Holiday Weekend Hangover

Mondays after long weekends are the hardest.  It is so hard to get moving again, to get motivated, to get back into the routine.  It always seems like you have a holiday weekend hangover.  You are tired, sluggish and feeling just a little depressed to have to walk back into work and start on those piles of papers that you hide away before you left.  The only thing that seems to brighten the day is knowing that you are one more day closer to the weekend when this one is done.

Our holiday weekend turned out to be pretty quiet.  Canada Day was a bit of a bust.  We usually head out to a local park that has a midway, bouncy castles, a big beach and food vendors.  Well, this year was a bit too cold to go swimming.  The midway wasn't there and there were huge line ups for the bouncy castles.  We basically had lunch and head back home.  Since my kiddos are not big on fireworks (they hate the noise), we hung around home and played Lego Harry Potter instead.


But before we left for the Canada Day celebrations, I did manage to get pics of my kids is being silly in the red and white.

Materials used: Bazzill cardstock, Tattered Angels glimmer mist (Candy Apple), Fabric leaves from Walmart, Luxe pattern paper, Bazzill cardstock edge, Glitz Designs 12" rubon, Versamark ink, American Crafts thickers, and Queen & Company pearls and felt.

Gotta love kids in silly hats.

Canada Day basically set the trend for the rest of the weekend.  We stuck close to home and just spent time with each other -- enjoying the fact that there were no routines to follow and no commitments to be fulfilled.


Happy Monday...only 4 more days till the weekend.

Happy Canada Day!!

It is a beautiful sunny day for it too...at least so far. 

For some reason, I woke up at 4:30 am this morning.  Wide away for no reason.  My eyes just popped open -- very strange.  Since I was wake and there was no way that I was going to be able to fall back asleep, I decided that I would get up and finish off a challenge layout that I was working on.  The challenge was to use a mask.  A fairly simple challenge but it did get my creative juices moving.

The other night I had misted, painted, stamped and inked a piece of Bazzill dot cardstock to create the base of the layout.  The next step was to figure out how the rest of it come together.  So after much fiddling, shifting, layering, distressing, inking and playing around....

Materials used:  BoBunny pattern paper, Bazzill dot cardstock, Tim Holtz stamps, dies & distress ink, Cuttlebug quilling dies, Golden Acrylic Pearl Mica, Versamark ink, Tattered Angels chalk mist and misting screens, Prima flowers, and American Crafts Thickers.

I am loving the BoBunny Peacock Lane pattern paper.  I love all the purples.  It is my favourite colour and one of my favourites to scrap with as well.  It fit perfectly for my youngest school picture.

I got it done just before my kiddos decided to wake up and take over the dining room table with their breakfast mess.

Not sure how we are celebrating Canada Day yet.  It will depend on how the weather holds up.  I heard rumblings of possibility of rain later on this morning.  We might take the kids to one of the outdoor celebrations with games & a midway or we might head over to the Museum of Nature and check out the dinosaur exhibit.  Either way....it will involve separating the kiddos from the Lego Harry Potter game.  If they had their way, they would play the game the whole day.

Have a fabulous Canada Day!

Masculine Cards...

I have a cluster of birthdays at the end of June and most of them are for the men in my family.  I usually don't struggle making cards for women, kids or for various holidays but birthday cards for men...those seem to be ones that I tend to belabour.  I will often procrastinate in getting them done because I don't have any ideas.  I just can't stick a pretty flower on it and call it done.

This year was no different.  I procrastinated to the last minute and then I made these:

Materials used:  Bazzill cardstock, Core-dinations cardstock, Tim Holtz grungeboard, Krylon Copper leafing pen, Basic Grey pattern paper, and dictionary paper.

Materials used:  Basic Grey pattern paper, Bazzill cardstock, Bazzill dot cardstock, Core-dinations cardstock, Tim Holtz grungeboard, Krylon Copper leafing pen, Tim Holtz metal elements, various brads and May Arts ribbon.

