Sewing Tutorial Today :)

Okay, so several of my friends are going to get a good chuckle at this.  They know how much I really don't like sewing even though I've tackled quite a few large scale projects over the years. (Most notably silk lined and interlined goblet pleated drapes that were for windows that were 13 feet high.  That was a BIG project.) So the idea that I would voluntarily do a tutorial on sewing is pretty laughable.

I wanted to make a heart banner for the Studio Calico CHA Heart Challenge.  For the most part, I have seen banners that were made by punching two pieces of paper and gluing them together on thread, ribbon or whatever.  I've also seen banners where they were sewn directly onto the page or onto a paper strip.  I wanted mine to float independently and having played around with the sticker banner I made recently I was thinking it could be done.  Here's what I'm talking about.

I found some vague directions for doing this for fabric, so I thought I'd give it a go. It turned out to be very easy.

How to make a sewn banner:

Start by holding your thread at the end and make a few stitches with nothing in the machine.

Place the heart or whatever shape you want to use so that the little teeth (I'm sure there's a technical name for this.) grab the heart and it will be guided into the stitch.

Once the first shape is stitched allow the machine to keep stitching even though you haven't loaded the next shape. You will need to pull the end of the thread again. Do this for the desired space you want between shapes.

You see here that I forgot to hold the thread in between the gingham and the open heart.  Thankfully because the heart was open I was able to slide it to make the space more even. (I got distracted by taking photos.) :)

It really couldn't be any easier.  Just remember, as each shape is stitched to grab hold of the thread and pull it to provide the space between the shapes.

(As seen in the March 2010 issue of Scrapbook News and Review.)

I used the Making Memories Slice to cut my shapes. Cute huh? I really like how they are floating on the page and if you were going to make a mobile or something like that the thin thread would allow the shapes to really float and look more airy.

Another interesting thing to note,  I realized there wasn't much contrast between the yellow letters and the light blue background, so I used the little spatula that came with my Slice to lift the stickers off the paper and place pop dots underneath them to add depth.

If the directions aren't clear, please feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email. :)

No Soup for you!

So today started out as most Monday's do.  I got Emily off to school and had a cup of of tea while I checked email and read a few blogs I like to read. (Okay, maybe more than a few, but let's not go there right now.)  I almost always go to the gym on Monday's because there is a class I really like, so I did that.

At lunch time, I made chicken stock. I have this new thing I do with bone-in chicken breast I get on sale.  I cut off the thick part of the breast and save the bony part to make stock/soup.  There actually ends up being a good bit of meat left for the soup and I have boneless breasts to use for grilling or another meal. Very economical!

Fast forward to the afternoon.  Miles came home and we discussed his liquid diet and how he handled that at school today.  (He got braces on Friday and can't chew because his teeth don't touch. I hope we can fix this problem tomorrow when the orthodontist is open.)

Anyway, I set to work on an Italian Chicken Vegetable Soup. It was a recipe I kind of just made up based upon a Minestrone I had made before. I was really happy with how it came out and thought I'd go ahead and share it with our neighbor on the corner who is scheduled to have surgery this week.  I called and told them Miles was going to deliver the soup and they could decide if they wanted to eat it now or freeze it for later.

I call Miles down and ask him to bring the soup over to "Mr. L's" house who is the neighbor who lives on the corner and I thought all was good.  A few minutes later I get a call from my back door neighbor, "Mrs. L" and she's telling me how much she liked the soup and how she was going to want the recipe.  I'm totally confused, but I play along and tell her I'm glad she liked it, yadda, yadda.

When I hang up, I immediately call Miles back down and ask him, just to be sure, where did he deliver the soup?  Well, he had indeed delivered it to the wrong house because both neighbors names start with an "L"!!!

Since I had just called the corner neighbor, I had to ladle another several servings of soup for them.  I had Miles deliver soup again, making it clear where to deliver it.  I then find myself with only enough soup for lunch tomorrow. :(

Oh, well.  The mis-delivered soup went to a very sweet, elderly neighbor I hadn't talked to since it turned so cold. In hindsight, it was good that it went to her too.  I guess I'll just have to make it again soon.  If you'd like the recipe you can find it here.

On a creative note, here's a layout I finished over the weekend. 

I have another layout almost complete on my studio table. Hopefully, I can share it tomorrow.

I can't close out my post today with out giving a shout out to the New Orleans Saints!!  Man, there was some whooping and hollering going on at our house last night.  I so wish we could have been in Louisiana enjoying the game with all our friends!! The Saints are Super Bowl bound! Whoo hoo!!

Happy Friday!

I'm definitely a Friday girl.  Some people love Monday's. They wax poetic about a new start, blah, blah, blah.  Me? I love a good ending and getting a chance to sleep in, be creative and enjoy the family!

