… where {A} is the {A}wesome {A}li Edwards and the cause of {A}utism Speaks and Songbird {A}venue’s newest kit, Bloom & Grow, designed by Ali together with Mer Fenwick, Jan Crowley, Amy Wolff & Janet Phillips
* Click on image to purchase the fab Bloom & Grow from Songbird Avenue, Inc!*
… where the love comes from jessicasprague.com, where my good friend Jessica has pledged to donate $2 for each Bloom and Grow kit purchased between today, Sunday, {A}pril 26 up to the end of the month (Thursday, {A}pril 30), because we just love Ali
So run to Songbird Avenue and add the wonderful Bloom & Grow kit to your digi-stash, and help us at jessicasprague.com spread the love! 🙂
Have you ever suddenly stopped in the middle of Wednesday, or Tuesday, or Thursday (actually, any day will do since the routines pretty much repeat themselves) and said, Man, I really could do with a new, exciting thing today?
Have you ever opened your eyes in the morning, stretched out in bed, smiled, and said to yourself, Today is a good day for going on an adventure?
Well, my dears, if you answered yes to at least one question, have I got great news for you! Today is the day you’ve been waiting for! March 30! Rev up your engines! Get ready for the ride of your life! And point your radar in the direction of the Spraground!
See, today Jessica launches her Scrapbook Alchemy courses! WOOOHOOO!
Turn lead into gold, turn your hoard of paper scrapping materials into wonderful masterpieces of recorded moments, turn your friend into your lab partner as you go on the adventure of your life with Scrapbook Alchemy! 😀
Are you a paper scrapbooker who sees all these new digital stuff coming up and thinks, “No thanks, I’ll stick to my paper. I can’t give up the feel of those soft fabric flowers, my sewing machine, my paper cutter, my Bind-It-All, my ceiling-high collection of cardstock and patterned paper? But hmmm… I don’t mind trying out something new to add to my hoard”? Jump on the Alchemy ship!
Are you a digital scrapbooker whose knees shake when you think of cutting up paper (“no! I can’t even draw, much less cut, in a straight line!”) and who gets dizzy at the mere thought of cleaning up after? Well, hey, sit down, have a drink of water, and join this little adventure that just might make your knees weak and your head dizzy but all with excitement! 😉
Are you a hybrid scrapbooker who loves combining digi and paper? Honey, get all comfortable, because you’re on for yet another fun adventure in your life!
See, the point is, this is an adventure for E.V.E.R.Y.O.N.E., whatever your inclinations are! As long as you want to go on a new adventure and you’ve got the energy to play, you’ve got a place in our Scrapbook Alchemy boat!
As always, Jessica brings top-notch quality instruction (step-by-step, from start to finish, you get her LIVE right in your home… it’s like scrapping along with Jes right in your scraproom… or kitchen… or dining room… or wherever it is you like to do your creative stuff 😉 ). And the lessons? To-die for. Totally fun. Totally timeless… you’ll be using the techniques you learn forever and applying them to different kinds of projects and pages. And albums! Albums too! How marvelous is that?
Here’s even more awesome news!
You get Episode 1 at half price! That’s right, my friend! 50-off!
And just when you didn’t think it could get any better…
throughout the month of April, when you sign up for the course, you automatically get a free pass (via an access code) for a friend! You get a free seat for your friend so you can both hold each other’s hands as you ride through the adventure together! Lab partner and adventure-mate, so you can share the fun with another one!
There are four episodes (four different projects) that are offered right now, and you canread all about it here! (Come on, click on the link, you know you want to! 😉 ) Don’t forget to check out the vid right at the top of the page! I love it and I think you will too! 🙂
Trust me. The Alchemy courses? They’re to-die for. There are just no words to express how awesome a job Jes has done with these. I am a digi-girl deep down in my bones, but let me tell you, these courses make me want to jump up and pull out all my untouched paperscrapping hoard of supplies from under the bed! And not just that, now I want to run to the nearest Archivers store and go on a shopping spree for new paper stuff, except I know this time I won’t be hoarding but will actually be using them! Now that’s saying a lot from a girl who’s got her compy surgically attached to her body, huh? 😉
Am I swooning? Hyperventilating? Stuck to the roof of my room in a merry floating spell? You betcha. Because I am 110% sure… Click on the image and check out the Alchemy page… You’re gonna love this, yes, you will. 🙂
PS. And when you’ve signed up and started the class, do come back here and let me know if you loved The Loft as much as I did. And do. 😉
And speaking of adventure…
My eldest son (the one entering university next school year) came home one day last year and said to me, “Guess what, Mom? They’re making it into a movie!”
Then my dear sister sent me the link to the trailer, which I absolutely fell in love with, right from the drum beat at the beginning all the way to the waving at the end of the two-minute teaser.
She knew I’d love the trailer because she knows I love Maurice Sendak and have a collection of his books from way back in college, when I first discovered him. The book that the movie was based on was the very first book I ever had by Maurice Sendak. It was a book so precious to me that it was the main star of the countless bedtime stories I read to each of my sons through the years (and today the love for this book is not just mine alone but a love shared by my five boys … plus of course, we’ve got the stuffies, because really now, you’ve got to be able to play hide and seek under the blanket with Max and the monsters at night and hug them tight when you shut your eyes to sleep, right? ;))
So. Feast your eyes on this. It’s amaaaazing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Do. Forever will. 🙂
Now, back to manual labor… I’m being evicted out of my room by the painting and carpentry crew, and if I don’t get out in two minutes, they will bodily lift me out (all eight of them). Heh.
Over and out and back soon! 😉
PS. In the amount of time it took me to write this and actually post it, youtube has already disabled embedding the vid… but no worries: click on the vid and it’ll lead to the vid on youtube itself. It’s worth the trip, trust me. 🙂
Wow! It’s been a looong time, hasn’t it? I’ve been missing you!
