crafting this and that

Hi!  This is the last of my kids' posts for Simon Says Stamp Special Children's Challenge .  My daughter wanted to make an Easter card for their grandma.  She had such a hard time picking a stamp.  She's kind of indecisive but finally settled on The Greeting Farm's Fleur Anya. She used colored pencils and colored in the background too.  She made little birds in the sky which is what my son had copied too on his card creation.  I let them use my old Stampin' Up papers and cardstock.  She placed the foam flowers and stamped the Easter egg from PTI in the centers of the flowers.  I think she did a great job coloring and embellishing her card.  And Fleur Anya looks so pretty! Thanks for reading!

Hi!  I'm still continuing with posting my kids' cards for Simon Says Stamp Special Children's Challenge . This is a card by my older son.  He picked Milton & Teddy stamp from Wild Rose Studio.  I haven't even used this stamp yet so I'm happy he picked it.  He colored it with pencils and did the background and drew in some birds.  He also added some foam flowers and animals.  I think he still rushes with coloring.  He is not that patient but at least he stayed in the lines. I think he chose to give this to his great-grandma for Easter.  At home, the kids did their treasure hunt to find their crocheted animals.  I think I made some of the riddles a bit too hard.  But they solved them all eventually.  We also had Easter egg coloring and a hunt afterwards at their great-grandma's house.  It used to be only our daughter doing the hunt since she was the only child in the family but now there are 5 kids so it gets really fun....

I actually felt a little bah, humbug, this Easter.  And for the first time (since having kids) we didn't really do anything.  We usually color Easter eggs, but last year we found out my daughter had an egg allergy.  At that time, she was still young enough to not know what was going on and let her brother color his eggs in peace.  This year, probably not so much.  Plus she also can't eat chocolate so we didn't really make a big deal about easter candy either.  But I felt I got a lot of house chores done! And since I had time, I thought I'd better get started on some Mother's Day cards and be a little prepared this year since I didn't make anything last year.  And if I make 1 card, I would have to make 3 (one for my mom, my mother-in-law, and grandma).  I used the sketch idea from Clean & Simple stamping 137 . And essentially just made 3 versions of the same card, although I rearranged the sketch and put my bow...

My son got quite excited when I told him about the Children's Challenge at Simon Says Stamp .  While I work on my cards, he often tries to make his own cards too using my scrap pieces of paper.  And then I get a little preoccupied keeping an eye on which supplies of mine is he using.  But below is usually what he does on his own time. For some reason he wanted to make a diorama.  I think his teacher was talking about it at school recently.  So this is his jungle, with trees, vines, bushes, a hanging red fruit, one cloud and a sun, all taped down using his fancy desk tape dispenser from Costco. Then it turned into a jungle battle with Lego Mace Windu and the clones versus the battle droids.  On the ground, there is a snake on the clone side and ants on the battle droid side. As you may have noticed, my son loves Legos and The Clone Wars.  He saw these videos on youtube where some people color their Lego clones, which he tried to copy ...

Hi!  Happy Easter!  Today I want to share the three little animals I crocheted for my kids for Easter.  I had posted HERE some crocheted Easter baskets and an amigurumi bunny.  That's when my kids saw this book I had called Easy Crochet Critters to crochet amigurumi animals.  It's a book by Vanna White!  Yes, the same Vanna from Wheel of Fortune!  I bought my book from Lion Brand Yarn.  Anyway, the kids requested some animals and I think I had told them maybe for Easter.  So my middle one kept asking me if I had made him the alligator yet and I still wanted it to be somewhat of a surprise so I kept telling him no.  So Easter morning they'll all be surprised!  I'm hoping I can hide them somewhere and maybe make a little treasure hunt out of it. Here's the alligator for my middle one.  And I finally tracked down some safety eyes.  I had to order them at Etsy from HERE .  The prices seemed reasonable and the service v...

Well, that is the sentiment on my latest card.  But I also wanted to say thanks to Eva, for keeping up the blog, making so many beautiful and creative crafty things, and inspiring me to actually use my supplies (but then buying even more things too!)  I can't believe I lasted a year, even if I only managed to make things sporadically.  But it has actually been a pretty productive year for me...recording it all on our blog has been motivational. Anyhow, I can't believe I didn't look at all these challenge blogs earlier, especially the sketch and color combination ones.  They help me out a lot with design ideas...I am the crafty-challenged one on this blog, I mostly enjoy the cutting and pasting parts, not so good at the creativity part.  Let's just say I'm lucky this is not my day job. Anyhow, I'm playing along this week at the  Play Date Cafe ...  And Card Patterns  It's basically all PTI...cardstock, polka dot pap...