Not sure Miles would agree it was a good Friday for him. Poor darling.  He got his braces on today.  He did great though and I think they look as good as braces can. His orthodontist put clear brackets (I guess that's what they are called.) on the front 6 teeth and put gold on the rest.  Gold sounds odd, but it really looks nice. Very subtle looking as apposed to the dark silver, metal mouth look.  I know he'd die if he knew I posted this but... I did treat him to a large Blizzard for lunch, so that's why he's smiling. :)

I did take a few minutes yesterday to do some quick portrait shots of him, pre-braces. Nothing too exciting really as far as scenery. It was raining and very cold, so I just snapped a few.  He's such a good, cooperative model.

Today, I couldn't wait to play around with some Photoshop Actions.  I was so excited last night when I finally found directions, that I understood, to add Actions to Photoshop Elements.  Very cool!

This one, I think, is Coffeeshop B&W Splendor.  Love the vintage feel.  I think I also added a Vingette.

This one is called, CoffeeShop Perfect Portraits and I also add a lot of the Vingette action.

LOVE IT!!

Here's a link to the CoffeeShop site.  She is awesome. Go check her site out if you are into that kind of thing. I've wanted to enhance my photos in this style for a long time.

And finally, I finished another Christmas layout. It's been on my desk most of the week.  I'll just keep plugging away at all those Christmas photos. :)

It's hard for me to not include lots of photos for Christmas layouts.  I think the point of a Christmas album is to see your family.

Hope to do some more scrapbooking this weekend. There have been lots of challenges posted on the Studio Calico board since it's CHA (Craft and Hobby Association) Convention weekend. I love a good challenge!  They really help me push the envelope and get me to try something new.

The sun is shinning!!

I'm so happy to see the sun!  Ever since our snow fall two weeks ago, we've had pretty much gray skies.  It's finally warming up too and the snow has melted completely.

I didn't share any snow photos at the time, but now seems like as good as any.  I had to laugh at Miles and Emily both of them wore their ski goggles the first day they sled in the frigid weather.  While it was cold and windy, I thought they looked a little goofy sledding in goggles. :)

Sledding is just so much fun!  Needless to say I've been collecting snow related supplies to scrapbook these photos and more. :)

 

A couple times I took the kids up to the front of the neighborhood where there's a huge hill.  The snow was still really good on the side of the hill, but once you hit bottom the sled stopped and you just kept on going!! 

 

Wipe-out!!

 

Anyway,  thought I'd share these fun photos. Back to work on some more Christmas layouts and enjoying the sun shinning through my studio window!

What I realized this Christmas...

Each year, I set out our Christmas albums on our oversized ottoman in the family room.  I love being able to look through the Christmas past and watch how the children have grown.  Having them out like this as part of our decorations, encourages the kids and visitors to look.  This year, not sure why not before, I realized I'm extremely behind.  The last year to have a half way decent documentation of Christmas is 2004.  I was stunned and deflated.

Like I always do, I have several theories for what contributed to this lack of Christmas scrapbooking.
1. I get really bored, tired and just plan uninspired by the Christmas layouts.  All the photos really start to look the same. The subject matter is pretty much the same.  It's kind of monotonous.
2. My father-in-law passed away right after Christmas 2005.  While not realizing it, I think I was just avoiding doing those pages because it hurt too much.
(Richard always makes fun of me for having my "theories".  Most of the time I do this without even realizing it. )

Despite the reasons for not doing it, I want to make it a priority.  It really does bring me a lot of joy to look back at our Christmas past.   And I was very disheartened to realize so much of it was missing.

To that end, I've devoted the last three layouts to Christmas (and I'm still going).   I started with this year because this year's Christmas photos are very different from years past.  I love this one.  I didn't love working with glitter I used on the snowflakes I cut with my Slice, but I do really like the results.

The next two are pretty simple layouts and go back to fill in some gaps from 2002 and 2003. Glad to have them done! And happy to be making good use of my Fa, la, la Slice cartridge.

Yesterday, I took a mixed media class/workshop taught by a local artist.  I wish I would have gone a totally different direction with my project.  Trying to decide if I want to finish it or just chunk it.  I did enjoy doing something different and hope to go again in the next couple of weeks.

Oh, one more thing to share.  Last night the strangest thing happened.  We were all busy doing various things in the house and all of a sudden Tucker was whining and grumbling at the back door.  Richard got up to see what had him all worked up.  He saw three deer by the fence.  He called us down to see the deer and as we were all looking each of us kept finding more.  It was so surreal. It was very foggy and dark so the deer were very shadowy.  We finally let Tucker run out and bark at them so we could watch them run off and see how many were actually out there. At final count there were 7 deer in the field behind and on the side of us. For the life of me I can't figure out how Tucker knew they were there.