Forgive the absence and the total failure to live up to Resolution No. 5! Tsk tsk. But real life happens, right? So in real life, I’ve been running around pretty much like a headless chicken (refer to blog title 😀 ) attending to one million and one things all crying out my name at the same time.
Uhm. In retrospect, I think I’ve been much more of a duck (“calm on the surface but paddling like the dickens underneath”). There’s a funny part of me that hopes that being calm and collected on the outside will somehow seep into the inside by osmosis. hehe.
So. Lots of reasons why I hope you’ll forgive the long absence, but I won’t bore you with all the details. In a nutshell, this is what kept me away from my porch these past weeks:
dealing with medical emergencies ( one of which was major and took me out of the home for an entire week)
starting a crash course in Nutrition and Cooking Duty to answer the diet and lifestyle changes required by the medical emergencies (see above). Uhm. I have to confess: when God was distributing kitchen talents, I was way over on the opposite side, lined up in the Digital Addiction area 😆
working on the construction of a new annex to our home and remodelling of the existing one
helping the younger kids with their school work for this last stretch before summer (blissful summer!) comes
attending to the graduation needs of the two older ones (including graduation balls, graduation practices, and all those major class activities that seem to get scrunched up in the last few months of the school year)
writing my usual column for our community newsletter (and editing the whole thing too)
and…(I’ve saved the best part for last)…
working with Jes on our new shoppe. That’s right! We now have our very own little shoppe on the Spraground! Woohoo! 😀 (more on this below)
Extreme Makeover, Home Edition: The Kitchen
Did I mention that our home has been undergoing a major makeover since late December? We added an annex to our home (when you have five boys, you realize you need *lots* of space) and what that translates to is, basically, building a house all over again. Or at least it feels pretty much like it. Repainting, acquiring more furniture (luckily, we have access to a carpenter who can translate my designs into wood so we don’t really have to buy too many ready-made pieces of furniture), sorting through accumulated junk and trying to decide what goes and what stays (and having to deal with “No! We can’t throw that away!” from all corners of the home), ripping out flooring material and … you get the picture. 🙄
The good news is, with the additional space, dh and I get to have our own workroom. I’m still trying to decide which shelves and cabinets to move from our bedroom to the workroom over there (separation anxiety from my scrappin’ goodies, hehe). Funnily, the kids refuse to get their own bedrooms (which is one of the main reasons we added the annex); they prefer to sleep together in their own shared bedrooms. What this means is we get to have a guest bedroom (you’re all invited to come over for a sleepover! YAY!) and another bedroom turned into a playroom for the kiddos (which serves as a second guestroom if needed so come over and bring your entire fam!) 😆 . Oh! It also means I finally get my own veranda, which I’ve turned into our art nook! The kids’ art table is now there, and my oil paints and canvases and my easel and palette and paintbrushes and…
And then, there’s the kitchen. Which is being made over. Which, in this state, pretty much represents what the rest of the house looks like while it’s undergoing plastic surgery:
A bit of a side story: We had wooden floors here, which we ended up removing because we realized on Year 2 that wooden floors and kitchen spills don’t mix well. Now that we’re doing major work on the house, dh and I decided to replace the flooring with the more friendly Italian tiles. So he brought home 5 large square tiles for me and the kids to choose from: there was one amazing tile that had a wood pattern very much like our old kitchen’s wooden floor–very tempting, except that it had a slight pink-orange tint to it that disturbed me (heehee). There were 3 wonderful textured tiles of the warm-color family, the kind that make you think of Tuscany… and these seemed the perfect ones to choose from. But then there was this lone Zorro. The black italian textured tile. Very sleek. Very cool.
Hubby and I looked at each other and had the requisite “should we do black, knowing that dark colors make areas look smaller?” conversation. But then he said:
“Look at our black granite counters. And all that stainless steel…”
I thought of the black tiles. And the silver. And the black. And then the flashing marquee: Totally Sleek. Gorgeous. Yum.
So. Black it will be. 😉
And now, moving on from the kitchen, let’s go to…
The Little Shop on the Block
I love little towns. I love the concept of having everything within walking distance. I love the thought of walking on late afternoons and passing by the butcher, waving at the baker, nodding at the corner grocer, smiling at the florist… I love the completeness of small towns where you can get everything within walking distance and where every corner oozes with warmth and sense of family.
If the Spraground were a tangible place, this is exactly how I imagine it to be. There’s the hotdog man in his rolling stall with the children around him; there’s the flowershop with tulips and carnations and chrysanthemums in full bloom; there’s the playground right smack in the center where everyone gravitates, and … oooh! in the corner! Look at that! It’s a little new shoppe!
😀
If you’ve been around to my uber-amazing friend Jessica’s blog or to our wonderful Spraground homepage, you probably already know that we have our very own little shoppe on our Spraground! Woohoo! If you haven’t heard about it, come, run skip and jump right over HERE and consider yourself our very special guest!
Jes and I have been so excited working on sharing our creations with our uber-loved friends! For the record, I will state (again) how awesome a friend Jes is, and how grateful I am to her, and how awed I am by her uncanny ability to pluck a dream of mine from the sky, a dream I didn’t even know I had, and put it in my hands. What a girl. A-W-E-S-O-M-E.
And of course, nothing could come out from the most awesome digi goddess than the best stuff, right? Have you seen Jessica’s templates? They’re all to-die for! These templates are the most amazing, most wonderful things to work with because not only do we get to use Jessica’s stellar designs but… listen to this… her templates aren’t just templates, they’re Templates PLUS!
What this means is when you get Jessica’s templates, what you’re getting is really much much more than just a template. You get a lot of goodies as well that come with it. Goodies that you can use over and over again on different layouts! How awesome is that? So buying a template from Jes is like getting a template and a host of element packs as well, all with the mark of excellence of Jessica’s great design and creativity and genius! Does it get any better than that? 😉
Here’s a preview of one of her awesome single-page templates:
When you open up this template, you’ll see that you get not only the template design but every part that you see on the template, including the circle embellishment, the frame, and the torn paper effect! Now that’s a huge PLUS, right?
