Easter Frame

Believe it or not, Easter is not that far off. I'm trying to add a little more seasonal decor to my home, so  I made this:

My favorite details are these little lilies made from Maya Road zipper trim.  

My original goal was to create an Easter lily from sipper trim, but I just couldn't get it to look quite right, so I created this Lily which, I think, looks a bit more like a calla lily.

If you'd like to try making the zipper lily for yourself, here's a little photo tutorial on how I did it.

Cut a 3" strip of zipper trim. Work with the zipper part facing up. 

Place a craft Glue Dot® about 1/4" from the middle on both the left and right sides.

With the zipper lying horizontally, fold both edges down from the center, so the ends are now pointed vertically. Cut the right hand tail of the zipper at an angle.

Wrap the right hand tail up into the left hand tail. Add another Craft Glue Dot® to the left hand tail as you wrap it up and around the right hand tail. Tack the end of the left hand tail down on the back side of the lily with another Craft Glue Dot®.
 

Create the center of the lily by wrapping a Craft Glue Dot® around a stick pin. then wrap about a 3/4" piece of yellow ribbon around the pin. Stick the ribbon wrapped pin into the center of your flower.

Once you get started, these zipper lilies are really easy and fun to make. In fact, I made 4 before deciding I was just going to use 2 on my frame. 

Easter Frame Supplies

Supplies:

Craft Glue Dots®

Mini Glue Dots®

Micro Glue Dots®

Glitz Design Yours Truly Patterned Paper

Navy Card Stock

Maya Road Pleated Trim

Maya Road Zipper Trim

Fiskars Upper Crest Border Punch
Silhouette Machine

Picture Frame (My frame measures 13" x 6")

Thanks for stopping by! 

I wrote this white participating on the Glue Dots® Design Team.

Glue Dots DT Call and a Fiskars' Fuse Project

Just a quick announcement and then on to my mini album. Many of you know that I am a Glue Dots®  Dottess (this is what they call their design team members). I have been a Dottess for 2 years now and thoroughly enjoy it. It's time again for a new design team. You can find all of the call details here on the Glue Dots® blog.  If you love using Glue Dots® and like being the first to play with new products (the Dottesses got to play with the Micro, XL, and XXL Dots before they were released!) I encourage you to try out. It's a great group of people to work with.

Okay, on to my mini album. Have you heard all the talk about Fiskar's new Fuse system? Fiskars is holding a contest where you can actually win a Fuse (and who wouldn't want to win a Fuse, right?). You can check out all the details of the contest here, there's still a lot of time to enter. I created this circle mini album using the circle Fuse pieces from the contest.

This mini album tells the story of the Baptism gown that my aunt (my sister's Godmother) sewed for her Baptism. I then also wore the gown, and just a few months ago, my aunt's first granddaughter wore it at her Baptism. I sandwiched chipboard between all of the patterned paper to make the album nice and durable.

Here's what the front side looks like:

And how about some close ups since that picture is teeny tiny:

Here's the back side:

and some close ups of the back side:

The patterned paper I used was from Lily Bee's Victoria Park Collection. The felt is from Stamp School, and the Baptism themed stickers are from Reminisce.

Thanks for stopping by!

End of the School Year Gifts Part 2

As promised, I'm back today with one more end of the school year gift. These will be going to my son's teacher and teacher's aide.

I always like to give a little gift with hand made touches. This year I picked up some insulated drink glasses that will be great for keeping summer drinks cool. Little Yellow Bicycle's Hello Spring was a perfect color match for the bright cups (I don't know why the cup is photographing red, but it's really a bright pink). I also created matching gift card holders from A Walk Down Memory Lane's on-line design team member Nicole's tutorial, that you can find by clicking here.


To create the cups you'll need some single serve drink mixes (I used Crystal Light lemonade).

 

Tie about 5 individual packs together into a small bundle. Because I have a large cup, I will be putting 3 of these bundles into a cup (for a total of 15 drink mix packs in a cup), but you can adjust based on the size of your cup. 

Cut 1 - 12" x 1" piece of patterned paper, and 1 - 12" x 1 1/2" piece of paper. Adhere the smaller piece of paper on top of the larger piece. Cut off 3 1/2" (now you will have 2 pieces, 1 that is 8 1/2" long and one that is 3 1/2" long). Set aside the 3 1/2" piece for later.

                  

Wrap the 8 1/2" strip of paper tightly around your drink mixes, and secure the overlapping ends with a strong adhesive like Glue Dots® Lines. 

               

At this point you can use flowers, stamps, ribbon, lace, twine, chipboard shapes, or just about any other pretty thing to decorate your drink mix wrap. When you are finished decorating, place the drink mixes into the cup and place the lid on the cup.

