Creepy Candy

I wanted to send some Halloween candy to my daughter at college and this is what I came up with,  Bwahahahaaa!!  I LOVE LOVE LOVE these print and cut label files by Jennifer Wambach that I found the Silhouette Online Store.  They are so fun and my daughter should get a good giggle out of them too - I know I did, lol!  I filled a peanut butter jar with white chocolate M&M's (I never knew they made WHITE chocolate M&M's!!) and a frappuccino bottle with candy corn, and then used a Silhouette candy bar wrapper cut file by Pebbles in my Pocket to wrap a couple Hershey bars.

For her roomates I decided to make a few of the coffin treat boxes by Kenzie Daley.  I had some real fun with these!  On the covers I used some Dustin Pike colored digis and a cool font called A Charming Font and then outlined the edges with some distressed Stickles.  The inside sentiment is a Silhouette print and cut file and the cute spider is a Creative Memories punch. 

Creepy sweets for my sweetie!  She's gonna laugh for sure!


Thanks for visiting!

Halloween Glass Block

I finally tried working with a glass block and I loved it!  I made this for my daughter's dorm room and although it is a bit late in the season, she still insisted on taking it anyway, yay! 

I combined (and slightly modified) designs from Lori Whitlock (house, bats), Sarah Bailey (trees) and Silhouette (ghost) to create the spooky scene and I added my own moon and background border.  Yep, all I had to do was draw a circle and a square, LOL!  I didn't have any kind of glass paint so I used tissue paper for the bottom layer to color the moon.  A wired sparkly black ribbon is wrapped around the sides and a yellow flickering flame battery powered tea light provides the spooky lighting.

A fun decoration, day or night!

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Shabby Chic Nesting Trays

My GIBBS Happy Mail partner this round was Tracy who wished for a tray to hold projects in progress.  I found this set of nesting trays and could not resist shabbifying them.  I started with 2 layers of light blue paint, then a coat of crackle medium and topped it off with a coat of white paint.  OHMYGOSH it was AWFULLLLL!  The crackle happened so much faster than I could keep up with and I did not get anything of the look I was going for.  The cracks were too wide and too blue!  But after another 3 coats of white paint covering up some of the blue, and a bit of light sanding on some edges, it finally looked more like my brain was imagining it would.   I also added 2 coats of mod podge to seal them and to top off the crackle struggle, temps were hovering around 100 the entire week with humidity in the upper 90% range so it took FOREVER for each coat of paint to dry, eeeek! 

I'm so excited that you can coat more than one layer of paint over the crackle medium and it will still crackle a little bit - I may be more adventurous in the future knowing this now!

I added some fancy background mats and some simple silhouette designs cut with my Silhouette.  I thought that the plain blue mats needed something more so I used one of my monster sized StampinUp! background stamps to add a white ivy pattern.  The mat design file is by Sweet Afton and the ladies are by Hero Arts. 

The larger tray has a mat design by Samantha Walker (one of my fave designers in the store!) but I flipped it upside down to fit the House of 3 bird cage design better.  I love how Silhouette has so many different and awesome designers in their store!

This was a really fun project despite the initial crackle challenge (and also having them fall off my deck railing 10' down to rocks while I was taking pics of them - good thing I was going for the distressed look, LOL!) so I bought two more sets of these trays to alter for Christmas gifts this year - heck, I may even keep one for myself!

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Tammy's Treasure Box Status & One More Item to Post

Tracking info says that Tammy's box arrived at her post office this morning!  OMG!  omg!  OMG!!

oh the pressure...I need to get my mind off that!  so I'll post another of the projects that is waiting inside it....

One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure:
In a dusty corner of my basement, once again scavenging for materials and ideas, I stumbled across a scrap piece of a bare pine board. It had been used for something at some point because there were marks on one side where screws had been and the edges were all chipped up, but for the life of me I can not remember exactly what it was or where it came from. It was a good size to make a sign so I decided to give Tammy another item she could use to decorate her new scrap room.

I found pictures of some vintage French signs online and decided to recreate one that advertised "Paris Flea Market".  I figured a Flea Market is a perfect example of the theme! Tammy likes the vintage paris/shabby chic stuff so I wanted to try that style. Not sure if I even came close to the true style, but I did find the exact font they used on the original sign and cut out paper letters to attach - I was too chicken to try hand painting them, lol!

The base of the the sign was first painted with several coats of black and taupe paint and then I applied a layer of crackle medium and then the top coat of antique white. I wish I had used pure white because the overall look after sanding some of the edges is a bit more grungy than I wanted but hopefully not too much for Tammy.

I love hanging vintage signs in my house - hopefully so does my partner!

Thanks for visiting!

Blocks

Another of the GIBBS3 inspirational phrases: You're a Blockhead Charlie Brown!  Tammy sure had fun making up these phrases, lol!

