A Good Book

For my friend Vicky's birthday, I always like to make her something special. I decided to make her a corner bookmark this time. I wanted it to be vintage, romantic and inspire the imagination, everything a good book should do. I used the papers from MME Honey Cake 6x6 paper pad. I used the measurements from here. I don't have a scor-pal but I do have a scoring blade for my cutter. I actually found that just folding them by hand and using my ruler (I also don't have a bone folder) to flatten the folds gave me the best matched fold. In my Silhouette program, I took a 4x4 square and used the border called Moroccan border, overlapped them, and the welded them together so that I could cut out the square and border as all on piece of beige cardstock. My image is called book stack by Bugaboo stamps who are one of our sponsors this fortnight for our Crafting With Dragonflies challenge to use your scrap, at least 5 different dp's. Our other sponsor is Meljen's Designs. I paper pieced my image, using my scraps from my bookmark pieces. The lovely thing about this 6x6 paper pad is that the cardstock is double-sided, so it was very easy to use several different patterns and yet they all still coordinate. Thank goodness, because left to my own devices, I would still be trying to pick out papers, I am just not good at that. I used the offset feature of my Silhouette to create and cut out the peach cardstock mat around my image. I added a teal fleur-de-lis ribbon and my image on top of that. I always try to keep my bookmarks very 1 dimensional so as not to crease the spine of the book. I read that somewhere, but I'm pretty sure reading the book creases the spine, lol, but better safe than sorry.

I'd like to share my project at:

C.R.A.F.T. Challenge paper piecing, closes Sept. 19,

Silhouette the blog use the weld feature, closes Sept. 20,

Kaboodle Doodles anything but a square, closes Sept. 24,

Alphabet Challenge Blog paper piecing, closes Sept. 27,

Creative Craft Challenges2 use a ribbon, closes Oct. 1,



A Halloween Birthday Party

I know not all parts of the world celebrate Halloween, but here in Canada it is on October 31st. Now that usually means we need to find a costume that can fit over a snowsuit. And some years they are so bundled up you have no idea what they are, lol. And yet we faithfully buy (or make) costumes, that they wear only once, for a few hours. So when my Kaylee decided her birthday party theme was going to be Halloween, I thought she was a genius! The kids can wear their costumes more than once, without a snowsuit, and I already had lots of decorations.
For her invitation, I typed it up and printed it onto Kraft cardstock. Then I took gauze bandages and stamped them with Tim Holtz distress inks in walnut. I wrapped them around the cardstock and tucked the end into the back. Then I used Skor tape to put googly eyes on them. Kaylee decided she needed girl and boy mummies, so fork bows were made for ribbon hair bows and bow ties. The really tricky part was wrapping so that the eyes were just a bit covered and stuck onto one piece of wrap so the kids could unwrap them. But they really turned out well.

 To decorate the house, I went to thrift stores and bought flat white sheets. I then put them over all the furniture in the living room. We bought 'potion' bottles at Michael's. All of their decorative glass bottles were 80% off and the Husband gets a teacher's discount besides. So we let the little girls pick out one of each color and some different sizes.
I bought cheesecloth and plastic spiders at the dollar store. Then hung the cheesecloth above the door using removal 3M hooks. We added the spiders. Cheesecloth also made the tablecloths for the living room coffee tables.

I always try to make a photo spot because I take a picture of all the kids that come to the party with Kaylee and then make up photo cards at Wal-Mart as thank-you cards. This time the Husband and I used white crepe paper to wrap one of our doors. I used my Silhouette to cut out the eyes (2 black circles and 2 larger white circles). I make it sound easy to wrap the door. It was not. It took over an hour because the large roll of crepe paper couldn't pass through the back of the door and we had to break and tape the roll at hinges, doorknob, lock, etc. Meanwhile the door was open most of the time. We let in a lot of flies. Thank goodness my Mother-in-law was here, so she was on fly swatting duty. I got a straw bale from my Dad and put a blanket on it. This became our photo spot.