Materials used:  Bazzill cardstock, Bazzill dot cardstock, Core-dinations, Basic Grey pattern paper, Tim Holtz grungeboard, Krylon Copper leafing pen and various brads.

I was trying to keep them fairly simple, a bit grungy and tried very hard to stay away from the frou frou that I normally love to put on cards.

Now that these are done, I need to get my dose of frou frou...luckily, I have a layout challenge using that masks that will fit the bill.

Last day of School....

My kids are practically vibrating with excitement knowing that today was the last day of school.  They are looking forward to the break from the homework, from the set routines and just getting a chance to do their own thing.  My son was hopping around the house, this afternoon, singing: "No more French".  Little does he know that he is suppose to be reading and speaking in French everyday in the summer....well, I will break that news to him on Monday.  We will give him the weekend to enjoy first.  I just have to make sure that I suppress my evil cackle when I tell him the news on Monday.

As usual I was running around frantically at the last minute trying to finish off some cards for the teachers.  Our thank you gift usually consist of a nice handmade card with either a gift card to Chapters, Tim Horton's or Scholar's Choice.  Having a number of teachers in our family, we have heard many horror stories about some of the gifts they have been given so we play it safe...very safe.

Since I was once again short on time, I was looking for something that would have the "wow" factor but with minimal effort.  Nothing adds "wow" to a card better than Prima and if you add in some quilling...well, you get this:

Materials used:  Basic Grey pattern paper, Stampin' Up cardstock, Krylon silver leafing pen, Cuttlebug quilling dies, Prima flowers, Tattered Angels Glimmer mist, Rock Candy stickles and Golden Pearl Mica.

Seriously, this card only took me 10 minutes to put together.  I have fallen in love with these quilling dies and well, Prima stole my heart long, long ago. 

I just hope that my daughter's teacher liked it.

It has been a while....

So what can I say? 

Well, my life got a little insane for a while with commitments at home, at work and a couple of unexpected trips to my home town.  All of which were quite stressful and basically sapped all my time and energy for creating anything. 

Thankfully, the home commitments have settled down and will even more when school is out in a couple of weeks.  The work commitments have slowed a bit as well and the unexpected trips home will not be unexpected this time but anticipated and planned for the end of July.

Mojo has not fully come back yet but I anticipate a full return soon.  The longer days with more sun usually spur me to create more.  This summer, the kids are spending two weeks on the farm with their Grandparents instead of the normal one.  I will have two whole weeks of kid-free time to create.  I still can't believe I agreed to them being gone that long and I will probably go stir crazy with the quiet but everyone keeps telling my husband and I that it will be good for us. We will see....

Even though I haven't been creating anything in the last few weeks, I still have been actively acquiring new paper, embellishments and other wonderful items.  One of those items was the new quilling dies from Cuttlebug. 

I have been waiting for these since the moment that ProvoCraft announced them.  I must say that I have never quilled before but my mother does such beautiful work that I have always figured that I would give it a try some day.  Well, someday has arrived.

These dies come in a set of three and each set has 4 dies, a quilling tool and some flower stems with it.  That is actually my only complaint with these dies is that if you want all three sets, you have to purchase the 3 quilling tools as well...you really don't need to have 3 quilling tools.  It would have been nice for ProvoCraft to have the option to just purchase the dies without all the extra bits.

The dies are easy to use and the learning curve to produce a decent result is small.  As I played, what I discovered is that a thinner weight paper works better than a thicker paper.  It is still possible to produce nice flowers with the thicker paper but it took a bit more playing.

I don't think it took more than 5 minutes to make a flower but what to do with them once they were done.  I had originally planned to make a card but for some reason this layout popped into my head instead.

Materials used:  Bazzill cardstock, 7Gypsies pattern paper, Prism cardstock, Pink Paislee Artisan Tape, Grungeboard, Making Memories Journalling page, Prima butterfly from a vine, Copper Krylon marker, Tatter Angels Chalk Mist, Cuttlebug quilling dies, DMC pearl cotton.

I think that mojo is slowly coming back after all.

Happy Sunday....and I am off to play with more cardstock and pretty paper.