Maryl's Bday Celebration - Workshop w/ Connie Stuart

Today, we celebrated my sister Maryl's birthday. 

Connie Govea Stuart held a private workshop for us at my sister Frances's house. The project today was a vintage purse with charms.

It was a unique project that was so much fun to make. We cut, glued, sewed, stuffed, punched, colored and then some. We all had a great time together!

Opening presents was one of the best parts of the day too. Maryl got some amazing gifts - many handmade projects that were so creative. 

These are the two braclets I made for Maryl. I let her pick one of the two. This one was made from some of the Jill Schwartz Vintage Groove pieces. I packaged it so it hardly even looks like a braclet!

 This one I made from vintage charms, ribbons and buttons. I packaged this braclet to look like a pinwheel.

Maryl picked the toy charm braclet. What a fun day we had!  Thanks for hosting a great party Frances and Connie, we loved the purse project. 

Small Book Project Kit From Jenni Bowlin

This month I bought the Jenni Bowlin Feb. project kit. If you know me, I love buying kits. I like having everything you need to make something all together in one cute package. I can work on it at my own pace, in my own home, and in the time that works for me. My two favorite parts of this project are the rub-on words on the cover with the vintage crystal watch. The pages are mostly filled with either Jenni Bowlin Memo Note Book pages or 7-Gypsies ATC pages. I also added a tag and a coin envelope. The book uses lots of paper from the 7-Gypsies Conservatory line. I like to buy the 8"x8" size because the prints are smaller. I also added a few of my own embellishments here and there.

Rachel's Polymer Clay & My Paper Doll

My daughter Rachel is into polymer clay. Today, she made some "deco-den", which is decorative clay pieces on an object. What's cool is that the "whip cream" is hardware store silicone used for caulking. These are the adorable projects she made today:

The different containers a are miniature Altoid tin, a contact lense case, a ring and a small round container.  Rachel makes the individual clay pieces first, then places them in the "whip cream".  She still has some finishing touches to put on some of the objects - but I'm impressed already!

Today, I also decided to make something from the Flea Market line items I bought at Joann's yesterday.

The head/bodice is from one of Catherine Moore's stamp - La Belle Epoque #4.  The remaining paper is from the Flea Market line.

I'm starting a new kit tonight - I hope to finish it tomorrow and then I'll show it to you guys!

More Shrink Plastic & Joann's Haul

In my previous post, I mentioned that the Melissa Frances ephemera stickers are great for printing on ink jet shrink paper. I've seen four sheets of her stickers that I just love; Air Mail, General Store, Vintage and Paperworks. She's collected wonderful images on all these sheets - you'll love them!

To use these sticker sheets to make shrink plastic, you need to reduce the originals by 90% because it's not the same size as the shrink plastic sheet. I reduce it on plain white paper. Then I use the paper copy to print onto the ink jet shrink plastic. It works great, cause the copy is lighter than the original and works perfect for the ink jet shrink plastic. As Cathe Holden recommended in her article, you should change the saturation of your image to 50% when printing on the shrink plastic since the color intensifies. So, it turns out that just making a copy of an original tends to lighten up the saturation perfectly.

Left side - Original  Right side - 90% reduction

Then make a direct copy of the 90% reduction sheet onto the ink jet shrink plastic. Cut out your pieces, punch holes using 1/8" punch, and bake!

Viola, adorable charms to use on all your projects. Some of these are from Cathe Holden's pdf's she posted.

Also, I wanted to share my latest find at Joann's today. I think this line is new, cause I don't remember seeing it before. It's called Flea Market from ColorBok. I love all the pieces; paper pads, die cuts, stickers, accents and transparencies. To top it off, this weekend at Joann's all the scrapbook accessories are 40%.  Unfortunately, I'm buying more than I'm making. But I get worried if I don't buy it when I see them, it won't be there next time. :-)

I Can't Show It Yet

I haven't posted much lately, but that's not to say I haven't been busy creating.  It's just that I can't show it yet.  I've been working on bday gifts for my sister Maryl - so I'll have to show them to you after she opens them.  We're celebrating her bday in a couple weeks - so stay tuned.

I'm working on Cathe Holden's shrink plastic project now (a post from Feb. 10th). I bought the shrink plastic (for ink jet printers) from Michael's today - with my 50% coupon.  I also found that Melissa Frances has these Ephemera Stickers that also work great for these shrink plastic ink jet paper because the images look like they're already 50% saturated and they're nice size images.

My Friday Depot Run

Friday's we get off work at 2pm, so it's become my tradition to run down to East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse and check out the latest treasures.  I picked up some:

• black card stock (you can never have enough black paper)
• pink vintage ribbon
• mini Altoids tins
• pink I.Magnin box - brings back memories
• couple of amber bottles
• bunch of manila mini envelops (you can't find these in the office supply stores)
• bunch of mini jewelry boxes (will be useful when I start selling on etsy)

I was very happy with my purchases this week.  You just never know what you'll find.

February Alameda Pt Flea Market

This morning Ruby and  I went to Alameda Pt.  What a wonderful day - the weather was just perfect.  We ran across some great booths...

 

That is Michael Chiarello, in the white shirt, from Food Network!

These are my finds from the flea market...

This was a fun weekend of finds!

2011 Q1 Company Sample Sale

Today was our first company sample sale of 2011.  We have these samples sales about 4 times a year for employees and I really look forward to them, it's like a huge Pottery Barn-Williams Sonoma flea market. 
Here are my purchases from today...

Love the wire house and 5 tier stand

See that metal narrow thing towards the back with a wooden handle - it's a vintage chicken feed

That wooded looking thing is a vintage pizza paddle - not sure what i'm going to do with it, but thought it was cool.

I found lots of fun goodies.  I think my top finds were the 5 tier round stand, the chicken wire tall house, the old chicken feed tray (which will be perfect on my craft table) and some lovely metal crowns. I was able to find lots of notebooks for Rachel too.  Tomorrow, I'm going to Alameda Pt. flea market - don't know if I'll be able to top what I got today, but it will be fun looking!

386 Steps to Coit Tower & Williams Sonoma Inc.

This post has nothing to do with arts & craft - sorry. I work for a wonderful company, Williams Sonoma Inc. - in their corp office in San Francisco.  When I get a chance, I like to climb the stairs to the Coit Tower...it's 386 stairs from the street level to the top.  I usually climb it 3 days a week. My attempt to get my 10,000 steps in every day.  Here's some of the pics of my steps to Coit Tower...

This is the bottom of the climb

The View From Coit Tower

Today, was also my 5 year Service Award Celebration with Williams Sonoma Inc. 

They hosted a lovely celebration for over 100 people in our corporate office.  I had my picture taken with the founder of Williams Sonoma - Chuck Williams (95 yrs old).

It was a lovely day, I'm so grateful for this opportunity...not to mention this Saturday is our company sample sale (open to employees only - sorry).