Baseball Birthday Card!

It's our nephew's 13th birthday! So what kind of card do you make for a 13-year-old boy who is really great at baseball? This kind I suppose! :)

I knew for the past week I wanted to make a card like this, specifically a square shaped with a big baseball. I also am taking the Pop Off the Page 2 class with Jen Jockisch at Studio Calico, who had a great layout with all these sewn on pieces of fabric. I also was trying to decide if I should throw away all these muslin fabric bags I have, that some of the Studio Calico products come in... So these 3 separate pieces of information in my head culminated to form this simple birthday card!

I cut a piece of muslin fabric to 5x5, then lined up a circle template at the edges to pencil and hand-cut a greater circumference circle at the edges than using a corner punch. I hand sewed around the edges to keep it attached to the card better, then drew in the wavy lines and sewed with white floss. Finally I added my red thread, using a thicker thread, and stamped the sentiment onto the fabric with Black Staz-On ink, but went over it a little further with a Sharpie!

NSD - Wild Life Caught!

Happy NSD!!! What's NSD? Why it's National Scrapbook Day of course!! Over at Studio Calico they posted a bunch of challenges and stuff last night so I was able to make this layout for the Numbers challenge!!

Yes, this is a series of pictures of a Hawk in our backyard, chasing down a chipmunk and eating him! Poor Chippy! It was really captivating to watch and actually capture on film, I just happened to be walking by my window when I heard something going on and ran and got my camera! Unfortunately they were taken through the screen, but it was exciting!

I used the Central High kit by Studio Calico - originally I figured I'd do a green background, but my Pop Off the Page class told me to try a different color that didn't necessarily match, and went with the yellow instead! It turned out perfect, and I love how those numbers show up so bold on it!

Hope to have some more layouts this weekend and next week for these NSD challenges!! Have a nice day! :)

I Love Him!

Another layout for the Pop Off the Page 2 class with Jen Jockisch from Studio Calico! This time our challenge was to scraplift one of the layouts from the first lesson - so I scraplifted from Jen's layout, and it turned out a bit differently than I envisioned, but still so easy! Here my husband took it upon himself to wash and paint the windows in the house! He is extremely good at keeping our house in excellent condition, it would look so crappy otherwise!!

Originally I had selected some different color papers to layer, but after combining the black and white striped piece behind the photo and the greenish watercolor looking paper below the main photo, I realized I really wanted to stick to shades of black and fluorescent green! Once I figured that out, the process was a little slower, since I had to dig through my stash a bit to find the pieces I wanted to use, but still so easy! I love that my husband used such a cool color tape to mask off haha next time I should try to figure out my color scheme first, then have him use tape to match :)

To make the die cut, and other punched pieces from the fluorescent green, I knew I wanted to use my Hero Arts Neon green stamp pad, but without stamping… so I finally used these older Jenni Bowlin foam stamps that I've had for a year and a half now, and inked one up, then stamped it directly onto plain white paper. I cut the paper and ran it through my Silhouette to make the die cut! Then I used the same method to punch a circle and a notebook edge as well!

This is definitely a totally different way of scrapbooking for me, but really fun and simple to do!

Outdoor Pets!

Chris and I don't have any pets - no dogs, cats, or even a goldfish. But I love feeding all my outdoor pets including birds of all sorts and last summer, my ducks! They came over every evening, walking over to eat any leftover birdseed on the ground, but then they'd run over when they saw me come out back!

The class I'm taking this month at Studio Calico, Pop Off the Page 2 with Jen Jockisch began yesterday! I didn't take the first class and since I have NO IDEA how to create layers (I’m more of a full page, fairly "flat" scrapper), I decided to see what I could learn from this class and so far, wow, so good! It was SO quick and easy to create this layout, especially without much of an idea what I was going to do.

Usually I have to have an idea, sketch, or example to follow to get going on a layout, and for this one I thought I was going to just copy Marcy Penner's example layout she made for the class. But this took a whole different direction after I selected papers from my pile of scrap pieces leftover from this month's Spencer's kit by Studio Calico! I also didn't try to line up everything perfectly, added in a few extra pieces and watched it take a life of its own!

Therefore I am very excited to finish this class this month!!