Friday, January 24, 2014

New Character Constructions Paper Dolls

This week I received my new stamps from Catherine Moore's new fabulous line, Cirque. I couldn't wait to make some new paper dolls with them and use my chalk board background papers.
Below is a close up shot of each one.

Thanks Catherine, love the new stamps! You can see her entire line of Character Construction stamps here: http://characterconstructions.com.
Have a great weekend!

Monday, January 20, 2014

Family Recipe Project

This weekend we celebrated two of my sister's birthdays: Frances and Maryl. I hosted the celebration with a  a family recipe book project. Each person brought recipes to share, and we decorated the pages and divider sections. We had a great time and I love the end result. Here are some pictures of our party and project.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Not pictured: Lana and Kacia who left early
Below is a quick video of me flipping through the pages of the recipe book.... 

On another note, I'm currently loving chalkboard style art. These are some items I found at Joann's from My Mind's Eye...so cute!
 Also, here are stamps I just purchased from HSN - Anna Griffin's chalk board stamps...
 The kit includes the stamps along with the green and black chalkboard inks!

 Have a great week!

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Creating for Tim Holtz & Red Lead

In the last couple of months, I've had the honor of creating samples for two of my favorite people/companies: Tim Holtz and Red Lead. As you may know, the CHA Winter 2014 show is currently taking place in Anaheim, California. This is a big show for all the crafting brands to showcase their new products for the year. I was thrilled to be asked to create some jewelry samples to be displayed at Tim Holtz's booth for this year's CHA show. Below are the pieces I made:
The pendant is a watch case filled with resin
One of Tim's new products is these awesome letter press blocks.
Tim also told me that the necklace I made for last year's CHA show, pictured below...
 ...will be features in his new book, "A Compendium of Curiosities Vol III...I can't wait to see it! 
Thanks to Tim and Paula for the wonderful opportunity to be a part of this creative experience!

Red Lead is a wonderful retail and on-line store in St. Louis, Missouri. They carry some very unique products that you won't find any where else. I was thrilled when they asked me to be a guest artist for them, and make some samples with their products. Below is a picture of some of the items they sent me to create with...
I can show you a couple of the finished products now, the rest I'll reveal when they're ready to release the images with their promotions.
These are Valentine's Day inspired ATC cards. One is for the "pocket" theme and the other is featuring their adorable fairy stamp. The projects I made using the birds items will be shown at the end of January with their ATB (Artist Trading Blocks) event, and the house projects will be shown in March with their house swap event! Sign up for their newsletter and follow their creative projects.

And finally, congratulations to my daughter, Rachel, who this weekend surpassed 100,000 subscribers for her YouTube channel: KawaiiSweetWorld WooHoo!!!

Wow, we couldn't have imagined that just 3 years ago when she posted her first video that she'd would have such a vast audience. We're so proud of her!

Hope you're having a great weekend!

Sunday, January 5, 2014

2014 Character Construction Calendar & Much More

Happy New Years! I'm ready to show the entire 2014 collaborative Character Construction calendar.
Catherine Moore is the wonderful artist of the Character Construction stamps, and she selected 12 artists to participate in this calendar. Each artist created a page for one of the months, using her stamps and/or paper. We've done this project in previous years, however this year we decided to take it one step further and send the images to a photo company to produce a 5"x5" spiral bound calendar.

Here are the pages!
Front Cover: Catherine Moore (Georgia)
Back Cover: Nancy Gene Armstrong (Louisiana)
January: Laura Haviland (Canada)
February: Barbara Smith (Florida)
March: Connie Fong (California)
April: Jackie Peters (Oklahoma)
May: Nancy Gene Armstrong (Louisiana)
June: Lisa Bruno (Oklahoma)
July: Linda Warlyn (Illinois)
August: Lana Kloch (California)
September: Vilma Gasnier (France)
October: Florance Loft (Canada)
November: Pat Rogerson (United Kingdom)
December: Diana Frankel (California)
I love each and every page. Thank you to everyone who participated and most of all, thank you to Catherine Moore for creating such wonderful stamps! 

I also wanted to share some pictures from a little craft workshop I held with some friends over the holidays.
Our first project was painting circles on some journal paper. We then cut the circles out, glued them on some painted card stock, and finished them with some doodling and stamping. Inspired from Roben Marie Smith.
 I think these make some adorable note cards. 
 Next, we did some mod-podge with paper napkins and tissue paper on manila folders.
And we made these adorable folders...
I then took it one step further. I used one of the folders my daughter Rachel made and turned it into our thank you notes for the Christmas gifts. I scanned her folder and added the "Thank You" text to one of the circles using Photoshop. 
These were some of the supplies we used for the folders. Most of the napkins are from Crate and Barrel.

I also want to share some wonderful artwork that Shannon Benedetti created with Catherine's new line of stamps. Adorable tags, mini cards and an amazing shadow box!

The winter 2014 CHA show is next week and I'll be able to share some exciting news...stay tuned!