E
Remember those altered letters I did for some girlfriends a while back? I made one for mE, too! It’s an altered paper mache letter. I painted it with acrylic paints and then covered it with paper and altered some Maya Road flower petals with Cloud 9 Design paper, Stickles, and glitter to make a flower.
Studio Revamp Ideas – His N Hers
I hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July! We had a very fun evening with friends and family. We had some crazy wind happening and I am surprised we were able to light the fireworks, but thankfully (for the kids) the wind died down and we had a blast! Here’s a pic of the carnage in the gutter and the last few ppl picking up to go home at the end & some fireworks shots. Saturday we did a little revamp (aka worked on finishing one of Brent’s projects that has been laying around in the garage since The Great Flood) on Brent’s “studio”…. He built (and I helped paint) some cubbies to go above his workbench (which will also eventually be painted) in his workshop. He is such a happy boy! This will be niiiiice so he can put away tools & things so that I can actually park my car in the shop/garage. (B tells me that it’s HIS workshop that I can park my car in… lol! Fine with me…) Everything we were working on was put on hold because of The Great Flood and we’re sick & tired of half done projects so we’re working on getting some of them tied up and done so we can move on as planned. We have 3 weeks to get the tile in the kitchen & bathrooms before the wood floors get here so we gotta get moving. So this morning I am dreaming up ideas for my “new” studio…. (cuz I want to be able to get going on getting it painted and ready so we can put the flooring in and then build my cubbies from B’s bday present to me back in March.) I’ve already chosen the “color scheme”… ….and I keep adding to it… less brown and more fun colors. I picked up a couple more paint samples to play around with for the color scheme. I still want green walls, just gotta find the “right” green. I want this to be a creative, happy place that inspires me to create happy & fun art. I also found some fun fabric for my curtains… I can’t remember if I have shared this pic or not yet, so I will share again. Hehe! The curtains will be a kind of patchwork valance and I will stitch some fun trim into the bottom hem. What ideas do you have for your crafty space? We all have different spaces allotted to us based on our individual circumstances and I love to seeing what people have done with their spaces! I’ve perused the internet and have seen some beautiful ginormous spaces and cleverly organized and beautifully decorated small spaces. Inky Smiles!
RAK Winner
I dropped some numbers into the Random Integer Generator (Random.org)…. There were 45 comments posted on the post…. Random.org generated #17 I counted down the comment list and #17 is: CONGRATULATIONS ROBIN!!! Send me a private email with your mailing address and I will pop your prize in the mail to you this week! Oh, and btw…. I have not named the machine yet…. Still thinking… Hope you all had a marvelous 4th of July!
Here’s the RAK
Ok, so I have a basket of odds n ends and fun little doo dads in what’s left of my scrap closet. I rummaged through it tonight and decided this would make a fun RAK for yesterday’ s post. SO, leave a comment on the July 1st post and let me know you’re still around. I will draw a name on SATURDAY (cuz B reminded me we’re gonna be bizzy beees on Fri) for this Heidi Grace paper pack (6 coordinating papers) and Heidi Grace idea book and 2 rolls of American Crafts ribbon.