And here’s an example of one of her terrific double-page templates:
Yummy! Don’t you just love this?
Oh, and have I mentioned that Jes included a tutorial on her blog last week, together with a free template and video tutorial on how to use them? Her blog tutorial tells you how to take the items from the template and separate them into their own files so that you can find them easily and use them later on your layouts without having to go find them in your templates? Awesome, isn’t it?
Candice, photographer *and* creative woman extraordinaire, is also selling projects at the shoppe. Have you seen her Valentine Garland? It’s awesome!
And little old me… I create kits and all the other bits and pieces. 😆
Here’s the latest kit that I’ve got up in the shoppe:
My absolute favorite thing to make is papers… so I’ve got a coordinating paper pack that goes with the kit (papers in this pack are different from the ones that come with the kit):
And here’s the latest bit-and-piece I’ve uploaded:
One of the things I love about this country I live in is the fact that textures abound everywhere! I can step out of my front door and find literally hundreds of texture sources! (This, by the way, is how I justify to my DH the need to bring my camera with me everywhere I go. heehee 😆 )
And because you know I love ya…
Here’s a freebie for you!
This one is a complement of the textures pack that I have in the shoppe. What you’ll get here are three photo texture plates, ready to use because they’re sized at approximately 5.5 x 7.5 inches. All you need to do is pull the texture plate onto a layer above your photo and then play with its blending modes and opacity levels. Try duplicating the texture, combining different textures, applying different blending modes, etc etc etc. The thing about textures is that they’re great toys to play with, and there are absolutely no limits to the amount of playing you can do with them!
Here are some examples of the freebies at work:
(You can click on the images if you want a closer look)
CREDITS: photo by bjearwicke @ stock.xchng
CREDITS: photo by lusi @ stock.xchng
CREDITS: photo by jaquesi @ stock.xchng
Do you want to play with textures too? Here ya go!
Click on the image to download.
Thanks for the love you leave on my blog as you download… and if you haven’t paid a visit to our shop yet, do drop by and have a look around, and pass by the general forum as well and say hello!
Phew! That’s all for today, folks! More updates tomorrow! Gotta get back to the saltmines! 🙂
((((hugs)))) to you!
PS. Want free tuition to a really awesome photo-editing course?
Yep. Lotsa buzz going on around here. Starting to feel like a real bee (not a queen, though… that’s wishful thinking. I’m more like the worker type or the drone 😆 )
BUT! It’s all good, right? There is always so much to be thankful for! And on that note, before I forget, Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! Hope you had an awesome time celebrating all that’s warm and wonderful in your life (and hope you had a great Black Friday shopping spree, too! 😀 )
We’ve got a lot to catch up on, so I hope you’ve got your shopping for the day done (at least for today 😛 ). So get comfy, sit back, grab that cold drink (or warm, if the snow outside is starting to freeze you), and put your feet up… and here we go!
The Gift that Lasts Forever
Have you gone Christmas shopping yet? You have? No fair… you can do mine. 🙂
I haven’t done any Christmas shopping, but that’s okay… there’s time to freak. Let’s see… I have exactly 19 days to go on a wild race to the stores. (And believe me, given the Christmas traffic in my part of the world, that’s not a lot of days to shop in. It’s not surprising to spend a quarter of each day sitting in traffic–and that’s if you’re lucky. *sigh* Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating. It’s just that I like traffic–any kind of traffic, any length of traffic–as much as I like … hmmm… bitter gourd. 😛 Each holiday season, I tell myself I’m going to shop the entire year next year, so that by December I would have no one left to shop for–you know, that dream of sitting contentedly, all gifts wrapped and ready to be delivered way before the 20th day of December–and of course, every year December rolls around and I wonder where that shop-early resolution got shelved during the past 11 months. What can I say? It’s an elusive dream. 😆 )
But hey, guess what? There’s a gift you can give which doesn’t require you to lock arms with the rest of the country as they run around the malls, looking at their lists and checking them twice. Better yet, this gift is truly special, the kind that doesn’t make you fat, that doesn’t collect dust on a shelf, that doesn’t get broken if dropped. This is the gift that lives on, long after the wrapper has been turned into recycled paper… (the season allows me to be cheesy, right?). It’s gift of learning, of discovery, of creating, of celebrating.
So yeah! Give the gift of digi-goodness to those you love this season! (Yes, that includes you! You can give yourself this gift too!)
There’s a huge, first-time-ever, crazy-generous gift over at our Spraground, and it’s called the Holiday Sale! Jessica has taken the best-selling digital courses and slapped on a huge discount on them, and there are even bundled offers (where you get a really, really great class 😉 for free if you take the bundle of 3 courses).
It’s so awesome that you can even divide the bundle gift between you and your friends! (You can give the entire bundle, lock stock and barrel, to your BFF 😀 or you can give one or two courses to your friend and keep the third and the free one for yourself. Oooor you can even give the four courses to yourself if you just joined us on our Spraground recently for our super-successful Stories In Hand free course and decided you like our Spraground enough to paint your name on a swing. 😉
The sale goes on till Christmas Day, so you can totally do your last-minute shopping on the web as well. You can send the gift either with a print-able card (we’ve got them on the Spraground–you just need to download them and type or write the coupon code before you give them to your loved ones), or you can send the gift via email. See? Isn’t Jes awesome? She thought of everything to make life in the fast-season lane easy for you! 🙂
(Alright, you may run to the Spraground and grab those courses now… I’ll wait right here for you to come back. >heehee< )
(Oh and PS. the image is click-able… it’ll take you right over to our Spraground! 😉 )
PAD makes a Comeback
Remember the photo-a-day we had last May, where we took a photo each day of the month, and at the end we have an entire day-by-day account of the extraordinary found in the ordinary days? We have that going on again over at our Spraground, upon the suggestion of one of my dearest friends, Lindsan. We’re taking a photo a day for each day of December (especially tricky, if you’re wrapped up in a million things to do this month, or especially exciting, if you’re one of the more organized people who’ve got their decor up and the gifts all wrapped and are just waiting for the 25th to roll around. If you’re the latter, I wanna be you. 😀 )
It’s only Day 4 and over at the special December 2008 Photo-A-Day gallery that Jes put up for all those who want to join (yes, that would be you, too, if you haven’t yet joined… COME!), there are soooo many wonderful photos and layouts coming up! I wish I had the time to leave love on all of them (yep, that’s on my to-do list too)… one of these days, I’m going to be successful at catching up with this! (There were 24 pages of photos/layouts last time I checked. )
If you want to take a photo a day and collect warm fuzzies from the awesome folks over at our Spraground but just found out about it now, come and join us anyway! (You can always post the previous days, a few days late! 🙂 )
And in case you’re thinking twice… there’s another special treat that Jes has cooked up to make our Photo-A-Day adventures more fun! Go read about it on her blog HERE.