I had a couple dozen 2" square wooden blocks that I bought second hand years ago and just haven't had the time to do much with them yet.  I used a few in the first GIBBS round and jumped at the chance to use them again this round.  I decided to start with Tammy's name and then find other words containing five letters.  I had a little fun with it all, using words specific to our GIBBS swap including "skype", which we all spent way too much time on with each other when we should have been crafting, and also the abbreviation for Tammy's skype nickname, Hostess with the Mostess, lol! 

I used scraps of Graphic45 papers from a couple different lines.  Oh I think sometimes I love G45 almost as much as K&Co!  I painted the blocks black, glued all the papers with mod podge and then added a final sealer coat.  When I wrapped these up to send to her I added a picture of each word to help her figure out what they are supposed to say and which block goes where - each common side spells one word, and figuring that all out was a little trickier than I expected so I did mix up a couple things, but I'm not going to point it out and hopefully nobody will notice (shhh! don't tell if you see, lol!)

Thanks for visiting!
 

Kind Hearts are the Gardens

The Flowers of Tomorrow are in the Seeds of Yesterday - inspirational phrase for another GIBBS3 item.  For this creation I decided to take an old fake pewter frame and attempt to give it a new and improved shabby chic makeover.  I used antique white craft paint to brush over the entire frame and then using paper towels I blotted a bit of it off.  This ended up making it look more like a sponging technique which I love. 

My mom had cross-stitched a sampler for me years ago and I've always loved the poem on it so I decided to use it for this project.  I printed and matted it, and then added one of my own crochet flowers using a pretty heart button for the center.  The color of the frame seemed a bit flat looking to me, so I took some metallic gold paint and dry brushed the edges of the flowers just a smidge, and that gave it a much better look.

Sorry that the picture is not better, I had some over exposure troubles with this one and the gold touches are washed out and not very obvious either.  I love my camera but I am still learning how to fine tune settings - I know it is capable of amazing pics, it's just my learning curve that is slowing it down.  Anyway, the words to the poem are:

Kind hearts are the gardens

Kind thoughts are the roots

Kind words are the flowers

Kind deeds are the fruits

Take care of your garden

And keep out the weeds

Fill it with sunshine

Kind words and kind deeds

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The frame alone qualifies for the "flowers" part of the inspirational phrase, but I think it's the poem that is the real interpretation of the entire phrase, and an inspiration in itself.

Thanks for visiting!
 

All Blinged Up and No Place To Go

More GIBBS3 inspiration words.  I decided to help Tammy decorate her new scrap room that she is planning and I decorated a wooden letter "T" for her to put on a shelf or hang on a wall. The papers were scraps of K&CO that were part of a mini tag album I made Deb in the last GIBBS round. I'm not usually much of a green and pink girl but the way these gorgeous papers coordinated when I mod podged them together has got me rethinking that. I almost didn't want to add any embellishments with how pretty they looked together.

The flower gems were from the dollar bins in Michael's - I have to admit that I've always thought these looked cheezy so I've never purchased them before, but I really like how the light reflects and how they look on this.  Somehow the pretty papers make everything look better!  The feather was a last minute addition and I hope it survives the shipping trip - a little fluff is always good with a little bling!
 

 
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I Don't Need No Stinkin' Paper

OMG can you even believe that Tammy made us use this as one of the GIBBS inspirational phrases?!?!!  LOL!!  This concept is soooo against my nature, being the paper ho that I am, but I did it.  At first I wanted to make her something using so much paper she wouldn't stop laughing for a week, but I decided to step outside my comfort zone and give it a whirl.  I'm glad I did because it was alot of fun and I really like how it turned out.

I teased her (and my previous partner deb from the last two GIBBS rounds) about using pickle, mustard and salsa jars as part of one of my creations.  I'm not sure if they really believed me or not, but I finally did use a salsa jar this round.  I wrapped wire around the top and looped it over as a handle.  Then I added some glass beads glued inside to hold a tealight in place, added some embellishments around the top and then used my Creative Memories dragonfly punch with vinyl to make a stencil for etching the glass.  I love etching - I've only tried it a few times but everytime it was so easy and so fun.

I was going for the recycled shabby chic'ish look but I added the big bright lime green flower button because it's Tammy's favorite color.  She is right, lime green is hard to incorporate into Shabby Chic!

Thanks for visiting!
 

GIBBS REVEAL!

I'm so excited to ship my box off to Tammy but I will have to wait until Monday to be sure it arrives in coordination with her vacation.  It was alot of work and alot of crazy brainstorming, or should I say blog hopping and scraplifting, lol!  But I have to admit that I'm really happy with everything I created. 

The overall theme of this round was Recycle/Reuse/Repurpose and there were specific inspirational phrases to launch our imagination to create a total of 12 items.  I already posted my take on Button It and today I'd like to share one of my favorites this round, Time Flies.

