These pics just make me smile

While we were in Florida, I was trying to get a few shots of Chris at the beach... hehe :)

Hopefully I'll find somewhere to scrap these! Nothing quite like capturing a moment that made you both chuckle at the time...

Pro-Tech Family Day

I finally finished this 12x12 layout I started awhile back... but oh well it is finished now! Back in July, my husband's company had a family day, so all their families came and got a tour of the shop, ate burgers and hotdogs under a tent, watched some of the Blue Angels practicing overhead, and then to top off the day, they had an ice cream truck pull in and give us free dessert!

The left side, with the big banner was an idea I took from this older project by Nancy Damiano. Then I remembered I had those little chipboard banner pieces to match the theme!

I put together the right side first, and didn't have to do a whole lot with it, since the paper was so detailed. Just added some buttons here and there and taped the picture to a piece of Bazzill cardstock. Easy!

HOW-TO:

• The paper is from the Anthology Collection by Studio Calico
• For the left side I cut a rectangle out of some shade of gold-ish Bazzill cardstock, and on the back I drew a line up the center, drew a dot about an inch or so up the line, then cut with scissors from each corner to the dot to get the middle as evenly placed as possible
• The chipboard banner pieces are from Maya Road
• I used the Yellow & Black sticky keys from the Boarding Pass collection by October Afternoon for all the letters
• For the right side I stamped and embossed a zigzag border stamp from Studio Calico and cut it out by hand
• The buttons are from the Lost and Found collection by My Mind's Eye

Watercolor-like

Someone in our family is pregnant! And someone in our family needed to make a card to congratulate that someone, even though they found out about it like a couple weeks ago, but was too sick to leave the house or make a card for that time! I am better and I got to utilize a new technique I saw from this blog post!

I've owned those Tim Holtz distress inks for awhile, but so far have only ventured as far as using them with a dry applicator to "chalk" or blend light backgrounds. Def never tried adding water or using my fingers to do some finger painting!

Um, I have 4 different color fingertips now - dusty concord, peeled paint, faded jeans, and vintage photo. Of course AFTER I showed off my newly colored fingers to my husband did he tell me he had some latex gloves in the basement. OK next time I will see how those work out so I don't look like a crazy person!

HOW-TO:
The cool thing about this technique is I actually stamped the image first, embossed it, and then finger-painted over the whole thing! It was cool to see it come to life since it was white on white paper. The video in that blog post shows how to do it, theirs came out much cooler, but this is my first project doing this so hopefully I will get better. Plus I didn't have watercolor paper (just used white Bazzill cardstock) and I didn't have the "pearlized water" she mentioned, I just used good ole free tap water!