And just to show you what a win-win situation we have here, at the end of December not only will you have had the chance to win a great prize, not only will you have experienced the special brand of Spraground warmth in our community, not only will you have had something exciting to do with your camera for every single day of an entire month, but–best of all–you’ll have 31 photos worth of wonderful memories, preserved forever either in photographs or in layouts!
How awesome is that?
Totally! Here now are my first four days of December PAD (with stories interspersed):
Day 1: Bread for Breakfast
A few weeks ago, some close friends of dh and mine invited us to a joint-birthday celebration at this little deli where they sell the yummiest and freshest French bread ever! Since then, I’ve filled our table with all the different types of French bread (and yes, with the cheese and the sausages to go with it! Mmmmm!)
Warm bread and Christmas warmth… it’s a perfect fit!
Day2: Igloo, Southeast-Asian Style
When I was a kid, I wanted to have my own playhouse. I had a nipa hut in our backyard, complete with ladder and windows that you kept open with sticks (authentic!), but I didn’t really like spending time in there because it was hot and it made me itchy (and between me and the teddy bear family I kept in it, there just wasn’t enough space). And to my little mind, it wasn’t cool. hehe. What was cool for me and my brother, 2 years older, was having our own treehouse. There was just one tiny problem: though our backyard was full of trees, they weren’t members of the treehouse-strong-branch family. The closest we ever got to making our treehouse back then was hanging a floral blanket over the branch of the aratilis* tree. It probably looked pathetic to the adults, but for us, it was treehouse-teepee heaven. 😀
(*aratilis – For those with green thumbs: I did a google search for aratilis, and found out that it belongs to the genus Muntingia, and is a close relative of the Jamaican cherry. It’s tinier than the first joint of your pinky finger; it’s green and hard when it isn’t ripe, and red and squishy when it’s ripe. Never enjoyed eating it, though my sister loved it. 😆 )
So… this yearning for a playhouse–is it genetic, you think? Is it something that all kids pass through? Because all my kids passed through a stage of trying to build their own playhouses (never mind that there are Little Tykes ready-built playhouses; there must be a primal urge to build a cave with one’s own hands).
My fifth son just built his a few days ago. Right in the comfort of our living room.
Yep. I knew those huge floor throw pillows had to be good for sumthin’. 😆
Day3: Oh Happy Day!
Oh happy day! Oh happy day! My package finally came in! My long-awaited Bind-It-All, accessories, space bar, acrylic and chipboard covers, and o-rings, finally in my home! Yabba-yabba-yeah-YEAH!
Okay, so maybe I kind of went overboard with all those o-rings… shhhhh. ( Wouldn’t you, if it took about a month for the supplies to get to you? 😆 Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m justifying it. heehee).
Of course, since I happen to be a gadget queen, it should come as no surprise that I totally love this tool?
A corner rounder that can cut through chipboard and other thick stuff! Mmmmm! It’s like a long-lost relative of my beloved Cropadile! 😆
Now, all I have to do is learn how to use these. Unlock the Power of the Tools! Indulge in the Gadget Love Affair! Let the hybrid games begin! bahahahaha!
Oh! Along with the BIA, I also got a bunch of books (to read during the Christmas break–yay!), ordered from both Amazon and ideabooks4u.
Love these two stores, amazon & ideabooks4u. The best part? Great customer service. I ran into a snag with Amazon (Ali’s book was listed as available, and then not), and they fixed it up as best as they could. Gotta love that. This was the first time I ordered from ideabooks4u (to get that Ali book which wasn’t available in Amazon), and they did an awesome job of delivering quickly and shipping the items wonderfully.
I am a sucker for great customer service. The product, whatever it is, has to be fabulous–of course, or else, why buy it, right? But even if I’ve got an excellent product staring me in my face, if it isn’t accompanied by excellent customer service, I can easily turn around and march right out, empty-handed and wallet-full, without an iota of regret.
Let me digress a bit and mention that (based on my experience) all digi shoppes are awesome and I have not yet met a designer who wasn’t a really, really nice, generous, sweet person. But I need to give a shout-out to my friend, Becky, who handles customer service at Scrapbook-Graphics.com. Each and every time I have run to her for help, whether it’s a tiny issue or a huge concern, she has always treated my pleas for help with much gentleness, concern, kindness, and immediate action. If there was an award given for excellent customer service in a digi shoppe, I’d vote for Becky any day. She’s definitely one of the reasons why SBG is among my favorite digi-shoppes! 🙂
I think it’s totally great to take an ordinary day and make it special by celebrating people who do their jobs with much heart and dedication. Just appreciating them is enough to put a smile of gratitude and quiet contentment on my face! (Among these people would be the three security guards who serve at my sons’ school. They are such a joy to meet every morning! Everyday when I take my kids to school, I’m greeted with big smiles and warm “Good morning!” greetings… every. single. day. Rain or shine. No fail. I love that, you know? That cheerfulness in the morning that lasts all the way till later on in the day when I come over to pick up my kids–it’s so precious! They’re definitely one of the best things I love about my sons’ school! 🙂 What about you–whom would you like to celebrate today? 😉
Day4: Belen on a Deadline
Ever tried crafting on a deadline?
