Gift of Friendship

One of my dearest friends here just celebrated her birthday. We had a wonderful meal just last night to celebrate another year. Here is the card I made for her.

Purple and yellow is my favourite colour combo...and putting them on a white background makes them just pop! I got my inspiration from this page of one of my favourite blogs, Trinity Designs. Of course, I changed things up a bit! But thanks to Robin Merriman for all her work and inspiration.

Then I needed a box to put the gift in, so I modified a project spotlighted here. I needed a bigger box, and of course I didn't have all the tools to make the boxtop as it was, so I made my own.
Isn't this fun?
Mer

Babies, babies everywhere!

It seems everyone I know has just had a baby, is expecting a baby or thinking about expecting one! I suppose that makes sense in the chain of events, as two to five (or more) years ago the theme was weddings. As a result, I have been working on a lot more baby-oriented projects than wedding-oriented ones. This has really stretched my collection of stamps and materials since of course I haven't specifically collected baby stuff. Imagination is a good thing: it helps you look at your materials in a whole new way!!

Unfortunately for you, I am in such a hurry to pack up my little cards that I sometimes forget to take pictures. But I have taken a few. The project I am most excited about is the scrapbook calendar I made for my new little niece. I will post some of my pages so you can see them. I got the idea from Lindsay over at thefrugalcrafter and it is something I will likely do for myself when we get around to having children. The benefit is that you don't hum and haw about what colours coordinate with the photos when you're making the page AND you don't have to take the time to make pages when you are busy taking care of new little Johnny. I know lots of busy moms who have millions of photos on their computers and none in albums. I'm sure I would easily become one of them, seeing as I still have a box of printed wedding photos waiting to go in their album! And there's no children in the house!!

Here are some of the pages. Some of them have the accompanying calendar page which would be facing the picture page in the album, and some are close-ups of the single picture page. I didn't do anything exciting with the calendar page, so I didn't include them all. I did use photo corners to attach the calendars so my sister-in-law can remove the sheets to put on the wall for that month. The idea is to record any little notes about baby right on the calendar days. Then she puts them back in the album after the month is finished.

For this project, I mostly used Stampin' Up!'s DS paper (Tall Tales and Tea Party) and then added a few other things here and there.

The best thing about this whole thing was that my sister-in-law, unbeknownst to me, had picked animal safari for her decorating theme, with brown as a dominant colour. Love how these things just work out!

Anyway, do enjoy the pictures and if they inspire you to take a couple days to scrap a year for a friend, all the better. I think this is the best gift a new mom could get...as long as she doesn't get too many!!

Mer

Picking up the tools again

In taking on my new job, I have had to let my cardmaking go a little bit. To all of you who work AND do something crafty each day...whew! Hats off to you! I keep telling myself that eventually I will find the balance and fit in everything. In reality, I think you always have to NOT do something to add in one more thing. Is that why the dishes are still waiting in the sink?

Well, the result of my housework strike is this little lovely. Just pulling out the stamps and the sparkle was so refreshing! But even better, it is to welcome a new little guy into the world. An old friend emailed me out of the blue to announce his arrival and I just had to make a card to send over the ocean in celebration! For inspiration, I caught up a little with some of my favourite stamping blogs and thought I might just try the sketch from Stamping 411 out. I'm pretty happy with the springy design, especially as I got to use my all-time favourite stamp set Summer by the Sea. Is this little guy not too delightful for words? I couldn't resist adding some sparkly sand just to give the card an even more whimsical feel.

Ahhh...it feels good to pick up the ol' tools again. I'm starting to size up the next photo album project. Only a few more months until my first wedding anniversary and I haven't even touched the photos. Sigh. Too many projects...so little time!