Inky Smiles Update
Hi Friends! I have been AWOL for a while now and I am sooo sorry! We’ve been super busy with the house, Brent’s city council duties, my church responsibilities, our regular day jobs (extra days for me this week), and various other projects around here and I haven’t had time nor the energy to blog or create. Yesterday I cleaned out my laundry room and started some big bags of clothing for our local Women’s Shelter, Goodwill, and such, AND I finally spent some time here in my makeshift office (aka the one of the rooms of our “store” where I store the Bind It All stuff – still working on the website) so that I could stand to be here at the computer for more than 5 minutes… So, today while one of the “Mini C’s” (see photo to left) is earning money for a new bike by de-fruiting my way overzealous “flowering” plum tree and I wait for my laundry to finish I shall blog… Over the past two weeks:1.) We’ve played around with trim options and built a TON of InkStaks in the past couple of weeks. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for your purchases! 2.) We are beginning to put the walls back together in the basement. Brent has been sanding the seams where the new sheet rock will meet the old sheet rock so that we get some nice seamless seams and he has put the sheet rock back up in the under the stairs closet. So now we can get going on tiling under the stairs and then putting all my Christmas stuff back in there. (The whole closet is devoted to Christmas!) 3.) This weekend (after the big BBQ & Fireworks party) we’re going to be cleaning the walls in the family room so that we can touch up the paint and put the carpet & baseboards back down. YAH BABY! This means that we can start putting the furniture back into the family room and I can unbury the majority of my crafting supplies! I CAN’T WAIT!!!!! 4.) I’ve painted some test colors (6710 Melange Green & 6711 Parakeet) on 2 walls of my studio…. one is too dark and one is too light, I think I am going to have to mix the two and see what I can come up with. Updated 7/6/08 5.) After much thought and research, we have decided that while the house is entirely torn up we will be replacing ALL of the floors (except the unaffected flooring in the basement). We’re doing all the work on the repairs (no contracting out) and the insurance money should stretch pretty far this way. We’ve chosen a beautiful hardwood floor for the first floor and my studio and a couple of porcelain tiles (here & here – I think we’re leaning towards the darker one) or the upstairs bathrooms and kitchen. THis is going to make for one heck of a busy month! The wood flooring is on back order until the 1st of August so that buys us some time to get the tile done before we do the wood (and also not scratch the wood while installing the tile). 6.) We finished building and planting our garden boxes on our back hill. We were set back a couple weeks with the whole flood mess. Currently I have 5 strawberriy plants, 17 tomato plants (we’ll be canning this fall), a slew o’ carrots, 4 green & 4 mixed red & yellow bell peppers, 1 “Jose Jalepeno” plant (thanks Jeff Dunham), 4 cucumber plants, 1 watermelon plant, and a small herb garden all coming along nicely. I will be giving away a lot of treats this fall when everything comes on! LOL! Next spring or this fall we will work on putting landscaping fabric and gravel between all of the garden boxes. I am even consideringplanting some grapes along the backside of the hill… mmmmmm. Next year we will finish the hillside down by the pool and add more trees to the yard. It was supposed to be this year…. but that was before the Great Flood Project. 7.) We ended up having to purchase a new pool because once we’d patched up last year’s holes and partially filled the old pool we discovered NEW holes…. not just one or two… more like 6 or 7.. UGH! SO, we hit Sam’s Club on Saturday and purchased a new above ground pool. WOOT! It’s now 3/4 full with lovely green irrigation water and we’re getting ready to hyper-clorinate (aka SHOCK) it and begin the filtering and cleaning process. Within 24 hours of shocking it, it will be crystal clear and clean and ready for swimmers. HOT DIGGITY!!! This is our weather forcast…. we’re going to be thankful for the pool. 8.) My favorite news so far …. After two years of saving and researching, praying about and thinking about it….. I finally purchased a new sewing machine and retired my clunky old Singer!!!! The store I purchased from had an AMAZING salesman who spent 45 minutes with me going over the machine and showing me what it can do and was not at all pushy, unlike a different store that I visited. Anyway… Nuttall’s BEAT the price of the other store by $150 AND gave me a trade in on my old machine, so when all was said and done, I was about $300 UNDER what I had saved for the machine. YAYHOOOOO!!!!!!! I start a sewing class TONIGHT! (In fact, it’s every Tues in July from 6-9 pm.) I already know how to sew and have made oodles of home decor and clothing projects, but this will be great to have a “real class” and get to know my new machine. I am stoked to get started on the curtains for my studio! 9.) Saturday night we had a fire on Molly’s Nipple (mountain behind our home) and I stayed up taking some photos with my
