CHA Day 2

Oh Man! Sorry everyone for leaving you hanging for so long! :) Here are some more pictures from CHA - that are SUPER DUPER late.

These are from the McGill Punch Booth. They had LOTS of ideas but I really liked this one of a placecard. I would probably never have a party nice enough to make these for but aren't they SUPER cute?

This was from the EK Success Booth, near all the Jolee's Boutique stickers. I really liked the layout, so I took a picture. You may be seeing a similar page by me soon! :)

This one and the next one are from the Doodlebug booth. Such cute cards!

These 2 are from the Just Rite Stamper Booth. And I swear, I think the Kraft paper is from Papertrey. Who knows, maybe the designer is a PTI designer too.

Ok, now that that's all done... on to crafting!

CHA!

Hi People! I am still sorta in a daze. I had an AWESOME opportunity to attend CHA (a.k.a., Craft & Hobby Association Convention & Trade Show). My PTI forum friend Lynn generously offered passes to anyone who was able to go. I jumped at the chance to go but had NO idea what I what to expect. I had always heard about this convention, especially since I live close to Rosemont, where's it's been held for several years.

This is a picture of Me, Lynn & Debbie at the Mrs. Grossman booth, posing with the Ace of Cakes cake.

I'm totally behind in the posting seeing that everyone else has already posted...but here it goes! And just to warn you, this is a very long post but it has lots of pictures!

My first day I got there and met up with Lynn and her friend Debbie (side note: there are a lot of crafters out there named Debbie!). They were SUPER nice to have let me tag along with them. I had so much fun hanging out with them and seeing all the things that had to be seen. Thanks Lynn & Debbie!!!!!!!!

One of our stops included the Marvy booth and guess who's there demo-ing their new fabric markers? None other than Lisa Johnson of Poppy Paperie & PTI Stamp Designer extraordinaire! I kinda geeked out but she was so nice to me - even took a picture of me in action! Check out her site. We used her stamp set, Flower Garden from PTI, to create designs and color them onto canvas bags. Incidentally, I was due to get an order from PTI that day and Flower Garden was in the box when I got home!

Here we are at the Provo Craft Booth - it was HUGE! They were doing a raffle when we happened to walk by and guess who made an appearance! The Cricut and purple thing (?)!! I had to have a picture... too bad my eyes were closed!

The one cool thing was that not only did all the companies have out all their wares, they also had tons of completed projects on display. Here is a wall of scrapbook pages (sorry, don't know where from). I was again, overwhelmed and didn't know what to take pictures of or who or even what to stop & see. Kinda just followed Lynn & Debbie around. :)

We stopped at the Ranger booth, another HUGE one and they had like a ton of well-known crafters doing demos. This is Claudine Hellmuth doing a demo on sticky backed canvas. I didn't even KNOW she was famous until I saw the sign over her head. This is what I'm talking about... how clueless I was :).

Here of course is Tim Holtz, the rockstar of the crafting world. It was so funny because when he came up to start his demo, ladies came out of nowhere and surrounded the table. If you look really closely at the blond lady behind Tim, that's Ali Edwards!!

After spending close to 8 hours on the floor, we still hadn't seen everything! But there was still dinner! "What!" you say, there's more?!? Oh yes, there's more! Kimberly Crawford, also from the PTI forum, organized a dinner. At first it was going to only be Lynn, Debbie, Kim & myself. Then we kept hearing that Nichole Heady and some others were coming. Little did we know that 4 would soon become 12! But what a 12 it was!

Here we are post dinner... there was Jennifer Buck, Lisa Johnson, Dawn McVey, Nichole Heady, Heather Nichols, Michelle Wooderson, Kimberly, me and two of Heather's friends. Lynn & Debbie missed the group pic!! I wish there was more time to sit and talk to each of these ladies. The surprising thing was not only were they NICE, they were so REAL :). That's a compliment, I swear! I felt like I knew these ladies but only through the blogging world, it was beyond AWESOME to not only meet them but HANG out with them.

Here's a picture from Dawn McVey's camera, thanks for sending it my way - I may need to frame it :P, dorky, I know! You can tell by my smile just how dorky I am :).

I have just a few more pictures to post from the Day 2 so stay tuned... and I will start posting some crafty things too, I promise.
Thanks for reading!

Helloooo!

Hi Everyone, sorry for the lack of updates. This weekend was busy and I haven't had time to sit down & post. So do you like my new banner? Just thought I'd try something new. It's acutally a picture I took while I was stopped at a red light. :). Every morning I pass these really pretty blue-purple flowers and one day I happened to stop right in front of them. I opened my passenger side window and snapped a few. I have no idea what kind of flowers these are but they grow along the road everywhere around where I live (suburbs of Chicago). Anyone know what they're called?

I had a chance this past weekend (thanks to Lynn) to attend CHA! I just downloaded pictures last night so I'll try posting some of the things I saw. I also go to meet a lot of people from Papertrey, including NICHOLE HEADY herself! It was SO cool!!!! So stay tuned for pictures. I'll also be posting some crafty projects soon too :).

Thanks!
Debbie

Out on a Limb

Here's another birthday card. I hadn't used Out on a Limb by PTI in awhile so I brought it out. It really is effortless to get a beautiful and elegant focal image with this set.

It's hard to tell but I embossed the "Happy Birthday" for a little something extra!

