, and that spider……my gosh is he ever OLD.  It’s from a die-cut sheet from Carolee’s that my friend Kathie gave me years ago.  Feels good to use it finally.  I did some machine stitching around each piece of paper, and gave the spider a hand-stitched web.  I free-handed a little speech bubble and stamped the greeting with my tiny Hero Arts alphabet stamps.  I always feel good when I break out my stamps, too.  Yup….it’s a feel good kind of day.

Time for me to get started on that new project.  Wish me luck!

Have a great day everyone!

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The Dreaded Random Chaos #27

Well, this is the ONE!  This is the one challenge I have been dreading ever since the Random Chaos blog came into existence 27 weeks ago.  For 27 weeks I have been crossing my fingers and hoping that this wouldn’t be the week……..that it wouldn’t be this.  Please don’t let it be this. Please don’t let it be this. Please don’t let it be this.  But this week, it was.

So, what have I worked myself into a lather about, you wonder??  What on earth could possibly be so horrible??  Well, let me tell you.  This week’s challenge is to do a layout using only cardstock.  You may include embellishments as long as they don’t have a pattern.  Do you hear what I’m saying???  No pattern!!!!!!  Mama Mia!

Here is what I did.

My main strategy on this page was to cover it as much as possible with photos!  That left me very little space in which to deal with the cardstock only issue, which made me happier.  I then pulled out an arsenal of supplies to try to jazz up the remaining areas.  I used white paint on the background paper to make a frame for the whole page and also did some random dry-brushing.  I outlined the kraft cardstock with a white crayon, as well as using the crayon in a circular design behind the sun.  I then took my Hero Arts watercolor set and a very wet aqua-flow brush to paint blue over the crayoned areas.  That resist technique  gives a rather unique look that I think works well with this water page.  You can see the effect fairly well in the detail photo.  Used the Fiskars Threading Water punch on the yellow cardstock to make the scallop, and pulled out my trusty Bazzill stitching template that I got in my August Paper-Playground kit to make some more hand-stitched waves.  I am really loving that template.  The title and sub-title are made from a combination of rub-ons from Flair Designs and Reminisce and puffy letter stickers from Making Memories.

And now, after 27 weeks, my fears are finally over!  It’s done!  I did it!!!  I rose to the challenge and overcame my fears!  Take that, you little challenge, you!

Big cleansing breath…

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