Digital Organization & Enabler Alert
So while we are on the topic of organization, I thought I might share how I organize my digital stash (digital scrapbooking supplies AND digital photos AND digital layouts, etc). Last year several girls in my Photoshop class recommended the program ACDSee to me for helping me organize my digital stash. At first I was a bit overwhelmed, but then I found some cool online sources for help and now I love using ACDSee to organize my loot. Basically you can tag each of your items with whatever attributes you would like to use for your version of sorting/organization. Once you’re all tagged, you can select the attributes that you want from a list you create and ACDSee will pull up what you’re looking for. You can tag by designer, by kit name, by color, by texture, by pattern, by theme, whatever helps YOU keep track of what you’ve got. You can put as few or as many tags on an item that you want. Then, when you’re ready to search, you can also select as many tags (attributes) as you want and start pulling up and viewing items. IT’s AWESOME!!! I tag everything first and then sort out into their new “storage categories”. Here’s a super quick & simplified breakdown of how I organize my digi scrapbooking supplies: When I first download new kits and items, they (the zipped folders) go to a folder on my desk top called “Zipped Digi Scrap”. I save the zipped files in here until I get a chance to unzip and sort them into their appropriate files. ** On the left side of the screen shots you see a list of files. These are the actual folders on my computer where the files are physically stored. This is where I would drag and drop to physically sort and organize the files. ** On the right side of the screen shots are the lists of categories of tags/labels. This is where you drag and drop for tagging purposes only. When I unzip the files, I save them in an “New Digi Scrap to Sort” folder. I know this might seem like overkill, but it works for me and I don’t always have gobs of time to unzip and tag and finish sorting at the same time. Sometimes I “buy and fly”… Anyway… When sorting them and tagging them, I open up ACDSee and begin the sort process. (Something I learned the hard way: If you don’t sort & tag within the ACDSee program, your tagging system will not work. Always make changes IN the ACDSee program.) I first label the whole folder by Designer and then the Kit name and then go through each element of the kit and start tagging. Once you have set up your tags/labels, it’s a relatively quick process. Here’s an example of where I have downloaded a Jessica Sprague kit and began sorting. The first thing I did was to create a folder under Designers>Jessica Sprague for the kit “Home Away From Home”. Then I highlight everything in the kit and drag it over to the Home Away From Home tag under Jessica Sprague. This tagged EVERYTHING in that kit as Jessica Sprague – Home Away from Home Kit. Now, after I have sorted things (not tagged, actual sorting) into their appropriate files I can go back into ACDSee and select the Jessica Sprague – Home Away from Home tag and it will pull up everything in that kit in the view window, and then I can drag and drop what I want to use into Photoshop. After the main kit tagging, I go back and open up each and every item in the kit, papers, embellishments, word art, etc and tag them appropriately. In this example I have tagged a striped paper from the Home Away from Home Kit. When I select the paper file, I drag it to the “Stripes” tag under Patterned Paper, under Papers. The cool thing is that it applies all the tags “Papers, Patterned Papers, Stripes” to the file all at once, with one drag. YAY! I do this for all the elements in the kit and then go and sort the items into my actual folders categories which reflect the same names as my tagging categories. This part is super fast because I can pull up all items tagged Paper, Staples, Brads, whatever and just drag and drop into their new folder home. This is super simplified, but I hope it helps someone. You can get some great tutorials and more detailed help from a site called Digi Scrap Info. They have some amazing ACDSee tutorials. 🙂 You can also read more info on it from Jessica Sprague by clicking here to go to the article on her blog. Happy Organizing! We have a super busy week this week! A ton of InkStaks to build and ship out, a big church ladies event (Enrichment) in my backyard on Wed night (Dutch Oven cooking… mmm) and I have to start sorting things in the house so that we can get ready to start working on replacing flooring. I found some awesome hardwood flooring for an AMAZING price online! It should be here in about 10 days! WOO HOO! So now that I have told you all about this,here’s some FABULOUS news!! ENABLER ALERT – BIG SALE BIG SALE BIG SALE!!! Receive 40% off ACDSee 10 Photo Manager! Take advantage of the Summer Fun Sale! Offer Expires 08/26/08 6/24/08 UPDATE: I’ve gotten several emails on what my “tag structure” looks like. The easiest way other than typing it all out is to give you the screen shots. Thank goodness for that function! I’ve also been asked what the difference between the PSE Organizer and ACDSee is. I can’t really tell you other than I played with PSE Organizer for a couple of days and did not like it. I went back to using my Windows file system to sort and organize… and then