I made most of Kaylee's peacock costume. For her skirt, I used a strip of black elastic and sewed Velcro to the ends of it. 3 different colors of tulle were used in her skirt. The front strips were cut 24" long and the back were cut to 40". Each strip was 3" wide. Tied each strip to the elastic using a lark's head knot. Basically, fold each strip in half and then place the halved tulle strip over the waistband so that only a few inches of the loop stick out over the top. Then fold the tail ends around the waistband and pull them through the loop. I had to Google the lark's head knot name, lol. We bought a spray of peacock feathers at Michael's and I attached them to the back with hot glue. I found a peacock ornament with metal wires on the feet that I wrapped around a blue headband for the top. She had a mask too, but we just couldn't make it work with her new glasses. The leggings and top were her own. My Abby was a Tinkerbell. How her Grandma got her superfine hair up into a bun is beyond me, but she looked cute as a button!

The kids all walked down to my Mom and Dad's to go trick or treating as their activity. Being that we are on the farm, we never get real trick or treaters, so my Mom and Dad went all out. They decorated their house too and bought pencils, erasers, lots of glow wands, and mini chocolate bars for all the children. All 12 of them! I gave each child a little trick or treat bag to take with them and my Mom filled it for them. My Mom and Dad also currently have 6 kittens. I had to phone to tell them to send all the children back for cake and snacks, lol. The kids would have gladly stayed and played there all night.
For birthday cake I made chocolate cupcakes and orange icing. Bought some dollar store rings which I pushed into the icing of the kids cupcakes. I also made 4 cupcakes without icing in case someone couldn't have food coloring, thankfully there was no one that came with any allergies. For those ones, I left them un-iced but used M&M's for the spooky eyes.

For a healthy snack to go with their cupcakes, I peeled Mandarin oranges, because peeled they really look like pumpkins. I also peeled bananas and cut them in half. Then I pushed chocolate chipits into them for eyes and a mouth. They looked like little ghosts. I forgot to take a picture of them but with some creative cropping I can show you what they looked like at least. Apologies for the next 2 pictures.

I made an orange punch and the little girls and Grandma put googly eyes on all the black and orange paper cups I'd bought. Sorry I didn't think to take a picture of them either so with more creative cropping and you can see them too, lol. Paper plates and plastic cutlery also from the dollar store. One of the perks of having the stores put out the next holidays decorations so ridiculously far in advance.

We had a fun party and I'm so glad we could have all the kids out to the farm, most of them are farm kids too so it was nice. But once they left we felt like we had just hosted 1000 children instead of 12. I'm sure if you've ever hosted a child's birthday party you know exactly what I mean. Thanks for visiting!
I'm sharing my invites at Make It Monday

Back To School

Well this morning I put both of my little girls on the school bus. I was not ready. I'm sure you've all heard the phrase, "Good parents give their children roots and wings." by Jonas Salk. That's what I kept repeating this morning, roots and wings, roots and wings. The Husband also left for school today too (he's a teacher) and I was not as sad to see him go after 2 months home of together time. He is very helpful when he's home and I appreciate it but sometimes absence and the heart, well you know. I made this mini album of the girls for him to take back to school with him.
This fortnight at Crafting With Dragonflies we are challenging you to make a mini album. 3 pages is enough, more is completely up to you. I used a Silhouette cut file of an album box and 3 live, laugh, love journal cards. I welded the 3 cards together and then drew perforated lines between them. I then cut out 2 of them, one out of blue cardstock the other out of yellow. Then I deleted all the word blocks and cut it out once more from a bright pink cardstock. Glued the blue to the pink and the yellow to pink on the other side and had myself an album. For the labels/frames I used another cut file that I wrote the text questions and answers on and then used the print and cut feature. I have blurred the text but you get the idea. Each year we've taken the girls for some portraits and I used a photo from each of those years. Their pictures matched up pretty well with the sentiments too.
Daddy was very happy to get his album and keeps it on his desk at school.

We are sponsored by Di's Digi Stamps and Eureka Stamps. Please follow our challenge blog and link up your creations, if you visit my teamies designs you will see so many different and yet beautiful ideas for albums!