Stampin' Up! Hostess Club - More March Projects

Hi everyone!

Here are some more projects that we did at this month's hostess club meeting. I was inspired to make these sweet little boxes after seeing some that other demonstrators have shared. We embellished empty button containers using a variety of products from the Occasions mini catalog, including the designer papers, pom pom trim, buttons, and roses. Some of the papers and die cuts came from the Sale-a-bration paper pack, which you can still get for free for one more week! These are the samples I made to inspire my club members:

Here are some of the boxes the ladies made:

You can purchase the containers here, (or e-mail your order to inkerbel@hotmail.com). They are only $3.95 for 6, and they come in handy for storing all sorts of embellishments, earrings, loose change, candy, and probably a gazillion other little things.

We also did some technique sheets, which we do every month. Here are a couple of the ones we've done recently:

These are always a lot of fun.  I have to  punch a hole in the upper left corner before I can add these to my ring.  I like to keep the format pretty simple and uniform. They are on 1/4 sheets of Stampin' Up! card stock, the sample size is 2.5" x 3.5" (trading card size) and the description is done on a business card template in Microsoft Works (2" x 2.5"). I was introduced to doing the technique sheets this way by Tracy Harp at one of the SCS gatherings, and I've been doing them with my club members ever since.

I have a bunch of work to do on my swaps for the gathering this week-end, so I'm off. I'll be sure to post pics of my projects when I get them done.

Thanks for stopping by!

Laura Albertson ♥



Stampin' Up! Hostess Club - March Projects

 So- I had my Stampin' Up! Club meeting yesterday, and I have a couple of our projects to share.The first one is a card we made that I case'd from Mary Fish. Usually if I copy a card design from somewhere, I change it up a bit so it is not an exact copy of someone else's design, but this card was so fresh, clean

and beautiful just as it is that I did not want to change a thing.The only thing different is the greeting. (I did give the credit to Mary at my club meeting, though!) Here is the card we made:


Maria decided to change hers up a bit (I love that). Here is Maria's card, isn't it sweet?

I love when my club members get creative and change up the card designs. It's always so nice to see a fresh take on something. For this card we used the Stampin' Up lattice die for the Garden green die cut behind the sunflower.

Lattice Stampin' Up! Bigz Die 115958

Price: $21.95



Fancy Flower Punch 118073

Price: $16.95

 



To get the beautiful sunflower shape we used the Fancy Flower Punch and double punched the flower. First you punch the flower out of Stampin' Up! Daffodil Delight card stock, stick it on the end of a small post it note (to help you hold onto the flower), re-insert the flower into the punch and twist it so that the flower is off center and then punch again.  We also did a technique sheet on double punching this month. Technique sheets are a bonus for being a member of my hostess club, and we do 1-2 new technique sheets each month. My club members love it!

Well, I have a couple more pictures from club to share with you, but I am suddenly having a little computer trouble, so I guess the rest will have to wait til tomorrow. See you then!

Thanks for stopping by,

Laura Albertson ♥

More samples from Springfest 3

Hi Everyone!

I posted some samples yesterday from last year's Springfest (local SCS gathering). Friends have been asking about the gathering and what to expect. I never posted last year's samples here on my blog so I am sharing them now. Hopefully it will give you a good idea of what types of things are made for the swaps and shoebox projects. Feel free to ask any questions about these projects. Although I didn't create most of them, I did get to see them all in person, and I participated in the swaps,including 20 of the shoebox projects, so I may be able to answer your questions if you have any.

I am getting excited about the Stampin' Along the Lake SCS gathering that I am attending at the end of this month. Can't wait to see what great projects we'll be making then  :)

Thanks for stopping by!


Laura Albertson ♥

Welcome Back!

Hello there stampers!

It's been well over a year since I used my blog with any regularity. First I was plagued by a computer crash, then got busy with my family as a priority for a while. Last summer I had big problems with my domain name and got frustrated. Lately, the blog has been under a little bit of construction, and I've been busy making a few behind the scenes changes & freshening up the look of my blog a bit.
I hope you like what you see. It's still "under construction" (note the new header and blog buttons I made all by myself using My Digital Studio!) but I will be posting regularly again, so please check back often.