Last Wednesday afternoon, my son R came home with news:
“Mom, my teacher wants me to submit a belen for extra credit.”
Belen is the Filipino term for the nativity scene, which can be found at Christmastime in every Filipino home (that, and the ubiquitous parol, or Christmas star). 😀
I noted the information and… promptly forgot about it, thinking there’d be the weekend to deal with it.
Well. Yesterday afternoon, R came home with news again: “The belen is due tomorrow.”
And: “It has to be artistic.”
Whaaaaa? You need this is less than 24 hours?
Zoom. Off we rushed to the malls to look for a nativity scene that could be bought off the shelves. Shouldn’t be a problem, right? After all, this is standard Christmas decor fare.
Wrong. Six stores and two pairs of tired legs after, I decided to buy a nativity scene figure and some raw materials and c.r.e.a.t.e. the nativity scene. I had absolutely no idea how it would come out; I only knew that it was our only option, since the bookstores we went to had absolutely no books with a nativity scene of the paper-doll kind; and none of the toy stores had any toy nativity scenes.
Here’s what the preliminary stages of the nativity-scene-creative process looked like:
The bare naked facts:
The backside:
(jumble of rice lights peeping on the right side)
The front:
And let’s not forget the recipe:
Ingredients:
extra thick chipboard, leftover unused chopsticks from Japanese-food takeout, some strapping tape, glue sticks, PVC glue, brown crepe paper, glittery fronds, a set of tiny rice lights, leftover animal toys borrowed from children’s toy box, and one store-bought Holy Family figure
Tools Needed:
glue gun, cutter, cutting mat, and yer good old trusty Cropadile 😉
Procedure:
Mix together, pulling cobwebby strands of glue from the glue gun (which manage to find their way all over the stuff). Cut some, measure some, laugh a lot. Plug in the lights when done, and voila!
The finished product, and my Day 4 Photo-a-Day accomplished as well! 😆
Freebie Mini
And since you made it this far, I thought it would be really nice if I could reward you with a little freebie, right?
This is just a tiny one… I have found that if I wait till I’ve got a fuller set to give away, I end up not blogging for days while working away on my designs. Then I end up torturing you with these long, long, looooong posts! 😆
So I decided to try a different route and give off little freebies now and then… that way I get to see you more often, and you get to download more (albeit smaller) freebies! Does that work for you? 🙂
So here’s what we have for today:
This is a 6×6 chipboard journaling block… just type (or write, if you’re doing hybrid 😉 ) your journaling on the lines, and voila!
Click on the image to download the journaling block (or should I say journaling circle?) 😀
PS. 4shared no longer allows comments on the download page unless you have an account with them and are logged in… so I would totally embrace you if you took the time to leave love on my blog as you download. 🙂
And before I go (it’s mid-dawn once again!), I have a little riddle for you:
Question: What could a 14-year-old teenage girl and her middle-aged aunt possibly have in common?
Answer: A love for Jason Mraz! Well… more specifically, absolute adoration for the boy by the teenage girl, and absolute love for the music (not the boy, LOL) by the aunt.
And because my niece is in Paris, this one is especially for her, in hopes that she manages to bump into the boy of her dreams while he walks along the streets again, someday in the future. 🙂
Enjoy, and I’ll see you soon, my sweeties!
PS. I can’t believe the guy just chased those pigeons down! Ooogy! I remember the first time I was in Paris, and dh wanted to take a photo with all the pigeons on the street… and I love birds. NOT. I think you can tell from my hunched up shoulders and the body-tilt (away from the birds, far far away) in the photo below. bwahahaha! 😆
… after being buried under tons of paperscrapping tools and paper and eyelets and chipboard and more paper!
We are having the grandest time at my friend Jessica’s Stories in Hand course ( and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re in it too! 😆 )! It’s so incredibly awesome to see so much creativity and so much storytelling coming together in one Spraground from all ends of the world! The course gallery is filled with wonderful works of art and the forums are overflowing with great reminiscing, and–best of all–friendships are in the process of developing or strengthening on the Spraground!
I am in a bit of a euphoric state (hehe) because I’ve finally finished my Stories in Hand binder, which houses the amazing system that Jes has designed for gathering and telling stories. Part of the happiness comes from finally, finally, finally getting to use all these tools in my scrapping drawers and shelves that have heretofore been referred to only as The Hoard. 😆 Can you spell g.u.i.l.t.-f.r.e.e.? I used to bite my knuckles every time someone mentions “paperscrapping materials” because I know I have a ton of unused stuff. Not anymore! YEAH! 😛
Before I put up the evidence of hands at work at more than a keyboard, here’s a little story:
When the course started, dh came home to a room filled with papers, eyelets, punchers, glue sticks and glue rollers, a brayer and a Cropadile… and said, “What is going on? What is all this?”
See, he’s used to coming home and seeing me create on my beloved Wilson compy. I don’t think he has ever seen me get messy (or mess up our room) with paperscrapping stuff.
So I answered him, with a quick glance up from punching tabs with my corner puncher, “Oh, just Jessica’s new course that we’re having on the Spraground…”
Well. I have to say, my hubby is one amazing man. Since that fateful day, he comes home and doesn’t ask about the metal ruler and the cutter and the strips of paper lying about. In fact, he accepts them as the most natural thing in the world. 😆
So. Here’s what he had to put up with while I wasn’t done with the binder:
(And nope, I’m not showing you what our floor looked like. This is embarrassing enough! hahaha!)
