Please forgive me...

it's been five months since my last post. :) I have been busily making name frames similar to the one in my previous post since my previous post. I have been selling them for my youth group at $15 a pop to help fund our trip to England in 2012. The orders have been steadily rolling in and have kept me pretty busy. Not to mention a promotion at work and a busy extra curricular activity schedule. So...I have been working on things, I just haven't been taking the time to post them. Quite honestly, I'm sure I've lost all of the followers that I once had. I wouldn't follow someone who didn't post for five months either.

Well, it's time for a new year - a new beginning. I am once again resoluting (is that a word?) to try to keep up with my blog...you can see how well I did last year. However, last February or so, I looked at two peas in a bucket for the first time in I don't know how long and a layout caught my eye. It chronicled the week of the designer. I read a little bit about the layout and discovered that it was part of "Project 365", in which the challangees, well...you know, chronicle their lives for the week all year. What a cool idea to really showcase our real lives, which is what scrapbooking is really all about. So, I decided then (remember, back in Feb. 2011) that I wanted to do that next year. Yes, I'm one of those perfectionist type people who would never jump right in and join in February. I say perfectionist type, because I am VERY far from perfect. Anyway, hopefully, I will be able to post at least something once a week this year.

Speaking of perfection - I've been revamping the screaming green studio. It's not quite finished yet, but I will post some pictures soon.

Now - onto my latest project...a Squinkie container for my son's new obsession. For those of you who do not know what Squinkies are, they are tiny little squishy toys that come about 12-14 to a package - they are pictured in the last photo of this entry posed on top of the lid. They come housed in tiny little bubbles, similar to what comes from a gunball machine, but much easier to open. And...they are addictive. My son has proclaimed "squinkies are awesome". When he opened them up at Christmastime, my sixteen year old son even got excited about them - very funny, they both got very excited about each other's gifts. I said we should just get them half the presents next year and they can share. Anyway, as I said, they are addictive. Kai got 2 packages, one from Santa and one from Grandma. He promptly went out the day after Christmas and bought four more packages with Christmas money and is asking for more for his upcoming birthday. He's really excited about the new Spongebob ones that are coming out soon. I think they're pretty cute, too. In fact, they have some Hello Kitty ones I'd love to get and scatter around the studio, just for cutes (I've been very into Hello Kitty lately for some reason - very nostalgic). Well - since squinkies are so tiny, but we now have a ton of them, we needed a container to...contain them. So, we went to squinkies.com and found the logo and a coloring sheetoved this guy, he's cute and ornery, just like Kai. Then we went to our trusty local hobby lobby and bought a big tin with a handle. (I reminded Kai that the last tin I made for his Cars got all bent up so if we were going to get a tin, he'd have to be careful and he informed me that he is seven now. I can be so silly sometimes.) The following pictures are the result of said supplies and a bunch of Mod Podges (yes, it is MOD Podge, not modge podge, that's one of my pet peeves). The paper line is Little Boys from Echo Park. I used spellbinders for the little signs, which say "No electricity required" and "Just add imagination". The image is colored with copics and the font for the lid is Cricut B is for Boys.

Hope you enjoy and beware, as I said...squinkies can become an obsession. And, to the folks at Squinkies - if you see my post and like it, feel free to send me a package or twelve of squinkies...remember the Hello Kitty ones! I'm sure if I have any followers, they'd love to have a squinkie give away :)

Name Frames

The mermaid name frame is much cuter in real life - I used shimmery cardstock and also used glimmer spray and glitter chalk on the mermaid and the seahorse, which you can't really see in the picture. The DP is October Afternoon and the letters and images were made using the Life is a Beach Cricut Cartridge.

The superhero name frame is made with Rusty Pickle DP and using the Classic Font Cricut Cartridge.

These name frames were custom-made for one of the ladies in my church diosese. I offered to make them as a fundraiser for our youth group. We are trying to earn money to go on a trip to England next year.

No hugs allowed

These are some shots from our Christmas Card several years ago. I'm sure I'm not the only one whose posed photo sessions end in meltdowns. Now I have 3, so it's even worse. The youngest is a ham, the middle one never shuts up, so it's hard to get a decent picture and the oldest, of course never likes any of the pictures taken of her! I used background paper from My Minds Eye. Just about everything else is from Bella Rose's For the Record line. The arrow, I've had forever and I added the pearl because I had no brass brads.

My very favorite picture EVER

This is my favorite picture that I have ever taken. I used Basic Grey Jovial. Since I have started scrapbooking again - I have ordered some new supplies and will (maybe) be using something other than Basic Grey soon. However, I do LOVE BG. The border is made using SU corner punch. The "Dude that is so cool" is from Stampin up's "So cool" set. I cut the circles with my nesties. The penguin is from Doodle Factory's Arctic. I am not happy with the upper right corner and may see if I can find a more suitable embellishment later.

Hide and Seek

This is another one of my favorite pictures. The journaling reads: We used to go to my Grandpa Hedrick's every Sunday. The kids would play outside. Sometimes, they convinced Papa Gordy (my dad) to play with them. One day they played hide and seek. Papa must have been tired because the kids found him sleeping in the car! Hide and seek, my foot - more like hide and sleep!
I used Basic Grey Wander paper and stickers. The journaling page is from making memories and the words and numbers are cut with cricut cartridges Lyrical Letters and Classic Font.

Beautiful Dog

This is Suki. She died two years ago next November. She was such a sweet dog and I've been missing her lately. The ice cream truck drove through the neighborhood the other day playing "Do Your Ears Hang Low" and it reminded me of her. She was a full-size dog on short legs who thought she was a lap dog. She loved everyone - used to bed hop so that all of got a turn to snuggle with her. She didn't bay or slober (much) like most basset hounds do. And, she was so patient with Kai from the time he was baby to even when he was a terrorizing toddler. No dog will ever compare to her, so I haven't ever tried to replace her.
The layout is made using a Max and Whiskers kit from basic grey. The "beautiful" embellishment is a brad that I've had forever - no idea what brand it is. The rub-on heart is Elsie.

Ihaven't done a scrapbook page in ages. The DP is Bo Bunny. I really like it for this picture because it has the bright green of the chair the kitties were lying on, but also has the pretty blue that brings out their eyes. I made the frame and the lettering for "Siamese" with my cricut, using Lacy Labels and Lyrical Letters. The "Twins" is done with fondue alphabet soup from KI.