I decided I wanted to make a perpetual calendar.  I scavenged the basement and found an old piece of wood that must be at least 12 years old.  Way back when, I built some kind of desk organizer hutch thingy for my work desk and this piece of wood was left over.  It was just bare wood and it had a bit of a warp to it and I challenged myself to use it as it was without cutting since I had no easy way of doing that anyway.  

I used awesomely amazingly fantabulously gorgeous K&CO Tim Coffey paper for the background.  It's from the Tuscan Sunflower pad and omg every sheet is just so pretty.  I hammered some nails into it to hold metal rimmed tags that I had spray painted and then added punched circles with the numbered days printed on my printer.  The months were also printed on my printer and then cut out using  my new Nesties Labels 10 set - loving this set even more than I thought I would.  I also painted the bottom portion with chalk board paint - I always wondered if that stuff really works and it does!  To hold the chalk I cut off a part of the plastic packaging that my external hard drive for my laptop came in, it made the perfect sized pocket.  Then to top off the Time FLIES part I added a Graphic45 butterfly that I cut out of patterned paper and then crackled - my new obsession!

I really love the way the colors of the paper and the tags go together, and how the bit of lace and the alpha brads help add just the right vintagy feeling.  I sure hope Tammy hates this one and wants to ship it back to me, lol!!  OK, so no I don't hope she hates it, but this is definitely one of a kind and I do hope she enjoys using it as much as I did creating it.

Thanks for visiting!

Altered Tray

Another GIBBS2 item - I found this tray in Bed Bath and Beyond but didn't like the weathered wood look it had because it was too dirty looking.  I loved the grooved texture though so I bought it anyway and figured I'd just give it a new look.  I painted it a fresh ivory color and then added some cardstock borders and K&CO papers to the inside.  I mod podged the entire thing three times so deb could actually use it for drinks and snacks while watching tv if she wanted to. 

Coffee Collar Mini Album

Another GIBBS2 creation - our task at hand was to create a mini album using coffee collar sleeves, and I was amazed how cute these things could be.  Some folks cut the sleeve open and use it like a cover, others seal them flat and use them as pages while others seal only the bottoms to make pockets in each page which is what I chose to try. 

I used the theme Live, Love, Laugh and added Dream.  Papers are from the big K&Co 360 collection pads and I borrowed my pal Diana's fancy SU punch  for the bird on the cover (ohgosh I LOVE this punch!).  Tags were punched with my CM tag maker (LOVE LOVE LOVE this punch too!) and the brads are from Making Memories.

CD Mini Album

I made this album for a monthly Yahoo group swap that I am in.  This is my first try at one of these and it was a lot of fun.  I've never made a round album and I think I really love them now!  Papers are from My Minds Eye Totally Boy pad - loving this paper pack!  I used mod podge to glue the papers to the cd's and my Bind It All to bind it together.   I was amazed that it was so easy to punch through the cd's and that it didn't crack them.  I <heart> my BIA!  lol!

don't forget - click on a pic to see it big!

More fun goodies I made for the GIBBS2 swap!

Altered clock -
This was so much fun!  I painted the wooden clock and then papered it with Graphic 45 papers and finally added some stamped images - I wasn't originally planning on the whimsical style but I really like how it turned out.

Altered coasters -

another fun item!  I've been wanting to try stamping on tiles to make coasters but I just never got around to finding them in the hardware store.  Then one day I saw a bunch of coaster sets designed with pretty pictures on clearance in WM and right in the middle of the display I found the only set that was plain.  It just screamed my name to buy them, so I did!  lol!   I stamped them with one of my favorite stamps using Stazon ink, then I added some color with chalk and gave the whole thing a couple coats of Krylon spray sealer.  Super easy!!

Crochet flowers -

I can't knit for beans and can only do a few simple crochet stitches, but I found a super easy pattern online for these little flowers and decided to try them.  I don't count stitches very well, and I can't keep an even tension on my yarn so every flower is "unique", lol!  And they are very loose and lacy, which I do like, but when my super crafty mom tried making one just for ha-ha's, it came out half the size of mine and had tight even stitches and perfectly formed little petals.  How the heck can she do that?!?  We used the exact same string and same size hook!  OMG I made myself crazy for a few days trying to get mine to match hers but then I gave up and decided that the loose and lacy look was perfect,  lol!  These would look cute on a card or layout with a pearl brad or a button in the middle!

Here's the pattern if you want to give em a try! 

  Ch 5; sl st together; ch 1

  sc 10 (onto the ring of ch 5); sl st together; ch 1

  in 1st st; sc 1; dc 3; sc1; skip stitch.

  Continue around chain until 5 petals are completed.

  sl st together; chain 1

Wooden signs-

These little signs are fun to alter - they came painted but I painted over them, added some K&amp;Co papers and a bunch of little embellishments and ribbons and I really like the look!