The 4th annual Springfest is coming up in April, so I have been getting a few questions from friends who have never attended about what the projects and swaps are like. Since I never posted pictures from last years event, I'm going to share some here now. Although some of these do not use all Stampin' Up! products,  there are many great project ideas.

I'll post a few more tomorrow, so check back.

Thanks for stopping by!

Laura Albertson ♥

My First {digital} Page!

Okay, I decided to be brave and try a digital page. It took forever. Not because the software wasn't easy to work with- it's actually really fun to work with. I just haven't done much scrapbooking to begin with, and it always seems to take me forever when I am working with photos. I'm always worried about creating something perfect so that the photos really stand out. What I came up with so far is actually a very plain, simple layout, but I may edit it and play around with it some more. What I would like to do is print it out and add some flowers or something to embellish it a little more.
I will say that I really LOVE being able to change the size of the punches, like I did with the curly label punch to frame around Nicole's picture.
I chose to do an 8x8 page, because I like working in the square format but wanted to be able to print it out at home.

I suppose it would have gone faster if I had planned out what I wanted to work on, but really I just opened up the program with the intention of playing around and seeing what I could do. I would have fixed up the photos a little, but I haven't re downloaded GIMP since the computer crashed, and that is the program I have been using to edit my photos.


(click the pic for a better view)

This is my cousin Nicole at her nursing pinning ceremony, along with her husband and her two youngest daughters, Olivia and Sophia. (Sophia is my goddaughter, and she calls me her "fairy godmother". It's so cute!). I have some really great pictures of her sister and her daughter Brittany from the ceremony also, so I guess I will have to do a second page with those photos on it. I'm really anxious to try a blog header, too.

If David remembers to bring the camera home form work tomorrow, I'll have some pics of my club projects to post this week as well.

Thanks for stopping by!

Laura Albertson ♥

Small things can make you smile

I'm so happy. I just made a discovery. Remember I said recently that our computer crashed? Well, we were unable to fix it, but were were really lucky that my best friend Deb was able to retrieve our photos and document files before we erased everything. Just about everything else was lost, though, including all the links in my favorites.
I just got a little bit of happy news when I went to bookmark something a few minutes ago. All of my Google bookmarks are still there! I originally thought they might be, since they are saved online, but then someone told me they probably wouldn't be since they are accessed through my computer and saved that way.

Well anyway- they are still there! The big bummer is that the large majority of my favorites were saved to my computer, not Google. Guess what I'll be using from now on? (not to mention backing up my photos and files from now on. Yep, that is a big Duh, but it seems I usually have to learn the hard way.)

SO... since Debbie was able to rescue all of my photos, I'll have a picture for you tomorrow. I don't have anything recent uploaded yet, so I'll look for something I haven't yet posted. Maybe I'll be brave and attempt a digital scrapbook page!

Playing with My Digital Studio

This is so much fun! No way this would ever replace traditional hands on stamping or scrap booking for me, but I am having a ball playing with my new toy software.
Look what I did today:

Look familiar?
This was so easy to do. All I did was was make a copy of the card I made yesterday by clicking "save as" under the File menu in MDS. Then I opened the copy (keeping my original nice & safe in it's file). I then edited the copy by deleting the sentiment rub-on, adding the picture of Tippy, fussed with the Not Quite Navy layer behind the photo of Tippy for about a second or two so that it fit behind the photo better, and moved the snowflakes around a little. I deleted one of the original snowflakes, and then made a copy of the smaller one by right clicking it and then choosing copy from the drop down box.

At this point I could have been done, but I decided I wanted to change the red color on my card from the original Riding Hood Red to the brighter Real Red. For the scallop square layer all I had to do was click on it and then change the color. For the ribbon, the ribbon knot, and the brads, I did have to delete them off the card and then re-choose the embellishments in Real Red, but it went really fast. Especially since I had already created the same design, I knew exactly what I wanted to add, and where I wanted to add it, so it only took another minute or two.

I am particularly tickled about the fact that I can create a card, and then go back and change it up just a little without having to re-create an entirely new card.
** I do want to mention that I did not lock anything in on my original card, and if I had, I'm not sure if I would have been able to do this. I am still learning, but as I do, I will share with you what I learn.

Have a great day!

hugs,

Laura