Life Outside the Fishbowl

A Little Halloween Inspiration

I had fun putting together this project for ScraPerfect.  I don't often duplicate posts, but I really loved these new Tim Holtz products and jumped at the chance to use them as soon as they arrived in the mail.

To make this project you'll need:

• Background:  Adirondack Alcohol Ink Surfaces, Distress Ink, Distress Oxide Ink, craft mat, heat gun, spray water bottle, black Archival ink, Stampers Anonymous Skulls & Cobwebs
• Embellishments: Idea-ology Halloween ephemera pack, Halloween Trimmings, Mini Pumpkins, Typography, Trinket Pin, Clipboard Clips
• Vintage book cover

I started with a piece of matte Adirondack Alcohol Ink Surface paper and a handful of Distress and Distress Oxide inks.  I smeared the inks on my craft mat, spritzed with water and dragged the paper through the ink.  After repeating this several times, I used a blending tool to fill in areas and add a bit more color.  Once I was happy with the background I stamped his new cobweb stamp on top using the Tonic stamp platform and black archival ink.  Super easy to use and no rummaging for my blocks!

I chose this vintage book cover for it's color. It matches well with the Cracked Pistachio ink I used.  After adhering the paper to the book using The Best Glue Ever, I added my embellishments, twine, and the clipboard clip on top.

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Genealogy Minibook with Eileen Hull's Journal Die

I've started a new minibook using Eileen Hull's Sizzix Journal XL die.  For this project I started with Sizzix's black mat board. You can see a step-out of the basis for the cover on the ScraPerfect blog here. 

It first looked like this:

Which I liked. I liked how the leafing turned out, as well as the contrast of the blue title.  But the more I looked at it, the more I wanted to add something.  I toyed with adding more text underneath the title.  I had a brand-new package of Tim Holtz's Idea-ology Paper Dolls and I thought adding a few around the title would be fun. What I really wanted was to have a few pictures layered beneath the title, which I couldn't do since it was really glued to the tag. 

Next thing you know I was using an exacto knife to pry up the word, ripping the kraft tag. Which was fine, except I broke the word ...  but there were several more to choose from in the Heidi Swapp package. 

So I started again, this time laying down an old Maya Road transparency piece as the base.  I grabbed my bottle of the Best Glue Ever and started layering:  transparency, kraft tag, Paper Dolls, a Cosmo Cricket phrase (tell your story) that ended up getting mostly covered up, another Heidi Swapp wooden word, Tim Holtz memo pin, and a Maya Road star pin (love these!!).  The stick pins go right into the wood and are set pretty snug.

For the time being I've loosely attached the covers with elastic, doubling it up so I have six elastic strands on the inside.  Right now I'm working on the inside of the book and I want to leave myself enough room to (1) add and move pages around and (2) bind the book permanently when I'm done.  The elastic will allow me to hold everything in place as I create this book  - and when I'm done the signatures will be ready to bind. And, if this book ends up like many of my minibooks -- very thick -- I can easily make the spine wider before binding.

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Lawn Fawn's Sliders

We've been doing a blog swap with Lawn Fawn this week over at ScraPerfect.  I was sent the really cute Fab Flowers set of stamps and die, but I had to grab the circle sliders dies as well. Those flowers and butterfly? They rotate all around the card.  Very fun.  I could make these all day.

For details and a supply list, you can find  my post on the ScraPerfect blog here.

 

Halloween Assemblage - and Hamilton

It's been a wild and crazy Halloween around here.  My daughter has gone Hamilton-mad, which led me to purchasing a new sewing machine (hey -- I needed to make button holes) and making some temporary alterations to a wool coat.  I was still sewing buttons as we were trying to get out the door on Monday; we never even had time to carve pumpkins this year. 

I did however, take some time afterwards to make this assemblage clock using a Tim Holtz Assemblage Alarm Clock.  That's what you get for wandering around Michaels looking for gold buttons....  

If you'd like a step-by-step, you can get that on ScraPerfect's blog today.   In addition to the clock, I raided my drawer of Tim Holtz goodies, including metal charms, letterpress blocks, and baubles.  Here's a look at the side:

And here's a bit of info on the Hamilton costume --

Do you know how hard it is to get these guys to stop for a photo??

Anyway --  we found most of the clothing online, but searched through many, many stores to find a coat. 

• Boots --  DSW
• Coat -- the Gap's Double-Faced Car Coat.  It had the color and length, and was on sale (bonus!)
• Shirt -- via Amazon -- PrettyGuide Women's Stand Up Collar Lotus Ruffle Shirt Blouse (a mouthful!).
• Pants -- via Amazon -- YourStyle Stretchy Slim Fit Skinny Long Jeggings.  She rolled these up at the top of the boots.  The only problem we had was the dye from the boots rubbed off onto the jeggings and her socks.

Butterick has a men's colonial pattern,#3072, which I picked up at JoAnn's, along with a yard of fabric, fusible interfacing and as many gold buttons as we could grab.  If you're making this and have time, I'd suggest looking for buttons online, as you need quite a few and JoAnn's only had a few cards in each style.   I used only the collar, lapels and cuffs for this project. 

For each part of the pattern, I cut two pieces of fabric and sandwiched the interfacing between them, so I'd have a finished front and back.  I shorted the length of the lapels to match her coat/size and added close to 4" to the interior edge of the lapel.  This gave me a wide enough lapel so I could pin it on the inside of her coat with tiny safety pins and have it fold over (remember, this is a temporary alteration to the coat).  The collar and lapel pieces I lightly tacked together, so the whole piece is kind of like a funky scarf. 

