Friends Helping Friends

I always knew that I live in a pretty great area. Last weekend we got to see just how amazing this community really is. Our neighbors and friends organized and/or attended an evening designated to collecting funds to help us out in these trying time.

We didn't know how we would feel, if it would be overwhelming and uncomfortable. But it was nice it felt like a regular gathering and the generosity was overflowing. It was amazing to see so many people attend.

It will sure make a big difference.

How Time Pass

Well that was crazy! My last blog was back in June.. that's hard and easy to beleive. I was back to work full time then I visited my hometown in NB then my husband did this to his wrists (yup both of them).

So I am for the moment no longuer at work and we will be dealling with this for a year or so.

I am hoping to get back to scrapbooking, for myself now, I've put aside Close To My Heart while we are healing... I'm a better buyer then seller anyways.

I'll be posting again soon,

Melanie

Finally

Here are a few pages I finally completed. They were the layout that was presented at the Close To My Heart regional celebration in Calgary.

Take note on the "a monster truck adventure" page the monster truck sticker and the family time adventure three layer stamped image. They were gifts from my husband from his trip to San Diego. Isn't that sweet?! Now getting them was great! but I think to watch him go through a scrapbook store shopping for stamps and stickers would have been priceless to see.

This page was actually designed with the title "you colour my world" (well actually they had color... but we are in Canada aren't' we). That title just worked perfectly with my Easter egg colouring pictures.

The convention was great. I got so many ideas and saw so many neat projects and layouts.

I even saw some celebrities. Here is a picture of me with Janette, the founder of Close To My Heart. I know it's not like she's a movie star... She 's even better then that... well it was to me.

Till next time.

One More Use For Staz-On Ink

Ok so I know I allready posted a blog today but this evening was just too much fun. I had my best friends and kids over for supper tonight. The kids played their little heart out.

The food was good. And then we did some "tattoo" stamping.

Brandy was saying she saw a stamp set she would like as a tattoo. Of course I had that stamp in my stash. So we pulled it out along the the staz-on ink and I stamped it on to see how she would like it. Was there some cheap fruit flavoured wine involved? You betcha!!

Scrappin' My Little Heart Out

Well it's been a little while. Adam had a race next weekend so I've been preparing for that. It was a lot of fun; dusty too. The boys love been surrounded by that many dirt bikes. Which is good since this was the first race of many for this season.

On a scrapbook note, I was surfing the net the other day and visited Becky Higgins blog (for those of you who may not know her, she his an amazing scrapbooker, published many times over. She great for creating attractive multi pictures layout with a simple appealing look. I'm a big fan) Well on her blog she was suggesting a few tips for organising your scrapbooking; not the materials but your scrapbooking plans.

She created a form that she fills out with the pages she would like to scrapbook along with such information like the album it's meant to go in, subject of the page, if the pictures are printed, the page created and the journaling completed.

Here is an example:

I printed a few forms out and started filling it out while going through my picture box at the same time. I have two complete page filled out. That's a lot of pages to create. The great thing about this is that I can see what I want to do, which page is ready to be completed and mostly I get an amazing sense of accomplishment when I can strike out a completed page. It is a great motivation. I strongly suggest you do the same and see if it works for you.

Here are a few pages I've created these last couple of days.

I was please at how Toddler Gym turned out. I had a sketched pick out and was selecting paper. I was looking for orange since every pictures had orange on it. Then I came across the brown poke-a-dot style paper which has a little bit of orange and blues and greens. I fell in love with the paper. And now that I'm looking back at the completed page I can see that keeping the orange as an accent colour really makes it pop out that much more.

I don't know if you've ever seen the "word" albums. They are a little 2 ring album that each page it slightly longer then the last finishing with a letter, so when the album you can see each letter spelling out your desired word; Love, Family, ect. Ever since I got my slice I've been planning on creating my own. and finally I did. I used my slice on the largest setting and cut out the letters on white chipboard (which is a fancy word for saying a white cardboardy page that comes with the labels at my work). This is great because the slice can't cut through the chipboard but it will mark the outline of the letter very well. Here are pictures of my album.

Well I wrote this blog with many children interruptions so I hope in the ends it makes sense.

Till next time

Melanie

May Long Camping

Well we went camping in Yaha Tinda for may long with my mother in law. It was a blast... a cold blast, but completely worth it. We woke up to snow twice. The boys replenished the river of rocks. Packed way to much food. Here are a few pictures we took. I thought I would share these with you.

Well I hope you enjoyed the May long weekend. I'll be posting again real soon.

Project Nights

Well I haven't posted anything in over a week, I've been keeping busy. It was project night at my house on Wednesday and the night before that I went to my friend's Kellie's house and had a private project night there. This month the project was a mini portfolio. This looks great and it is so easy. A whole new use for envelopes. These could be used as a coupon hold/gift, a card holder, a mini album (each slot would hold a decorated page) and so on. It's up to you.