And here’s the final product:
The binder on the left is what contains the meat of the system and the little notebook on the right plays a supporting role. 🙂
Here are the front and back views of the binder:
Psst. Let’s pretend you don’t see that the stitching is crooked, okay? 😉
And here’s what the binder looks like inside! Open sesame! 😀
(I made the envelope and quote strips to go behind the three main sections–Roots, Family, and Self–because I wanted an excuse to use raffia. 😆 Just kidding… I love quotes and often I’ll find one and scribble it on a piece of paper… and when the time comes that I need it, more often than not, I’ll forget where that little piece of paper is. So I thought, hey, why not make some little strips that look nicer than those hastily-torn scraps and have them all in this neat little binder, so I never have to look for them again? Hence the quote envelopes and strips were born. 🙂 )
Here’s a closer look at the prompts (color-coded according to the tab they fall under–Red for Roots, Green for Family, Blue for Self)… and the inside prompt-pages that contain Jessica’s Stories in Hand magic!
The Family tab page, front and back:
And the Self page, which I renamed “Me” 😀 :
A few more pages from inside, including some additions I made to personalize the pages:
(I cut little slits where the photo corner diagonals are, and then printed each photo on regular photo paper. Then I inserted it into the slits. This way, if I ever feel the need to change the photos, I can easily slip these existing ones out and re-insert the updated photos in the slits. 😀 )
And the little jotter, of course!
And now that the binder and the notebook are all ready, let the story-gathering and story-telling begin! YAY!
On other fronts…
Thank you sooo much for all your kind wishes and your precious prayers during the rough month of sickies that my three kids were going through. I think it’s pretty safe to say they’ve finally scaled the walls and are now on the way to getting much better.
Before these past few weeks, I used to think that pneumonia was something someone got if they didn’t take care of a cough or a cold, or if you let a wet t-shirt dry on your back (yep, that’s totally unscientific, and Amy, Shell, and my other awesome doctor-friends, don’t you worry–I’m aware these are probably old wives’ tales that my nanny told me when I was a kid 😛 ). Well, this whole bout with the double-whammy pneumonia of my three babes began with a cough on the first day, a fever on the next, and by the 3rd day when I was at the pedia, it was pneumonia. (Sound byte from me to doctor: “In two days? Two days and it’s pneumonia? Pneumonia?”
It’s a good thing my kids’ pedia did not stick her face up mine and say, “Read my lips: P.N.E.U.M.O.N.I.A.” 😆
And I call it a double-whammy, because after 10 days, they did get well. But then in the evening of that very same day that the pedia announced that they were clear (they were feverless, after all), my youngest suddenly had high fever, and we were in the boxing ring for Round Two! *sigh* I think I’ve made friends for life with the salesgirl at the drugstore, from the sheer amount of medicines I bought and trips I made to her little medicine kingdom. 🙂
So I’ve taken that Excel file and dumped it in the trashcan (with relish! Aah! The end of all those medications! The kids are well!) and now this is the only thing that will remain on my bathroom counter for the next few days:
Halloween Hangover
So… since the kids were on medical “house arrest” during Halloween, they unfortunately didn’t get to go trick-or-treating. But they’re great kids–they watched the other kids go trick-or-treating from their bedroom window, clapped their hands as the parade and band marched around the streets, and… more than a week after, transformed themselves into…
PS. Yes, those are Spiderman figures they’re holding, and yes, they were watching a Spiderman vid. 🙂
I have *not* forgotten…
…the last set of my friend Lynne’s and my Fall into Fall freebie collab! Here, finally, are the elements that go with Set 4 (and coordinate with the first three sets that we released).
Because this is the last set of elements, we’ve filled it up with loads of stuff!
Here’s what you’ll find in the Fall Into Fall Set 4 Elements pack:
Fall into Fall Elements - Set 4
What is in this pack: 17 realistic elements (18 if you count the glass frame which comes in shadowed and no-shadows versions).
Click HERE to download the freebie! And thank you for the love you leave in my blog as you download. 🙂
Alrighty! Now on to the other stuff that fills my to-do list! Will be back soon, I promise!
In the meantime, huge (((((((hugs))))))) to you, my sweeties!
Wait! One last thing! 😀
PS. I just discovered a little button on my dashboard that says “Poll”… hmmm. So I wanted to play around with it and try it out. Will you join me?
See, on this Stories in Hand venture, I discovered that I enjoy scrapping with real stuff and playing around with my hands (I used to do a lot of crafty stuff in my former life, after all 😛 ) but I’ve also discovered that I really am a digital girl at heart. I love hybrid because there are just some things that can’t be done in digi (say, have tabs that really stick out of pages, or have real holes where eyelets have been pushed through the cardstock), but then I really, really love brushes and layers and the magic that is possible in digi… plus I really like definitely love that Delete key! 😆
So… let’s try out PollDaddy and you tell me: are you a paperlovin’ scrapper, a digiscrapper hopelessly hooked to the Dark Side, or are you right there in the middle-hybrid?
Ever tried climbing the walls lately? I think the past weeks have made me an expert.
But I like to call it celebrating the chaos. It sounds so much nicer than freaking out does, doesn’t it? 😆
It’s been a very demanding 3-4 weeks, what with three of my babies sick with pneumonia. Endless trips to the doctor, nebulizing round the clock, too many meds to keep count of… (yep, I totally needed to create an Excel file to keep track of what to give whom when, and here’s proof):
Ahem… it’s also proof of how awful and messy my chicken-scratch penmanship is… so thank goodness for Photoshop Blur! 😆
So I’m so sorry, my friends, if I’ve been missing in action lately. I’ve been missing you too! But you know what happens when real life takes you by the collar, right? You stop whatever it is you’re playing with and you come running. (Ha! Lots of climbing and running, wish it had effects on my body! ROFL).
But I’m back! My boys are on the mend (for good, with no more relapses, I hope!), thanks to all the prayers of all my wonderful friends worldwide. Like I always say, how can heaven not listen when there are pleas from all ends of the earth? 😉
A friend of mine told me something the other day. She said, God’s weakness is in prayer and our strength is in prayer.