Fine Print:
Stamps: PTI Out on a Limb, Birthday Basics
Paper: SU! Chocolate Chip, Purely Pomegranate, PTI Stamper's select white
Ink: Palette Burnt Umber, PTI Perfect Match Spring moss, Sweet Blush, Berry Sorbet
Accessories: SU! Ticket punch, Rhinestones, clear embossing powder

Thanks for looking!

Cutesy & Fun Baby Shower Invite

So I got a call from a friend who wanted to know if I had time to make baby shower invites. Of course I said yes. Then she said, "Uh, I need 36 by next week." I then said it would end up being pretty simple and she was ok with that. :) I also asked what kind of theme she wanted and I gave her the choice between elegant or cutesy & fun. She chose cutesy and fun. :)

Here's what I came up with... a pocket invite, where the pocket is held by the ribbon so there is no gluing and I can get three 4" pockets from a 12x12 sheet of paper. Easy AND economical. I also chose a paper with pattern all over so there would be minimal decoration needed for the pocket. I actually tried to find a double sided paper but nothing seemed to fit what I was looking for.

Here is the insert with the shower information. I printed the information onto vellum and then layered it over green cardstock. I stamped a border using the itty bitty animals from Bitty Baby Blesssings and stamped the onesie so it showed through the vellum. Sorry, had to blur out some personal info. Then the two layers are held together by the eyelets. I also stamped a border along the "fold" of the pocket.

Here's a closeup of the stamped details:
Obviously, or I hope obviously, she's having a boy. So the colors are in the boy palette range, she's actually the same person I made this for and she is doing MUCH better.

Fine Print:
Stamps: PTI Bitty Baby Blessing, Stampendous little star
Paper: DCWV Glitter Boy Stars DP, Vellum, Archiver's Apple (?) CS
Ink: SU! Mellow Moss, Apricot Appeal
Accesories: SU! Bashful Blue grossgrain ribbon, Making memories eyelets, Fiskars small corner rounder

Thanks for looking!

First Attempt at Iron on's

I really wanted to try what everyone seems to be doing - playing with iron-on transfers. I found out that you can stamp and color on the kind you would use for ink jet printers. So I decided to make a few gifts. I followed instructions that Ali Miles and Niki Estes posted on their blogs.

This first attempt was for the same birthday boy who loves monkeys. I thought I'd make him a T-shirt that matched the theme. Sorry about the picture but I thought of taking a picture only AFTER I had wrapped it. I created my own box too using a transparency sheet and following directions from Niki (again) :)

Coloring is trickier than I thought it would be because the marker can start to pull away the transfer material and leave spots - as you can see. The key is going slow and blotting the color in more than brushing the color on.

Thanks for looking!

Happy 1st Birthday - Goody bags

The goody bags for the first birthday party - I decided to keep simple. I googled an image of a bunch of bananas and printed them out with the pun below them - keeping with the monkey theme - get it? :)

I punched them with my Mega circle punch, then punched scallops with my Giga scallop circle punch. I glued them to a band that went around the bag.

Here are the bags for the adults, we filled them with traditional Korean rice cakes or "dduk." The kids got the same bag but filled with CANDY, some small toys and bubbles from a party supply store. I customized the bubbles by ripping the labels off and creating my own.

I printed the saying and colored the monkey in with Copics.

Thanks for looking!

Happy 1st Birthday - Table Numbers

Alrighty, finally here is the summary of what I did for my friend's son's (we'll call him "M") first birthday party. They kinda "hired" me :), they were my first "clients"!! I would love to do stuff like this as a side business but with a full time job, time is the biggest issue. I think of it as a good way to justify all the money I spend on all my supplies. But I always wonder what the demand is. I'm sorta hoping that by word of mouth I could get a few jobs here and there :). Let me know if you're interested, we can talk!

I'll post about the table numbers first. I also did the place cards, photo centerpieces and goody bags.

We picked this theme because M's favorite stuffed animal is a monkey - So cute when he hugs that thing!



I used PTI's Polka Dot Basics on SU! Soft Sky with Craft White ink to create the background paper. I added patterned paper by My Mind's Eye appropriately called "Birthday Boy Plaid/Brown" :). I used Lollipop die cut numbers from my local Archiver's and created a shadow effect by using 2 different colors. My Mind's Eye "Birthday Girl Dots/Aqua" and SU! Chocolate Chip. Glued them down and then stamped my monkey scenes. I used both monkeys from Stampendous and CC designs. I colored with mostly Copic markers but supplemented with SU! Markers when needed. After I finished I thought I might have gone a bit overboard but my friends really liked them.

Here's how the final product looked on the table.

For the photo cubes, we took pictures from each month of M's life and put them with the matching table number. So month 1's pictures went on table 1, etc. All in all, I think it turned out pretty welll!

I'll post the goody bag idea tomorrow, I carried the monkey theme out. I've posted the place cards previously.

Thanks for looking!

July?

Wow! It's July already? Where did the time go? I know I said I was gonna post pics from the 1st birthday party but I still need to go through and edit the pictures. So to tide you over, here is something I put together for a birthday at work. I even made a matching envelope using my Paper Source templates and by using double sided DP, I didn't need to make a liner!

What do you think of my coloring? Getting better? :)

Fine Print:
Stamps: CC designs It's my birthday
Paper: SU! Jersey Shore DP, PTI Stamper's Select White, SU! Old Olive
Ink: Palette Ink Burnt Umber, SU! Not so Navy & Old Olive
Accessories: SU! Makers, Copic Markers, Queen & Co Ultra Mini Brads Blues

Thanks for Looking!