Thoughts for Thursday: Goals
“As women we wear so many hats that it is absolutely necessary to be organized and do those things which move us toward the goals we have set.” ~Mary Kay Ash Today’s TFT is brought to us from a Mary Kay email ad that I received the other day from my friend, Amaryllis. I thought this was a good quote to share as I am really bad about getting organized to accomplish my goals. I write them down and generally get them taken care of, but sometimes I get a bit distracted along the way {life sometimes just comes at ya full speed} and it takes longer to get done that which I have set out to do. What are some of the goals you have for your life? Write them down… Make a plan…. Take some photos…. Make a layout…. Inky Smiles!Erin
Digi Fun… Independence Day Is On It’s Way…
Since everything is still topsy-turvy around here I have been playing around in the digi realm… Every year since we’ve been in this house Brent and I have had a big neighborhood/friend 4th of July Pot luck BBQ & Fireworks party. Each year different people show up and each year seems to be more fun than the previous year. This year I had wanted to make some really cute paper invites, but things are obviously, well u know, so I did them digitally in PS Elements. The papers used are from Christine Smith and the elements used are from Christine Smith , Raspberry Road Designs and some random ones that I picked up somewhere along the way and don’t remember where they came from. I’ve omitted my address for any “party crashers”.. lol!
The Culprit…
We interrupt today’s blurfing (blog surfing) for a message from our sponsor culprit… (I’m finally feeling up to dealing with some of the photos I took… mostly I just need to get them off my camera card…) This is the culprit… under the carpet in the concrete floor of my once 100% finished, cozy and well loved family room…. It’s now repaired. Thankfully the family room sits on the high side of the house and the poo water did not seep into the floors in there. Four fewer walls that need sheet rock repair, yay! Here are some snapshots of the aftermath… I’ve spared you the details of the poo water, nobody needs to see that..ewww… We’d mopped up the water from the floor so we could walk around and move furniture. Thankfully my desk was not harmed in this incident. There were a few corners that we cleaned, but 99% of the desk was unharmed. YAY! The laundry room was “only” hit in about 1/3 of it. The walls on the south side were hammered… cut out, etc. We’ve got to do some major sorting, cleaning and repainting in here now. UGH! After we moved Nate & Sara up to the tiny spare room on the main level, we loaded most of the office furniture and family room furniture into the guest room. The recliners, desk drawers and files and a variety of small things that don’t cram well are scattered in various rooms throughout the rest of the house. Fun, fun.
Character
“Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open.” I made a whole bunch of these little guys for some girlfriends a while back… Avon had these cute little Disney Princess Chapsticks on sale and I could not resist! And of course you can’t just give them to your girlfriends without some sort of cute packaging…. (You can click on any of the photos to view them larger.) I modeled my package after a matchstick box card and made it slightly bigger to accommodate the Chapstick tube. It’s decorated in paper from CTMH which has been stamped with CTMH Stamps & Inks. The flower is done by stamping Versamark ink on a piece of transparency paper (acetate) and then sprinkling white embossing powder over it and heating with your heat gun. Be CAREFUL…. the acetate WILL melt if you heat one place too long. Once the embossing powder is cooled you can cut out the flower. It may take several tries to get the desired effect… the embossing powder likes to stick to the acetate anywhere it can. You can try rubbing gently with an anti static bag, but be careful because it can scratch the acetate… I stamped a CTMH paper flower with a polka dotted stamp from the Floral Elements set and set aside to dry while working on the acetate flower. When all the floral components were ready, I pinned them all together with a little (discontinued) sequin flower and brad (CTMH) and attached the flower to a white organdy ribbon (CTMH). Supplies:White organdy ribbon, paper flower, white brad & sequin flower – CTMHInks & Paper – CTMHStamps: Floral Elements, Delight In Everything, Follow Your DreamsWhite Embossing Powder – CTMHHeat Gun – MarvyAdhesive, misc.