To create the flags for the straws, grab the 3 1/2" piece of layered patterned paper that you cut earlier. Use a scissors to cut a banner edge to one side. Use a craft knife or circle punch to create 2 holes to thread the straw through on the opposite side of the banner edge.

 Use your printer (or if you have nice handwriting, you can just write it out) to print "For a de"light"ful teacher" and "For a de"light"ful aide" on colored paper. Trim out the words and adhere them to your banner. Underline the words with colored rhinestones. Place the banners on the straws and you're set to go.

I also think these would make great hostess gifts for summer parties! 

Thanks for stopping by!

Not so Mini Album

Today I have what could loosely be called a mini album. It's 6" x 6", so it falls into the mini album category, but I stuffed it so full of photos, that it's a little larger than mini. The whole thing is made from My Mind's Eye's Miss Caroline Dilly Dally Adventures collection. I fell in love with the colors and patterns in this line immediately, and since I had to have almost everything in the collection, I figured it would be put to best use in a large mini album.

I made the covers out of chip board, just to make it a bit sturdier. The blue star piece behind the title is actually an unfinished wood piece that is part of the Miss Caroline line. I used Tim Holtz Broken China Distressed Ink to stain it.

I love when mini albums are interactive, so the photo on the right hand side of the bottom page opens up to show 2 more photos underneath.

 The photo on the top right side flips up to reveal another photo and journaling about the trip.

 My favorite interactive page is the bottom left page. I made little pockets behind the main photo, and one photo pull out from each side (by pulling on the ribbon). The photo on the bottom right spins up around the brad in the right hand corner to reveal another photo underneath.

The journaling/title tags that go with Miss Caroline were perfect for my album, and really helped make everything come together quite quickly. I raided my leftovers from all different projects to scrounge up a few unexpected touches like the layered giraffe sticker on one of my pages, and some fun word stickers to sprinkle throughout the album. It was a great way to use leftovers and enhance the album!

Thanks for stopping by!

For the Love of Cropping

I love a good crop. Whether it's on-line or in person, I just can't help but be motivated to get things done. This weekend there's was an impromptu crop over at the Fiskateers site. If you're a Fiskateer,  you should definitely head over and check it out. Challenges don't close until Wednesday night, so there's still time to play along. If you're saying "Fiska-what?" you should also head over and check out the Fiskateers. It's a free community of people who love all things Fiskars (and if you're a paper crafter, sewer, or gardener you definitely own at least one Fiskars scissors, paper trimmer, punch, or gardening tool!).  It's a really fun, creative and supportive group, and you won't be disappointed that you checked them out. I've been having fun working on a few of the crop challenges. Here's a spring layout I made using my favorite Fiskars Border Punch (which just happens to be Fiskars Upper Crest border punch. I used it as an accent on the left hand side of my photos):

 

I created this layout from some leftover paper I had from another project and some Washi Tape. I used black, blue, and yellow Washi Tape to create the pattern on the top part of the page. There's a lot you can do with Washi Tape, but one of my absolute favorite things is creating my own patterned paper with it. You can check out the chevron paper I made with it here if you didn't see that project when I posted it.

This background was created by placing 3 strips of the same tape next to each other on a diagonal, and then repeating with a new tape until the entire background was covered.

 

The  patterned paper and journaling tag are from My Mind's Eye's new On The Bright Side Collection. On the bright side is much like it sounds; a bright and bold collection, however it has surprising vintage touches to it as well. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Chore Chart

I've been wanting to make a chore chart for my boys (they almost 4 and 5 1/2), but I didn't want a traditional "chart" style. I also wanted something that would look nice hung up in the house. I wanted it to be pretty and functional. I wasn't sure what I wanted until 2 weeks ago when my husband was doing a project and had a bunch of leftover pieces of cedar that were about 2 feet long. The following chore board sprung to mind:

 
First, I have to say, sometimes things come out as well or even better than you pictured in your mind (...and sometimes they don't). Happily, this is one of those times, I love how it turned out.

I took the bare 2 foot piece of wood and sanded it. Then I painted it with only 1 coat of white paint and sanded it again. I wanted to have a worn look, and with 1 coat of paint the grain shows through nicely.  Then I cut my words from vinyl and used it as a stencil for painting my words.

I added hooks (which I found at my local hardware store) to the board for the chore tags to be hung from. Since my kids are too little for printed words just yet, I found public domain clip art and printed those out on white card stock. I punched out my clip art pictures with Fiskars circle punches and attached them with Craft Glue Dots® to larger circles of Pink Paislee Prarie Hill patterned paper.

I set an eyelet through each chore tag to hopefully keep the medallions from ripping. I used a 4" piece of chain (also found in 3 ft lengths at my local hardware store) to hang the the medallions.

