Unfrogettable Stamping!

Crafting with the Lovely Ladies...

   I have been doing crafting classes (mostly stamping) with the Lovely Ladies of the Williams Home for over a year now and have grown to love these women!  I lost my Grandmother years ago and these sweet women with their Southern accents just remind me of her so much.  Sometimes we'll have as many as 8-10 that come to class and last week we just had 4, but no matter how many come we always have a great time!

  Our crafting session this time was to create fabric flower pins for their upcoming Spring Tea.  I used my Big Shot and the Fun Flowers L die to cut out 240 layers of fabric - there were 4 patterns in total of various shades of purple and I spray starched the flower layers ahead of time.  The Ladies mixed and matched the layers and we held them together with an antique brad to form a total of 26 different fabric flower pins.  They turned out great and I can't wait to do more fabric projects with them in the future!  I think we may be embellishing canvas bags with different flowers sometime this summer - doesn't that sound like fun?!

   Here are some close-ups of a few of the flowers... if you haven't made any of these yet they are so much fun!  If you'd like to schedule a private flower class contact me for details...

   I love the time I spend with these Ladies, sharing my love of stamping and crafting with my Big Shot and other Stampin' Up! products.  Thank you, Melody, for giving me the opportunity to be able to do this!!  If you have the opportunity to go into a retirement facility and do some crafting with the residents there you will get so much back for the time you spend with them, I promise!

Happy Birthday, Gerin!

   What birthday gift do you give to a friend who has it all?  You make her something unique and pretty!!  I made this fun fabric flower pin for my friend and downline Gerin using my Big Shot and the Flower Folds Bigz XL die with a matching center step card.  It is very similar to my Fabulous Friday project from last week (see that here).  The "happy birthday" sentiment is the 1-line large text stamp that I had custom-made by Stampin' Up! and I use it a lot!

   Here is another view of the card... rather than attaching the flower pin like I did with my card last week I decided to use baker's twine to hold it onto the card so that after removing the pin  she could add a photo to the card front (thanks, Melody, for that idea!).

   This card is sized oddly so doesn't fit in a regular A2 envelope... luckily, I still had a few of the chocolate chip envelopes that came with the carousel notecards (remember those?) from a couple of years ago so it worked out great to hold the card and flower pin.  I just wrapped it with some pretty in pink striped grosgrain and added a tag.

   Believe it or not, when I took the gift to Gerin yesterday she was wearing a pink shirt with brown accents and a white cardigan... the flower had the perfect fabric to match her outfit!!  Who knew?!?  So the next time you have a gift to give, think about what you have in your craft room and try making it!  The recipient will love that you put so much thought and love into your gift!!

Happy snow day!

Well it finally happened... we got our first snowfall of the season yesterday!  My kids were thrilled... we thought it was going to be a snow-less winter for us here in central Virginia.  Here are our dogs playing in the snow, Beau (the beagle) and Mika (the Golden Retriever) this morning.  We are all enjoying a no-school snow day here, lounging around in our jammies until swim practice this afternoon!! 

Kelsey and Brandon decided to have a snowball fight before the snow completely melts.  They're both sporting their Christmas hats - Kelsey's is a fun faux-hawk knit hat and Brandon's is the black Bomb Angry Bird.  Amanda opted to stay warm indoors, playing on Pinterest.  Teenagers!!

So on to the stamping... I held my Diva Day for my 4th quarter top 3 demonstrators this weekend, treating them to a brunch of bacon quiche, grape salad and mini eclairs on Saturday morning.  Everyone got half of the Spring Fever Simply Scrappin' kit from the Occasions mini catalog in an alterable canvas tote bag (I have found some awesome ideas for these on Pinterest!) along with an 8" x 10" picture frame and dry erase pen.  Our first project was to create a dry erase board using pieces from the Simply Scrappin' Kit along with various embellishments from my stamping stash with the picture frame (an idea first shared by my downline Angie Kinzie during our shoe box swap in December).  The second project was creating a fun fabric flower pin using the Twitterpated designer fabric from the Occasions mini catalog similar to the one we made at Leadership in Nashville last year.

Here are photos of my Divas, sporting the tiaras I picked up in San Antonio last month (thanks to Dawn Rapsas for sharing that idea!!) along with their finished projects.... so proud of the hard work these wonderful demonstrators did last quarter!  Who will be my Divas this quarter I wonder?

Jennifer Rawlings - Top Diva for 4th quarter 2011

 
Sherri Gough, #2 Demonstrator for 4th quarter 2011

Kris Burdeaux, #3 Demonstrator for 4th quarter 2011

Here are some close-ups of my fabric flower... I love the trinket keys and beveled windowpanes... the stamp set used was Clearly for You and the shimmer comes from Moonlight smooch accent ink.  The fabric layers were cut with the Fun Flowers L bigz die and the First Edition DSP flowers were punched out using the 2-3/8" scallop flower punch.

Thanks for visiting today!

Fun Flower Folds Fabric Flowers

Fun Flower Folds Fabric Flowers - say that really fast 3 times!  Now that my kids are back in school, I finally found the time to pull out some of the fun fabric I've been hoarding for a while and created some great fabric flowers with my Big Shot and the exclusive Stampin' Up! Flower Folds Bigz XL die.

I first saw these beauties at Convention in 2009 when our CEO Shelli Gardner shared them on stage (I think she used thicker decorator fabrics).  I was awestruck by all the beautiful fabric projects that you could create with the Big Shot.  Any quilters out there - this is a FABULOUS tool for you!!

What do you think - aren't they great?!  These are all made with the 3 smallest size flowers on the die.  Although the corduroy buttons are now retired, I have a huge stash of them and wanted to use them up.  I'm making a bunch of these flowers for craft show projects later this fall.  I plan to demonstrate how to make these along with another type of fabric flower at my downline meeting next week and will share pictures of those with you later.

Here are two more that I made - the flower on the left only uses the two smallest flowers so the overall flower is smaller.  This is so fun and I made all of these flowers in about an hour!  

If you'd like to learn how to make these I would love for you to host a Girls Night Out with your friends and family and teach it to you!  Please contact me for further details or to book your date.

Products used with today's projects include: