DIA Project #2 - Teri's Purse Scrapbook

Here is another project I did with the DIA girls. It's a purse scrapbook that Teri put together for us.



Mine uses The Angel Company's Willoughby paper collection, but some of the other ladies used a different collection.

Here's the inside of the purse with the slide out circle tags shown to the side:



And here's some of the stitching detail we freehanded on:







For those of you in the Chicago area, I'll be hosting a class on this sometime in the future, so be on the lookout.

If you want to check out some other versions of this project, take a look at the following blogs, and hopefully the rest of the team will have posted theirs today too. I know some of them have been having computer trouble.

Rita
Pat
Dawnmarie

Hannah Montana Inspired Card and Giftwrap

Last weekend was my niece's birthday party. She just turned six and is a Hannah Montana NUT!

We went bowling for her party. (Note the Hannah Montana shirt).



and had a Hannah Montana cupcake cake.



So it was only fitting that I made her a card and wrapping paper that were Hannah Montana inspired. Her bedroom is decorated in purple and sea foam blue with Hannah Montana cling stickers all over it. So this is the card I made for her using the Archiver's exclusive Rock Out clear stamps by Stampendous. (Now you know where my post about clear stamps came from last week).



I colored the guitar with my Copic Markers. And thought the "shred six" phrase was especially fun because it was her sixth birthday. Not that she'll get the guitar reference, but my husband did. The edges of the scalloped rectangle were highlighted with Crystal Stickles. Amazingly, the glitter in the Stickles picked up the mint coloring of the blue and seemed as though they were made to match.

I also stamped the guitar and the You Rock wording onto some blue wrapping paper I had in my stash, and wrapped it with a purple ribbon so that it matched the card.



My niece was very happy with the card and the wrapping. (She's actually one of my biggest fans, and gets very excited about the cards I make for her)

And now off to play!

Busy People Get Things Done!

Wow! This week has FLOWN by. I came back from vacation to an office that was gearing up to appear in court, so I missed lunch on most afternoons this week, but did manage to get my boss off to court with everything he needed and more. I worked late a couple of nights and had other obligations on the evenings that I didn't stay and work. On the flip side, I was able to leave work a little early yesterday, which enabled me to get together with a group of girls that I will be working the St. Charles craft shows with --- still a form of work, but in a different sense, and a group of people that are lots of fun to be with.

I've gotten no blogging, or crafting done since Monday, but I did....
sign up for a booth at the Mokena Farm and Barn Harvest Festival, where I will be selling handmade items, made my list of things I have done, and things that I need to make for that, ordered the supplies I will need to make and packaging the craft show goods, got a small portion of my craft room organized, swapped out all of the stamp sets that retired from the catalogue out from my collection, added all of the new sets that I purchased and have cut from the new catalogue into my useable stock, got all of the kits for the St. Charles craft show together with the other girls that will be working the booth, paid bills (YUCK!), signed up for an Angel Gathering in October (YAY!), and got a wine box that I will need to decorate as part of a friend's wedding gift.

What a busy week! The reward for getting all of that organizing done, will be to spend a day PLAYING! I watched The Shining.... I have no intention of slaving away just to end up with "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". So hopefully there will be more posts with craft stuff soon!

A Great Time To Sign Up To Be An Angel

The Angel Company recently announced a sign-up special for those of you that may have an interest in signing up to be an Angel Company demonstrator.

Most of my customers know that I signed up simply to get 25% back in commission on purchases I made for myself. It supports my passion. The minimum sales requirement is $100 every FOUR months, which can be purchases of $25 each month, or one $100 order towards the end of each four month period, or any combination. That made it a perfect fit for me and left me able to purchase my basic supplies at a discount and have money left over for some of the other toys I just had to have, like my Copic markers and my Cricuit.

For the current promotion, The Angel Company is also offering a choose your own add-on kit on top of the usual stamps, paper, and markers you are able to choose for your starter kit. Angels signing up before 5:00 Central Time on August 11th can choose one of the following to be added to their kits:

Option 1 - Simply Stamps

Choose an additional $50 worth of T-Codes stamps from the Fall/Winter 2008 Inspiration Book

Option 2 - Kit and Kaboodle

Receive one of each of the paper kits from the catalogue. Kit contains (1) Sydney Circle Album Kit, (1) Woodrowe Keepsake Album Kit, (1) Natalee Accordion Album Kit, (1) Pemberly Bay Matchbook Kit and (1) Rockin' Roxie Matchbook Kit

Option 3 - Gung Ho!

Go Gung Ho! and choose:

One (1) 19.95 T-coded stamp set from the Fall/Winter 2008 Inspiration Book
One (1) 15.95 T-coded stamp set from the Fall/Winter 2008 Inspiration Book, and
Three (3) $6.95 TAC Soar With It Paper Collections

For more information, leave a comment in the comments section with your e-mail address, or send me an e-mail at mmtm89@yahoo.com. The benefits are great!