We used the lapel patten to help layout where the buttons should be. I used the buttonhole feature on my brand spankin' new machine, and then just attached the buttons by hand on top.  In hindsight, I should have sewn them closer to the outside edge of the buttonhole, instead of the middle.

I had hoped the cuffs would stay on their own, but we had to safety pin those as well.  There's buttons on the collar and the cuffs, which aren't shown in this photo.  Now, all I have to do is convince her to actually wear the coat without them....

And, she's John Laurens, not Alexander.  (No, I couldn't tell either...)

 

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Layouts, and a Bit of Life.....

It's been a year, at least, since I've been regularly scrapbooking.  A pile of boxes blocking access to your desk and craft area will do that.  But I've got a few layouts up on the ScraPefect blog today.

Luckily, it's almost as easy as riding a bike. I grabbed a Cocoa Daisy kit I hadn't even opened and started matching up paper. I've even managed to pick up a new D-ring album for 2016, even though my 2015 album has been quite neglected.  I'm looking forward to having some quiet time once the kids are back in school so I can spread out over the kitchen and dining room and do some catching up.

Which reminds me, I also have quite  lot of catching up to blog about -- I started strong last fall and then got caught up in another round of disruptions   renovations. Seemingly never-ending.  It's a bit hard to think and type when they're tearing apart the basement 20 feet from you. 

And just when you think you're climbing out of one thing, life throws a few curve balls.

I haven't talked about this on my blog - I am now so I can warn people. I had to drop everything in January to fly down to be with my family. My dad had a cerebral hemorrhage which left him in a coma with no hope of recovery. After a very long, hard few days we made the decision to remove him from life support.  He was on Xarelto and had been for a few years.  Xarelto can cause uncontrolled bleeding. Thanks to this drug he'd been bleeding internally, finally culminating in a brain bleed.  And, the problem with Xarelto is that the doctors can NOT do anything to stop the bleeding, unlike other blood thinners. There is not antidote to counteract the Xarelto.  The only thing they can do is wait for the drug to leave your system, in about a week.  Too late for my father. 

So, you'll have to excuse me for neglecting this blog for the past half-year or so.  I'm making an effort to get back to a regular blogging schedule -- there's so much from last year's renovation and trip to Scotland I never finished sharing.

 

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A Bit of Glitz

I've got a layout on ScraPerfect's blog today. I used the Best Glue Ever along with ScraPerfect's Designer Transfer Foil and some yummy leafing from IndigoBlu -- royal peacock. You can get a step-by-step on the ScraPerfect blog here.

Other products used: Bazzill cardstock, Heidi Swapp and Studio Calico wooden pieces, Kerri Bradford's "Lovely Little Words," and Kara Dudley's "winter lace" cut file.

Making a Shaker Card

Volunteering to be our service unit cookie manager has meant I've been living & breathing nothing else besides Girl Scout cookies since Thanskgiving, but I'm finally getting back to normal.

I wanted to share the shaker card I have up on the ScraPerfect blog today.  You can find all the details on how to make easy shaker elements on ScraPerfect's blog here. 

Supplies used: paper from Crate Paper's Sleigh Ride collection, the Best Glue Ever, Tim Holtz Picture Wheel die, Vagabond machine, foam core board.

Foiled Again!

I've been playing with ScraPerfect's Designer Transfer Foils. I cut a sheet of shapes with my Silhouette and grabbed some cheap stencils. You can get step-by-step directions at the ScraPerfect blog here.

I liked how they turned out so much I immediately ran off and made a layout -

Here's what I used to make this layout -

Full disclosure: these are affiliate links, and I would recieve a small commission if you decide to purchase through them. Any money I recieve just helps me offset the cost of this blog.

 

Layouts with Multiple Photos

Sharing a layout real quick I made for ScraPerfect. It's hard to believe it was just over a year ago we were strolling around London doing my best to fill up my camera's SD card.  I gathered several of my favorite shots from our first stop and combined them into one big block to print.

To create this photo block I made a new letter-sized document in Photoshop. I created a custom crop at 300 dpi and used it for each photo, dragging it onto my new document after cropping.  When I had all six lined up and spaced I realized the photo block was too big.  To remedy that I selected all six layers, held down my shift key and dragged the lower corner to resize everything together.

Holding down the shift is important -- it keeps the proportions the same. Otherwise you'll end up with wonky, distorted photos.

Hidden Photos on Your Layout

It's nice to be able to spend time and just create, especially after spending a week volunteering at a Girl Scout camp.  Who am I kidding - it's just nice to spend time in air conditioning!

Anyhow, I've been very productive this week. I put together this layout for ScraPerfect and wanted to share a quick way to add extra photos to your layouts.  I used a large tag folded in half that can be flipped open to reveal two more photos - photos that I wanted to include, but just didn't work well with my main photo.

I placed the tag with the fold side down and my main photo adhered on top.  When you open the tag you see two more photos. I've also hidden my journaling in a pocket that was sandwiched between two of the pattern papers.  I had just gotten a pack of Snap's photo flip pockets and just wanted to try them out.

 

Supplies: Kaisercraft, Basic Grey, Crate Paper paper; Studio Calico wood stars and stamps, Maya Road paperclip, Ranger tag, American Crafts Thickers, Snap photo flip pocket, Stampin' Up punch