This is not the prettiest picture, but at least you can get an idea of what it looks like hanging on the wall in my house. Each night after my boys go to bed, I'll hang their chores for the next day (make bed, set table, help fold laundry, etc.) on their "to do" hook. When they wake up in the morning they can look at their job for the day, complete it at the appropriate time and move their medallion from the "to do" hook to the "done" hook. The hook in the middle holds all the extra medallions for chores that don't need to be done that day.  My boys are already excited about moving their medallions from the "to do" hook to the "done" hook". One other note about this board if you're thinking about making one for yourself: Some medallions I only have 1 of, for example "help mom sweep", because only 1 child needs to do this at a time. Some medallions I have 2 of, for example, "pick up the play room" will often be assigned to both boys on the same day.

Thanks for stopping by!

Together Is The Best Place To Be

Today's project is a bit of a bundle project. Glue Dots® challenged its designers this month to make a wedding project, and Moxie Fab World is having a Punches Challenge. I thought I'd combine the 2 and make some framed art with my Fiskars Heart Squeeze Punch that would also make a lovely wedding gift.

I know you've probably seen a lot of this kind of framed art. This one's a bit more personalized because you use a map of a location that is special to the couple that will be receiving the gift to add an additional personalized touch. For example, this one is made from multiple maps of different locations that are special to my husband and me (where we met, where we married, where we owned our first home). If you are attending a destination wedding you could make the hearts from the map of that destination (i.e. Jamaica, Hawaii, Mexico).

Here's what I used to make my frame:

The background piece is a sheet of Jillibean Soup Kraft card stock. I cut it down to fit the frame and ran it through my printer to created the border and text. You could easily do this part with a black fine point pen and a ruler. I just have really, really bad handwriting so I decided to print the text instead.


Here's a close up of the text:

I attached my hearts with Mini Glue Dots®, but the Ultra Thin Glue Dots® would work equally as well here. Whenever I arrange something in a grid pattern, I lay one row across and one down to get the spacing right, then I work out in rows from there.

In the bottom right hand corner, I created a heart with our wedding date on it instead of creating a heart out of a map piece. Instead of using flat adhesive for this heart, I attached it with a Pop Up Glue Dot®

...and there you have it! just pop your creation in a frame and you're all set!

Thanks for stopping by!

*I created this post while participating on the Glue Dots® Design Team

Teal and Orange Party Decorations

 This month, Glue Dots® challenged its designers to create teal and orange party decorations. I happen to have Christmas on the brain, so mine are geared toward a teal and orange Christmas party. However I'll explain simple ways to change up the decorations to make them fit for other party situation, too. I have 2 ideas today. First up is a fun centerpiece:

I chose to make mine look like a Christmas ornament, but you could just as easily make yours look like a pumpkin, apple, or even switch out the shape for a star. My finished piece is just about 6" x 6". If you'd like to make one about the same size you'll need:
 

Ultra Thin or Craft Glue Dots®
A way to cut circles (or any other symmetrical shape). I used the Lifestyle Crafts nesting circle cutting dies.
3 - 12" x 12" pieces of paper (I used Authentique Gathering Grow and Together and Little Yellow Bicycle Hellow Fall Bundle-up Blue)
A scoring tool
A topper for your centerpiece (I used Fiskar's Scalloped Sentiments border punch to create an ornament topper).

Cut 12 circles and score them down the middle.

Attach the wrong sides of the circles together from the score line to the curved edge with Ultra Thin or Craft Glue Dots®. Repeat until you have a 12 adhered into a circle.

I cut the bottom of my circle off slightly to create a flat base instead of a rounded edge. Add your topper (ornament topper for an ornament, stem and leaves if you're making an apple or pumpkin).

For my second project I decided to make something that can be hung from a light or the ceiling. Make a dozen or so of these to really add ambiance to your party:

 For this project you'll need
Mini Glue Dots®
18" of orange ribbon per decoration
1 Teal pearl (If you don't have teal pearls, use a white one and color it teal with a Copic Marker)
Glitter paper (I used American Crafts Pow! Glitter Paper)
String to hang your piece from when you've finished.

 Cut your 18" ribbon into 3 - 6" pieces of ribbon. Form a loop with each piece. Adhere together using a Mini Glue Dot®

 Form each loop into an 8 shape by placing a Mini Glue Dot® in the center and pinching together.

 Layer all 3 loops on top of each other, adhering with mini glue dots.

Cut a shape from glitter paper for the center of your ornament. Depending on your theme, you can pick appropriate shapes: hearts for a wedding or baby shower, snowflake for a winter party, flowers for a spring party. Attach the glitter shape to the center of your ornament with a Mini Glue Dot®

 Add a teal pearl to the center of your glitter paper using a Mini Glue Dot. Add string and hang! My boys and I are going to add string and use a snowflake shape in the center and hand them out as Christmas ornaments to our family this year.

Happy party planning!

I wrote this post while participating on the Glue Dots® Design Team.