Instructions:

Seal and fold desired amount of envelopes, folding in half and trimming about 1/8" at each end.

Using a strip of double sided tape along the middle of one half of the envelope glue in two. Doing the same for all of the envelopes.

Then with a strip of double sided tape along the middle of one side of the envelope glue all the envelope to one an other. This should create your portfolio portion of this project.

Cut out a piece of cardstock to the width of the envelope by 12" and score your first line at the length of your envelope, then again about 1/2" from there. Then to allow room for tabs I folded at the length of my folded envelopes plus 1/2". Then one final score at a 1/2" again.

Then decorate your portfolio before assembling as you'll need to figure the kind of attachment you'll want to use.

I came up with three. My first was a half circle notch glued with an embellishment. My second is two eyelets holding a small circle cardstock with a string, in this case a used Close to my heart,s Waxy Flax. My final one was by having a string across to hold the tab (I used a smaller envelope for this one so i had a lot more "flap").

Then with a strip of double sided glue on either side of your portfolio to assemble to your holder.

Then simply fill whit what ever you wish.

We had a great time and everyone's project looked great.

Of course Brandy came babe in tow and worked on her scrapbook, it looked great so here are some pictures of her work that night.

Stay tune to see pictures of my May Long Camping Trip to Yaha tinda. Too much fun!!!!

When life gives you lemon....

So it took us 3 hours to drive our toy hauler 2 minutes from the house. Yup!

My husband had a race in Calgary, so we loaded the toy hauler and got there Friday night to camp at the track and be ready to go for the morning. But once we got there we where told that the race got cancel. Due to a little rain. Wussies!

So we turned around and drove to our own track at home and camped here instead. My in laws joined us for snacks that evening. The kids went down easy and slept till 7am!!!!!!! A miracle!

The boys took turn riding their PW 50 and then Adam whent for a ride and later he also took our dog Troy along. We still have to go a birthday party but I think we'll be camping here tonight again.

This is us making lemonade with life's lemons.

A homemade present for my nephew's birthday

These past few months has been a little pricy with Easter, the boys little friends/cousins birthdays, and of course I very much a gift giver. So my husband as ask me to cut down on the spending for gifts. Fine... I think I can do that. I decided to simply make my gifts, for mother's day we are giving our mothers an envelope album of their trips.

May 7th 2009 is my nephews birthday. He'll be 6 years old. And he recently started playing soccer, he's loving it and he's a great player. So I whent to the dollor store and started loking what I could turn into a homemade gift that would be suitable for a little boy.

I picked this:


















I figured he could use the clipboard to display his artwork or pictures; and a box to keep his treasures.

The closer I was getting to this birthday the cheaper I felt this gift was. But I completed and I am very pleased! I think it turned out great. I used four different papers/cardstocks and a sheet of transperacy.



















Now, hopefully he'll like it.

Talk to you again soon

Melanie

A weekend of parties

This was the weekend of parties. It was great, there simply isn't anything like a gathering. First on Friday my friend and neighbour hosted a Close To My Heart gathering with me. We had a great time. We made it into an early mother's day celebration. I used up bunch of my raided items from the Dollorama and transformed them for this gathering. The next day I had an Epicure tasting / Karaoke party at me house.





Here are a few pictures and details of the items I prepared for my friend gathering.




















The project of the night that everyone got to make and take home was the Waterfall Mini Album (Again, Thank you so much Kellie for showing me how to make this one) Full details on how to make this mini album can be found under My Art on my website http://www.melaniebarr.myctmh.com/. This project is really quite simple to make, and it looks so intricate; it's sure to please anyone. If you are trying to make this project and finding the instruction complicated to follow please contact me, I'd be happy to help.

















I like to make something using the Close To My Heart product line to make my hostess gift. This time I bought a small glass vase and I tied a bow around the top with a my CTMH ribbon. Using there rub ons I put Friends on the front and dotted the I with a small clear sparkle. How versatile are those product huh?

For the prizes there was two chocolate bars that I recover with stamped b&t paper, and an embellishment organizer that I embellished with card stock and B&T paper and stamped with "in scrap booking there are no mistakes, only opportunity for embellishments"

I made a little button jar, which I stamped "cute as a button" in front of it. I embellished the top by cutting out flower pattern from the paper, and a button and some waxy flax.
















I created a mini filling folder by folding sealed envelopes and cutting out the ends. This project turned out quite nice. More details on how I created it can be found on my website.





















I also made a card gift box. It's not quite completed as I haven't made the cards, mini-cards and tags to fill this up. I found this design in a scrapbook magazine's website. I forget which one now. It's a little complicated to do but looks so good.

Well it was a great weekend and I've been having a blast coming up with new ideas and project. I'd love to see what you come up with; e-mail me some pictures.

Talk to you soon

Melanie