a life artist's type culture: September 2007

Friday, September 14, 2007

We are Mouse-bound!!

Heading out in the weeeeee early morning hours tomorrow. We need to be up at 5:15am to catch our flight to Orlando...Yipppeeee!!

So what am I NOT doing? ....packing

So what am I doing instead? ....making these super-cute autograph books for my girls, of course!!

Now, as much as I LOVE Disney, I just CANNOT tolerate all of their licensed character papers that are on the market--Good God, they make me want to hurl! I find them quite gaudy and gauche, and try as I might, I just couldn't bring myself to make that purchase--even for my kids.

What I did find as a perfect substitute was these Cherry Arte Cosmic Energy papers. They had all the right colors, and I was even able to accentuate some of the miscellaneous circles with some Heidi Swapp bling to represent a Mickey Mouse head...Not bad, eh? I didn't go overboard with lots of embellies, as these books will put through some rigorous handling, hence the need to mod podge the cover too. I'm not too crazy about the look of the mod podge on the cover, but wanted to give it a bit of protection...It's ok, I can live with it...It is far better than one of the cookie cutter books found in the parks, and I didn't have to subject myself to the purchase of f-ugly papers you find in the stores.

Now that I can check these books off my to-do list, it is on to packing!

YaY!!

See you in a week!

:)

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Here's what's happening in my neck of the woods...

This past week I have been super busy doing store displays for my lss, Lasting Memories. I also actually worked a day in the store, and rang customers--all by myself--YIKES!...LOL, there were a few people who got some REALLY good deals on items as a result of my ineptitude with the register. But it was a good day. I'd definitely do it again, and I'll give y'all a heads-up so you know when to come in while i'm working ***wink, wink***

This first layout for store display is using K&Co's Hopscotch papers...When I first saw the papers, I was like, "ick!!", but now I kinda like the way this page turned out. :)

This 2-pager is done using Rusty Pickle's Pirate Princess papers. I did gobs of machine stitching on this, along with my very first experience with the uber-cool Stickles. Oh yeah, I've gotta get me some o'dat!

Check out the close-up picks of the scrolls and winged heart--the Stickles make them jump off the page!

Here's another store display I did using the BG Periphery papers. I have been really big into transparencies lately--especially making my own. I used the HS "cherish" stamp on my tranparency. Then I used my Crafter's Workshop doodling templet to trace and cut the scalloped/pierced edge. I dry brushed the scallops to give the detail some definition. I also grabbed some mesh (I know!! a blast from the past) to go along with this page. I thought it worked really well with the distressy look of this paper. Then I did a couple of my trademark embellishing (you can almost always see this somewhere on my lo's), the machine stitching and cut out flowers... You really have to click on these photos to enlarge--you just don't get the detail from the regular sized pics on the blog.

I also worked on one other lo for store display, but did it while I was working at the store...I don't have a pic, but will try to snap one tomorrow when I go to teach my class...

P.S. Did i mention we're going to Disney in 4 days?! I gotta get going and get organized for that!! I've got costumes to pack (MNSSHP), travel documents to retrieve from our safe deposit box, get some cash, pack our everyday clothes, confirm our grocery delivery, confirm our flights, etc....and the list goes on and on!

Sunday, September 02, 2007

As promised...

...here are my pictures from Cape Cod

The beach bums (my girls, and my friend's girls) hammin' for the camera on the beach at low tide in Eastham (which, by the way was voted one of the U.S.'s top 10 places to view a sunset!)