Birthday Card for Ally

So my most favorite pretty girl turned 16 a couple of weeks back and we had a party for her.  I wanted to make a card she would ohhh and ahh over and I have a ton of cards and card stock from my paper stash. (That's what happen when you plan a wedding twice and then elope!) Can we say card stock out the wazoo...
Anyhow, I decided to uses some of the Color Me Paper  for my background and to keep it fairly simple.
I embossed my petal of the card with my swirl embossing folder and my cuttlebug. Cut my butterflies with my Sentimentals cartridge and layered them adding just a bit of bling.Used Ranger Distress ink for my color and made sure I got all my edges. Then I sprayed everything with sparkle Shimmer Spritz added na nfew pearls, Et Voila ! She loved it.

List #2 - Goals for Next Month

Woo, I'm on a roll.

I thought about this all day and am just now getting to jot down to my list items so without any preamble here we go. This is mostly craft related though.
1. Make throw pillow covers and a new lamp shade with the awesome red curtain panel I found.
2.Owl wall art
3.Get my peas in the ground, they are going bonkers in my craft room, growing by leaps and bounds in just two weeks or so.
4. Finish the baby girl onesie mini album I'm making for a friend.
5. Quilled dogwood wreath for a mothers day gift for my mom.
6. 8-10 Christmas cards... I'm behind on my self imposed quota. :-)

This is a pretty good start for a list, it by no means encompasses the number of projects I actually want to get done but the most pressing on my brain

30 Days of Lists

Well better late than never I say. Yesterday while I was over on the Teresa Collins site drooling over paper I ran across the 30 Days of Lists challenge that she was doing and I thought it looked cool. Cool enough that I wanted to do this and I figured I'd start now. Or yesterday actually although I, of course, didn't do it. The point is to start a daily journal practice and doing the list really should take you only 5 to 10 minutes a day. Of course some people are making it a little more detailed with art journals and the like which is what I'd like to do but I think we'll just start with me posting here.
So let me start.

List #1 Challenges to Accept...

1. No more gluten ( seems I'm gluten sensitive, with a side of wheat allergy and man do I love bread...heavy sigh)
2. Get up an hour earlier
3. Limit white carbs (should be easy if I'm not eating gluten, right?)
4. Deal with the fact that Kaylio is my Imperial Agent's companion and there isn't a dang thing I can do about it, although shooting her with my blaster rifle is really high on my list. (I play Star Wars the Old Republic with my husband.)
5. Limit the number of hours watching TV every night.
6. Increase my crafting time.

So challenge or late start resolution either way they are things I struggle with and are a challenge for me. But heck I'm game so we'll see what happens next.

Flower Obsession Interrupted (or This cat is a pest.)

Ok, I know I'm obsessed with paper. Flat out addicted to it in fact. But, I tell you if it's a craft and it involves flowers I'm right smack in the middle of it. I have no self control. No will power. None! Crepe paper flower? Yup! Love to make 'em. Origami flowers, yup. Quilled flowers for cards and lets not talk about my rubber stamp collection and the flowers there. I was recently reunited with my PSX Botanical Stamps and my husband said he really didn't realize girls squealed over stuff like that. 

I think the only thing more important than flowers or paper is holding the big black cat who consistently invades my personal space. He is a space hog to say the least and he has no conception of boundaries.

Ace

OK, let's be clear. He thinks it's more important. Period. And as cute as he is, he can be a pest. Especially if I'm working on things that include long strips of paper. (Quilling) Any form of ribbon, floral tape, yarn. You get the picture.


Today I came home from work as soon as I could because during my run home at lunch, the mail man came with goodies for me from Custom Quilling. I was so excited. I still have a mass amount of paper strips for different projects but today in my order was a new book! Yay! I'm also addicted to books.

This is what came!!!

This book is a beautiful project book by Alli Bartkowski called Quilled Flowers. I've been home for an hour, had a cup of tea and looked through the whole thing, and drooled. I'm not ashamed. I was. DROOLING!