I think that’s totally beautiful. God grows all soft when we pray to Him, and we on the other hand gather strength from Him when we pray.
Awesome.
So. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things… and I know that I owe you the last set of my friend Lynne’s and my Fall Into Fall freebie collab!
I also know that DSD has come and gone and I totally missed giving out DSD gifts (awwww 😦 ) and to make it up to you, I’ve come up with not one but TWO final parts for the Fall Into Fall freebie! (About time too, as the seasons are quickly changing and Christmas lights are starting to blink all around! 😆 )
So here we go: Fall Into Fall Set 4, the Paper Pack!
These papers coordinate perfectly with the other papers from the previous Fall Into Fall sets. There’s one patterned paper here, and the rest are solids–all highly-textured and grunged a bit. I hope you like them!
Click on the image to download. And thank you so much for the love you leave on my blog!
Now I’m off to bundle up the rest of the elements so I can get them up here too! (PS. Lynne has three more awesome elements to share with you!)
I’ll be back soon, so don’t forget to come back for the elements in this last set of the Fall into Fall Collab freebie!
I loved the movie (didn’t get to see the play)… Loved Meryl Streep, great actress that she is, and incredibly funny too (I totally get her humor in choosing to do this movie to embarrass her kids, bwahaha). And maybe Pierce Brosnan doesn’t make me swoon when he sings, but he doesn’t need to because he makes me swoon even without opening his mouth to say a word. 😆
So anyway, inspired by Mamma Mia and the Spraground Weekly Challenge last week on scrapping travel photos, I decided to pull out the 11-year-old old photos of our trip to Santorini, Greece (yep, back in them good ol’ days when long hair didn’t drive me crazy yet and I had the bravado to wear mini skirts 😛 ) and finally scrap them!
What was supposed to be a single page layout turned into a double-whammy.
Here’s what I came up with:
The Beauty of Santorini
(You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish)
Click on the image to download the 24×12 layered template (this is huge!)
Now if you’re more comfortable doing the pages on their own as two 12×12 layouts, you may want to download the double-pager as two separate sides (the left side and the right side). I’ve gone ahead and created that for you as well, just to make things easier (yep, I’m all for easy!) 😆
LivEdesigns-Santorini Double-Page Layered Template-12x12 times 2
So click on the image above if you want to download the two 12×12 layered templates that make up the left and right sides of the double-pager.
Both downloads come to you as layered .psd files.
Have You Joined the Bandwagon Yet?
Everyone and everyone has joined the Stories in Hand bandwagon at our Spraground! Have you signed up? If you have, yipee-doo! You’re probably busy getting your supplies for this great event ready!
If you haven’t signed up yet, whoa! What are you waiting for? Come and join the par-tay! 😀 Sign-up is till November 8th, and I did mention the whole course is free, right? With loads of surprises! So come on, hit this image below (or the one on my sidebar) and go straight to the sign-up area! I promise you, you’re going to be in good GREAT company! 😉
Stories in Hand - SIGN UP NOW! (if you haven
Update on the final set of Fall Into Fall Freebie:
This one is coming soon. I know, it’s trudging along way more slowly than I would have liked, but I’ve been busy caring for my three sick kids (bad colds gave way to pneumonia… so I have turned my home into a mini hospital with three poor little patients… would appreciate a little prayer sent to Heaven for them! Thanks in advance!)
… is funny. It’s great almost all of the time; sometimes it gets poopy (really now, what country has things going great for it all of the time?). But mostly it’s funny. The people are funny.
That’s one thing I love about these beautiful 7000 plus islands. The people have such a great sense of humor. There is a saying we have which, loosely translated, means, “Everything can be solved if it is communicated properly.” (hmm. Somehow the English version loses much of the flavor of the native language, but it’ll have to do). Anyway, the point is: part of that communication, no matter how serious, is always offset with the lightness of humor. I think it’s the belief that if you can laugh about it, it can’t be *that* bad yet. Something can still be done. There’s hope.
Yep, this same sense of humor is what we ride on in the best of times, and it’s what carries us through the worst of times.
And many times, it’s apparent everywhere you look.
Case in point:
Remember this character? (He’s been around since the early 1900s apparently):
Felix the Cat
Now, check out the name of this barber shop, as featured in one of our biggest dailies:
How funny is that? (I’ll bet the barber’s name is truly Felix, too!… Wonder if he’s both barber and manicurist?) 😆
A Freebie, Sweetie!
It’s freebie time! Time to reveal what this was all about:
It’s a layered template for you! 😀 Here’s the full view:
LivEdesigns-Time of Year Template
Click on the preview to download.
The template comes with a curved text path, and you can absolutely change up the hanging strings and the bottom accents with stuff from your digistash so that it fits your taste. 😉
Here’s the layout I made with it:
LivE - Time of Year (Christmas Layout)
(Yeah, I know, it’s a Christmas page… what can I say? Gotta get those Christmas photos scrapped before new ones come flooding in, in about 3 months! 😛 )
CREDITS: (all from ScrapbookGraphics.com)
Meredith Fenwick: Crazy Beautiful-paper; Antique Paper Swirls (recolored)
Natali Designs: Christmas Needful Papers-paper
Studio Flergs: Denim Blues Strap; AptD Screw & Glitter; Rough & Timple Gemstone & Staple
Traci Sims: Flourish Date Stamps
Update on the Fall Into Fall Freebie
Yep, the last set is still being worked on, but check back in a few and we’ll have it for you! 😉 (Hey, that rhymes. Bahaha!)
I got a text message from my dear bro-in-law Jun this morning:
And because I’m basically an obedient person (hehe), I did. Well, guess what I found?
My first (and only) two minutes of Youtube “fame.” ROFL!
The Master with the Extras (bwahahaha!)
What can I say?