Lots to Share

I have several layouts to share.  Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy with life and when I got a minute I was scrapbooking.  I had a lot of time to make up for being away from scrapbooking so long over the Christmas break.  I just couldn't bring myself to do anything else.  Do what makes you happy right?

So, I think the first layout I completed since the break was this one.  It's really sweet and based upon a Studio Calico Sunday Sketch.  I thought that was a good place to start.

It was good to do a page that wasn't focused on the children.  This was such a wonderful trip, and I wanted to express how much I loved being just us.  I was also inspired to create a page about us because we celebrated our 18th Anniversary on Monday.  I'm so lucky to be married to a man that loves me so completely, creative craziness and all.

Next was this one.  This was also based on a one-page sketch, although once I completed the page I wanted to make a "companion" page because I had more photos I wanted to use.  It turned out to be a two-pager instead of a "companion" page.  Most two pagers that I really like have elements that repeat or extend across the two pages.  Really creates unity and balance.

Next up, I wanted to use elements from the December Studio Calico kit, which had been completely untouched.  I thought these funky papers would highlight the fun that is New Year's really well.

I have one more to share, but that will have to wait. I'm off to the health club for my "total body workout".  Hoping I can find a parking space!  I get really frustrated by all the "New Years resolution people" clogging up the parking lot.  Ha ha!!

One little word...focus

I wish I would have gotten up and typed up my post the night I decided on my word.  I had such a great stream of ideas going that is now lost. (But I was trying to focus on my task and didn't want to be destracted, which is a lot of of what this word choice means to me.)

Anyway, I picked the word focus, not because I'm ADD or anything, but because I find myself losing my focus a lot.  Little daily distractions cause me to lose the focus of what I had intended to accomplish or had hoped my day would be like. I want to be intentionally, focused on my family, our health and the little everyday wonders of life.

By the same token, I don't want to be so focused on one thing that I loose the big picture.  I need to  find a balance.

Kind of like when you like at this photo above, the depth of field is pretty shallow, so only my hands are really in focus, which is fine, if that is the goal.   Sometimes the whole photo, or the "big picture" needs to be in focus and other times it's more a matter of perspective and artistic expression. I think it's a fairly effective metaphor for the purpose of my word. (And by the way, I had the hardest time getting the focus right in this photo. I normally focus with my left eye so keeping it open for the photo was extremely hard.)

Maybe when my train of thought comes back into focus, I'll have more to say on my one little word. :)

We interrupt this post...

So, I have a post to do on my one little word.  I finally made a decision.  I can't post all about it now as I have a project to finish and a potential snow storm to prepare for.  (the southern girl in me sees it just like preparing for a hurricane!)

If you'd like to know what the "one little word" is all about,  click above.

Happy New Year!!

So happy you stuck with me through the lean month of December.  My last post was only days before we left for our Christmas ski trip with our family and it seems we have been non-stop since then.

What a wonderful Christmas we had in Utah! Hope yours was lovely as well.

I have to say it was unlike any Christmas we've ever had before, but definitely in a good way.  We awoke on Christmas morning to see what Santa stuffed into the children's ski boots, enjoyed a big breakfast and shortly after that we were all geared up for a day on the slopes! Such good, family fun time!

We all decided, during the planning of this trip, that we would have to get a Christmas tree.  I brought paper and various things to make an old fashioned, handmade tree decorations.  I think it turned out beautiful and everyone really enjoyed the process.  My dear mother-in-law spent, who knows how long, stringing popcorn and cranberries into a garland and was the perfect touch to our homemade tree. (Using the letter stencils came from an old Pottery Barn tree I saw online.  We made it personal by using only the initials of each of us there.)

Here's a collage of my favorites from the trip.

We really missed visiting with the rest of our Louisiana family and friends.  But we were very thankful to have this opportunity to spend Christmas with Richard's mom and brother and his family.

Once we returned we had a few days to unpack and get reorganized for my Dad and Felicia to come for the New Year's weekend. It was great to have them ring in the New Year with us.

We made a huge, southern New Years Day feast, complete with fried turkey, cabbage and black-eyed peas along with other trimmings.  Our tradition of eating cabbage for plenty of money in the coming new year and black-eyed peas for luck, is faithfully fulfilled each year!

My Dad brought all the gear for frying the turkey, but we now know why this is really only popular in the south during the holidays!  Oil can freeze and propane tanks can too!!  We had kept both in the garage when they got to our house and with our single digit weather, it was way too cold.  It all worked out once everything was inside for a couple of hours and the turkey was positively worth the wait!

So, today we all returned our normal routine, ready to face the New Year!!  Happy 2010!!  Hoping to get back to my creative pursuits tomorrow!