Getting ready for construction

For the past few days I have been involved in a major house project.  We need to have repairs done to fix the ice dam damage to our house that occurred last winter.  We are also having a few things done in addition to the repairs to redo the design of the area where we have had the most problems.  It seems funny to talk about ice dams in June, then again - it was around 55 degrees today.

We had to empty out my husband's study and find new places for all of his furniture for the duration of the project.  The laundry room next door to his study won't be directly impacted by the work, however, it seemed like a good idea to get in there and do some reorganizing.  So I have been sorting and cleaning and finding things I forgot I had!  The laundry room tends to be our "dumping ground" for the things that have no other home or the things that just need to be quickly cleared away from the main part of the house.

I am debating whether I have the courage to post a "before" photo of the laundry room - I will post an "after" view since one of the motivations to finally get things sorted out is the need to find a place to put the Yudu machine I bought recently.  I'll definitely be trying some projects - maybe some things for the wedding - as soon as I have a clear area to work with this very large machine!

I was sorry to realize that I completely forgot about Flag Day on Tuesday - so I created a few patriotic rosettes - what do you think of them?  I have been doing some experimenting with a new software program and trying out lots of different designs.  I'll go into more detail soon but I wanted to share a few things that I have designed with this program that combines digital scrapping with the cutting of files.

 I have been having fun adapting images to make new designs.  I think I need to be two or three people so I might have a chance at making all of the things I have designed in my mind!


Thanks to everyone who left a comment or emailed with suggestions for the wedding ring pillow.  I think I have a plan worked out in my mind - I hope it works!  I haven't forgotten about the last two challenges - I hope to be able to finish my little projects and post them later this week.  Thanks to those of you who gave them a try - there will be more coming soon...

link to Discussion Day #5 - Life is too Short...

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Sneak peek at the start of a special project...

Our older son will be getting married in September.  It is a very exciting and busy time, with lots of details to attend to.  I am working on a few "crafty touches" for the big day.  One of the things they thought I could do is to make the ring pillow.

I made the ring pillow for our wedding and also for a few other family weddings.  The top of our pillow was needlepoint.  This took me several intense weekends of work during law school -there was a lot of ivory background to fill in!  (This is not a very sharp photo - I had to zoom in on a large group photo to show the pillow.  I'll have to find the pillow and take a new photo)

When my Dad moved to the retirement community, we needed to empty his home of over 40 years.  This box was with my Mom's things.  She died just before their 49th anniversary.  If she was still alive, they would have celebrated their 64th anniversary last week.

The wedding veil is long gone (the tulle disintegrated over time) and the headpiece is not in very good condition after all these years.  The small pieces have started to come off the band.

My plan is to incorporate a few of these little flowers on the ring pillow as a way to remember my Mother on the wedding day.  I know she would have loved the role of "grandmother of the groom"

I also want to use the graphics and font from the box for some digital projects.

The little cherubs are adorable and I see some other pieces of the artwork that will be nice additions to my digital library.

I am trying to work out the final plan so I can be sewing or embroidering while we are traveling this summer.  So ... back to the sketching and planning - any suggestions?

link to Discussion Day #5 - Life is too Short...

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Damask Decor in Velour at Scrappy-Go-Lucky

Today is my day to post on the Scrappy-go-Lucky blog.  I have been using and enjoying the Damask Decor cartridge and I used it for today's card.  There is a sneak peak at the card above - to see the full card and find out how I made it please click HERE to go to the post on the Scrappy-go-Lucky blog.

 

Damask always brings to mind formal occasions and elaborate decorations.  It also makes me think of flocked wallpaper.  I think I have been in many restaurant dining rooms with fuzzy damask designs on the walls.

Back in January I made a card using flocked contact paper - you can read the post HERE.  At the time I was using a roll I had purchased long ago and I couldn't find the wrapper to give you more information about the material.