Nothing. Except bwahahahaha. 😆
(Well, I have nothing to say about me. But lots of good things to say about Jun! But… that’s for another post on another day. 😉 )
This is Three.
Set 3 of my friend Lynne’s and my collab freebie, Fall Into Fall.
This set contains ALL the hard work of Lynne. The last download was my work; this download today is Lynne’s. Wooohooo!
Here’s what Lynne came up with for you:
Lynnea - Fall Into Fall Collab Freebie - Set 3
What this set contains: three 12×12 papers made by Lynne, one leaf stamp in .abr and .png format made by Lynne, and eight real nature elements also made by Lynne. Yep, my friends, this is all Lynne’s goodness and hard work! I’m so proud of her!
As usual, we’ve divided the set into two downloads to make it easier for you.
Click on the image above to download the eight real nature elements.
Click hereto download Lynne’s papers and the leaf brush/stamp.
On Lynne’s behalf, thank you so much for the love you leave for her at my 4shared account and on my blog as you download! 🙂
PS. There should be one more set coming up before the Fall Into Fall kit officially closes. 😉
Encore!
Oh, and a friendly reminder, for those who may not scroll down to my post a few days ago 😉
Come join us! The course has all of the Spraground goodness for FREE!
Sign-up day is October 20th (that’s barely a week away, yay!). Come and join us! We’d love to have you on our Spraground!
Looking for my DID circle template?
Got a message asking me to fix the download link for the circle template that I released some time ago…
I have no idea why sometimes the links at 4shared go awry and say “link is no longer valid” (Does anyone know what causes this? Is it connected to number of downloads? All I know is that I’ve experienced this same strange thing sometimes when I try to download freebs from other blogs… so if you know why, I’d love to hear it! 🙂 .
Anyway, just letting you know that I’ve re-uploaded and changed the link in the original post. It’s working now, Deanna! Do let me know if you’ve managed to snag it! 🙂
Oh and one last thing… I have a new freebie coming up soon… (it’s not related to Fall Into Fall, but you can use it with the kit–how’s that for a clue? heehee). Here’s a sneak preview of what I have in store for you…
Alrighty! With that, I now go back to playing with Photoshop! Have a happy day, my sweeties! 😀
It’s October 10th, friends, and you know what that means! Sneak peeks have been unveiled, the story has been handed over 😉 , and now it can be told to all the world!
Over at our Spraground, we’re having a huge, big, major course party, and you’re all invited! (Yes, that’s you, you, you, you, and you! And you too!)
COME JOIN US ON OUR SPRAGROUND! It's FREE! And it's for YOU!
I have a feeling you’re going to be seeing this wonderful reminder quite often on my blog! (hehe) Don’t you just love how the words form a heart in the hands? That’s how awesome our stories are… the stories of our lives are the stories of our hearts… and we can do nothing less than make sure they get told, somehow. And that’s exactly what Jes is going to do with this course! She’s going to take us by the hand and give us some fab, fab ways of making sure that our stories get told… by us!
Find out more about it on the Spraground! (The image above is a link… Click on it and it will take you to our Spraground homepage where you’ll find the awesome Why’s, When’s, and How’s of this latest super-goodie!)
Oh, and don’t forget to grab the course updates via Jessica’s blog too!
And oh (again), did I mention that this is FREE? And that there’s no limit on registration? And that registration will begin on October 20th? And that it’s open to ALL! Photographers, scrappers, non-scrappers, young and old, with children and grandchildren and without, as Jes says: as long as you have stories to tell (and who doesn’t?) this is for YOU.
So please join us as we party on for a week! We’ve polished the swings and slides and we’ve put up extra lemonade and cookie stands just for you! I hope to see you and your friends over there! (Yeah, in the spirit of “the more, the merrier”…let’s spread the word, folks!) 😆
Latest Scrapped
Over at Oscraps, Shaui of Feistuff Designs is featured as the designer in the spotlight. The challenge she gave (as well as the awesome freebies she shared with us so we have all we need to complete the challenge) grabbed me by my collar and didn’t let me go till I produced a layout! hehe
So here’s my latest scrappy thing:
I wanted to keep it really simple and make it look like an artist’s palette. So major restraint used with supplies. LOL. This was absolutely fun! I loved creating the little paint-daubs on the left. (For once, it felt great to be “mixing” paint without having to go through the clean-up after and the washing of my brushes–I think that might have been the part I least liked about oil painting, which I really should start up again one of these days… but I digress 😀 ).
If you want to join the challenge, head on over to Oscraps and get your layout uploaded! You have till October 12th to join.
CREDITS: Everything by FeiStuff, plus Nancie Rowe Janitz’s Inked Overlay. Font is AvantGarde.
Speaking of free…
Here’s the next set of our Fall into Fall freebie collab kit! Everything in Set 2 was made by me… keep looking out for Set 3 which will carry more of Lynne’s great stuff!
What you’ll be getting here is five more of the highly-textured 12×12 papers (you might have noticed by now that my favorite thing to create is papers! At least for now, haha!) plus a complete alphabet (with uppercase and lowercase letters) along with numbers and some of the symbols we use most often when we create pages. Since the items are highly textured, the downloading may take a wee bit more time. So I’ve taken the liberty of separating the paper set from the chipboard alpha set. That way, hopefully, it’s not going to take as long downloading them in two separate sets as it would’ve in one single zip.
Oh, and if you can take the time, please do leave me a note and a link in the comments section of my blog (right here. Press that button, you know you want to! 😆 ) in case you’ve used the goodies on a layout or project! It totally thrills me to see your great work! (And if you give me permission, I’ll hang your creations on the walls of my little blog too! 🙂 )
Thank you also for the warm fuzzies you leave on my blog as you download 😉
Set 2 of Fall into Fall Friendship Freebie Collab:
LivEdesigns - Fall into Fall Freebie - Set 2
Click on the preview above to download the papers.
liv.e simply 