Hi!  A little shout out from PTI (for my cards HERE) always makes my day!  I'm back with another card for PTI's Make It Monday #11 Embossing with dies .  I had actually thought of this idea first before my little 3x3 cards but somehow couldn't get it together until tonight.  I had a hard time with colors and then the layout and it just took me some time.  I don't know if I'm completely happy but I do love what I created with the dies. I made a little Easter basket with dies!  The bottom portion of the basket was made with PTI's Mat Stack die 1.  I cut it out with fine linen cardstock and then trimmed it down to the size basket I wanted.  Then I took the rick rack die and embossed it to look like a woven basket.  Maybe you need to stretch your imagination a bit to see it.  Then I took some circle nestabilites to make a handle which I also embossed with the rick rack die but just sort of randomly for the woven look.  I also inked u...

Hi!  I'm continuing to post my kids' creations this week.  So next up is my youngest.  He has just discovered that scissors can cut really well and likes to cut up any stray pieces of paper.  Before that he used these plastic scissors that would just basically rip the paper instead of cutting it.  So now that he is using real kid-safe scissors, he is super happy to just sit and cut.  He has his own "cutting box" that he cuts his paper into so clean up is easy too.  My older 2 also went through this phase and loved cutting in preschool.  I've also recently organized my crafting table and actually stole my kids' bookshelf to store more of my crafting supplies so there is more space to work on my table.  My youngest now can craft next to me during the day and it gives me a little bit more time to craft in between the requests that he makes to stamp an image here or there on his own paper.  He'll color and cut them out and glue them too....

Hi!  I'm playing with dies again as inspired by PTI's new Make it Monday .  The challenge this week is to emboss with dies.  So I thought I'd make a 3x3 card set and also enter it in Moxie Fab World's The Card Sets Challenge .  That challenge will end soon so I better get a move on and post this.  Hopefully, you'll get a chance to play too. This is the first set of 3x3 cards I made.  I cut the circles first with my nestabilities and then used PTI's small rickrack border die to emboss a series of rows onto the lower portion of the circles to look like waves.  I then stamped and cut out the small images from various PTI Tiny Treats stamp sets and popped them up with foam tape.  (Yes, they are tiny images to cut but still manageable).  I cut out larger circles in PTI felt for the layered look.  I really like how this looks and I think the images help to convey the feeling of waves.   I made a second set of cards in red (sorry this ...

Hi!  I thought I'd better get a start on some thank you cards and teacher gifts for the end of the school year.  I made a little thank you card for the school librarian using kind of an older TGF stamp set, Never Ever.  I just used the girl image (and the Imagine sentiment from the Never Ever set) cause she looks like my daughter.  Glasses, long hair and her nose in a book!  My daughter loves to read!  And I know a lot of kids like reading but she loves it!  Every free minute she has, she's reading.  According to her school, she reads up to the 11th grade level now though she is in the 4th grade.  I also used PTI's library card stamp and the library pocket die.  The large leaf is from PTI's Turning a New Leaf die set.  The flower and button are also from PTI.  I stuck a little heart stick pin (from Maya Road) through the button.  I saw this from Danielle Flanders blog and thought it was a cute idea.  I wrapped so...

Hi!  Today I want to share the Easter treats my daughter will be passing out to her classmates.  There are 29 kids in her class!  I think that is way too many.  My son's kindergarten class has 23.  I think that is more manageable but still a lot of kids to teach especially a bunch of active little kindergartners. Here are the treats for the boys.  I did all the cutting and my daughter picked out all the stamps and did the stamping, coloring, gluing, packing and also the cleaning of the stamps!  She loves to clean stamps.  I used PTI's lunch box die and taped the ends to make like an envelope.  It was big enough to slide in 2 silly bands.  For the boys, she used PTI's Tag-its #2 for the circle border and the bunny from PTI's Tiny Treats Valentine's set.  She colored the bunnies with pencils and gave some of them fun designs and even colored in the backgrounds.  You may have to click on the photo to see it better. These are f...