FINALLY! Some Stamped Images From Clear Stamps I Can Live With

I've never really gotten on board with clear stamps. I purchased some a while back ago and didn't really care for them. They were sticky, slimy, smelled funny, feel flimsy and ripable, didn't give particularly crisp images, and yellowed and became brittle in a short period of time.

I guess I've been spoiled by my Angel Company stamps because they're real rubber, and so give better, sharper and more detailed images; unmounted so I don't have to store and work around a wood block; I can cut them close so that I have no problem lining up an image or restamping something where I missed part; and I truly haven't found any clear stamps that cost less. I've been paying approximately the same, and sometimes even less for an unmounted rubber stamp that has better definition and in my opinion the same "pros" as a clear acrylic stamp.

But I've been reading Taylor's blog and seeing all her cute cupcake images that were made from clear stamps, so I thought I'd give them another try. I purchased two sets of cupcake stamps and one set of music themed stamps, and then felt like I threw my money away because the ink just wasn't sticking to them. I'd put stamp to ink pad and see near to no ink on the stamp. I'd MASH the stamp into the ink pad and get ink all over the edges of the acrylic block, and finally got some results, but then it was almost as if the ink were puddling up on the stamp and splattering on my paper and looked awful! I read the care for the stamps on the back of the package and searched the internet to see if I could find something about fixing the problem and came up empty. So now I've had these acrylic stamps in my collection for a few months and not been able to use them. Talk about disappointment! Craft-wise, there are few things worse than getting excited about some new supplies and then getting poor results.

I was finally at the point where I was going to put out a plea for help on my blog to see if I could get some advice back in the comments, when my friend Dawnmarie came to my rescue. We were at our DIA gathering and I was complaining about how I couldn't use these stamps when she told me that new acrylic stamps come with a coating on them and I needed to scrub the coating off before I could get the ink to adhere properly. She recommended cleaning them with the Staz On cleaner, scrubbing them really well, and then immediately washing them with soap and water and rinsing thoroughly. I didn't have any Staz On cleaner (or at least I'm not finding it) but I did find a stamp cleaner that had one of those spongy scrubbing caps and I scrubbed some of that on and then used a soft bristle toothbrush to wash them again with the soap and water and FINALLY I can get a decent image from my stamps.

NOW I can stamp cupcakes, after months of drooling over other people's cards with the cute images on them! And hopefully, this post will help some others that may have been having the same problem. I'm sure I'll always like my unmounted rubber stamps better, but at least now I have options, and can use the clear stamps with the images I wanted so badly.

Mojo Monday Turned On It's Ear

Now that I'm back in town, I got a chance to work on Julee's Mojo Monday Sketch #47. The original sketch can be seen here.

I didn't have any stamps that would fit the oval if I created the card vertically though, so I turned the sketch on it's side, and this is what I came up with.



The paper is more from the Angelee collection, and the stamp set is Seeds of Blessing. I colored the image with Prismacolor Pencils and accented the wings with Crystal Stickles. The inner oval of the stamp is colored with beige colored pencil, but is difficult to see in the scan.

Diamond Island Angels 2008 Project 1

O.K. I promised some projects from my DIA trip, and here is the first one. This was a special date book that Dawnmarie put together for us. The paper is The Angel Company's new Angelee paper collection. A collection you'll probably see a lot of on my blog in the coming weeks because Angelee is the paper collection I've chosen for my board for the upcoming St. Charles Expo.

This book is made with an accordion pleat in the center holding pink library pockets. To make the accordion pleat, you take a piece of 12 inch x whatever height your covers will be (slightly larger than the library pockets you choose). Score the entire 12 inch length of the paper every 7/8 inch and accordion fold. When you're finished, you should have 6 mountain folds when the end flaps are facing up. Then you would attach the end flaps to a piece of covered chipboard, covering the flaps and ribbon to tie the book closed, with a piece of cardstock. Adhere the library pockets back to back on each mountain fold so that you have a pocket for each month. Print the date/occasion cards on the computer, place them inside the pockets and embellish.

I embellished the front of my book with the Flourish Bet Level D Hostess Set from the current catalogue and some of the tags from the Angelee collection, stamped with a flower from Spring Dream.



The inside pages are decorated with the Swirly Gigs stamp, colored in with the Stardust Glittering Gel pens, and the Date Disks and Mini Occasions stamp sets.





I'm hoping that this little date book will help me stay organized when it comes to the cards I should be sending out every month.

Our plan was to have everyone from the cottage that has a blog, post their projects at the same time so you can see different versions of the same project. So check out the following blogs (and hopefully everyone's on board).

Rita: http://ritasangels.blogspot.com/
Dawnmarie: http://monkeybusinesswithdawnmarie.blogspot.com/