I can hardly wait to whip out my paper strips and get started. (cat be damned!) The photography is simply gorgeous, as are the projects. I mean heck, look at the cover 3 dimensional quilled flowers. If that doesn't inspire someone to learn how to quill I'm not sure what could. Also, all the directions are clear, she does a great job of going over the basic quilling shapes and breaking down what you need to do the projects.

I just can't decide what to do first, but I have some teeny tiny and smallish glass bottles and vases that need some flowers so lets see what I can do! Without the cat's help.

I'm a Bad, Bad Blogger.

Ok. We are NOT going to talk about where I've been. Let's just say that life got in the way and move on.

For those wondering, I did NOT get to have my DIY paper-filled dream wedding I was hoping for but I did get married. YAY. It was a nice little trip to Tahoe with my nearest and dearest, back in November. Of Course in this very mild fall and winter that we've had here in Northern California it chose that weekend to snow which was kinda cool but the intimate service with my friends and family was perfect.
Besides my dress, my bouquet was my most favorite accessory of the day. Not my crepe paper flowers I was hoping for but considering I had a very short time to get them done, (24 hours to be precise) they turned out great.

I was wish I'd been able to make it larger but time and supplies on had were very limited. I used several glass buttons for centers to give it some bling and then floral filler picks for doing regular flower arrangements to add another dimension. I hand cut all my squares from hand colored "Color Me" papers from Hot Off  The Press. a couple of sheets from my Anna Griffin stash and a couple of sheets of a really nice 12 x 12 script that I picked up from Joanne's.
Ok that's all I have time for today as I've been forced at keyboard point to do an update and I've got the flu so it's taken me all day to get it done.
Time for a nap....

Flower Number Two

Ok, short post today. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and we have a few hours before it may thunderstorm again. I've got oodles of lawn to finish mowing, (Again) So, I'm gonna make hay while the sun still shines, so to speak. 
I've just been working my way through my paper flower book and here is the second flower variety I've managed to complete. I can't say I've "mastered" the techniques yet but I'm certainly getting more comfortable with them. So the next flower was the water Lilly style Dahlia. There are three dahlia style flowers and this was just really fun to do. It's much larger than the first rose, but then again in real life they ARE bigger than most roses. I love it! I'm gonna see if I can't get a couple of flowers done later today after chores, and I have a cute little Easter treat I need to finish for my mom's kids at school. I should be pretty busy this afternoon. If I get that finished I'll post it as well.

Thinking of You Card

I've been working on learning lately. Learning LOTS of different techniques which is just fascinating to me. One of my favorite places to learn new things is the Weekly Webisodes over at Paper Wishes I advise you to not venture there unless you are better than I am at controlling the desire to  purchase every cool thing they have on their website.

That said they were actually the inspiration for my wedding invitations that I'm working on thanks to their wonderful Color Me Papers. I've got a whole slew of these papers that I am hand coloring for the wedding invitations. But. In order to figure out what the heck I'm doing I've had to do some playing. The thing I really like about this paper is that Paper wishes/Hot Off the Press has done all the hard work for you, by stamping and and heat embossing the raised image with clear embossing powder. All you have to do is add your color to show off the beautiful designs. So here we have a card that I've recently done with lots of different techniques I've been trying out.

The card itself is from my stash of primary cards from Joann's. The blue swirled paper is the Swirl Color Me. I applied ink from my Surf Cat's Eye with a make up sponge dabbing all over the surface and then wiping the ink off the raised swirl images with a paper towel. My Lady Bug image is from Bugaboo Stamps. This I colored with my chalks and although you can't really tell from this picture the Lady Bugs were topped with Rangers Glossy Accents.

Here's a close up of my circle sentiment. I've been fascinated with these in the last couple of weeks. This sentiment is from the great designers over at Squigglefly.  I love circle sentiments but I have some major issues cutting and so... Well lets just say the embellishments I quilled for this was to hide the fact that I apparently cant follow a line very well. Even with a template. I was rather tickled with my fringed flower. I really like adding the three dimensional quality to things I'm working on. Sure, it makes it harder to send through the mail but it's awful pretty to look at.