I went back to our local five & ten and I found more of the contact paper - in black and blue - so I bought both!  Here is a photo of the label with all of the pertinent information if you are trying to track down this paper for your own projects.  I don't have the receipt handy but I think it cost about $7 for the roll and the roll is quite large - enough for plenty of projects.

The card base was cut from this DCWV cardstock.  I just love these colors and have them in my dining room (but the paper is not flocked!).  I was lucky to find it on sale a while ago - I am not sure if it is still readily available.

The added texture from the flocked contact paper adds a lot to the card and it is so much easier and neater than adding flocking.  I used multi-cut 2 with blade depth 5 and pressure at 4 and speed at 3 and the cut was perfectly clean.  The adhesive is already on the cut and it is somewhat repositionable so you can get things lined up perfectly even if you have to try more than once.

I like to keep an eye out for different types of material to try cutting with the Cricut.  It is fun to add dimension to the card with this simple technique.

Please be sure to pop over to the Scrappy-go-Lucky blog HERE to see the full card and directions - while you are there be sure to check out some of the projects my fellow Design Team members have been making.

link to Discussion Day #5 - Life is too Short...

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Another Great Site for Word Clouds

I recently posted a reminder about the Wordle site for making word clouds that you can use for various cards and projects.  I started looking around for other sites and I found one that you should definitely visit and use to try making some word art. 

This site is called "Tagxedo" and it has lots of interesting options.  For the image at the top of this post I used the description of the Cricut Imagine machine from the Cricut.com website as the text.  (Just click on any image to make it larger).

You can change the font and the orientation of the words and make another cloud.  Just keep spinning the various options until you find one you really like.

There are many color themes to choose from and you can even do your own thing and choose all custom colors for your cloud.

Another nice feature is the ability to fit the words to a shape.  Here is a simple heart (in another interesting font and color palette).

The shapes give an interesting twist and there are lots of stock shapes to try.  This elephant is filled with words relating to Mother's Day that were used for the site example.

You can even upload your own shapes to be totally creative.  I tried it with a Cricut shape from the Lovely Floral cartridge using my blog url as the text source.  The possibilities are truly endless.

The Tagxedo site is HERE.  There are also three blogs connected to the site.  I am fascinated by the portraits that appear in the gallery on the main site and in the Celebrity Tagxedo blog.  Here are the links to the blogs.

All Things Tagxedo

Daily Tagxedo

Celebrity Tagxedo

I started out intending to make a word cloud for Father's Day.  I still haven't done that - I was having too much fun just trying some of the many options.

I hope you are having a great weekend - it rained here and since it was Graduation Day at the high school the ceremony had to be held inside.  It also turned very cold - from nearly 100 degrees a few days ago to the mid 50s today - will the weather ever be "normal" this year?

link to Discussion Day #5 - Life is too Short...

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Father's Day is almost here...

I have had several requests for a Father's Day project that is relatively quick and easy to do.  This word book is something I designed last year and I wondered why people were not finding it and then I realized that I didn't have a project label for "Father's Day" in the extensive label list in the right side bar.

Someone asked me about the labels recently and the letter code system that I use.  Quite a while ago I realized that it was difficult to search for particular things on my blog and started a system of labelling my labels with a code.  I did quite a bit of reorganization to try to keep things in categories.  For example, "C" stands for "Cricut Cartridge" and by putting this in front of each cartridge name, all of the cartridges should appear in alphabetical order.  I am hoping to be able to finish up with the revised categories over the summer.  In the meanwhile, I have added a label for "H - Father's Day"  which means "Holiday - Father's Day."

This book was designed with Base Camp which is a great cartridge to use for basic word books.  It could be adapted quite easily to use another font cartridge if you don't have Base Camp.  I used papers from the DCWV Natural Stack - they have a great copper metallic finish on some sheets.

The original post with all of the assembly details and the free file to download can be found HERE.  There are also directions for making the card in the same post.

I hope you have a safe and crafty weekend!

link to Discussion Day #5 - Life is too Short...

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