MORE FATHER"S DAY PHOTOS

I am not a great computer person. I admit it. I tried to add lots of pictures to the post about Father's Day and it just would not keep them in the post. So I am making a second post with the remainder of the pictures which I felt were worth sharing. I haven't learned how to do my writing as captions underneath the photos yet. Maybe someday! Thanks for stopping by.

89 YEARS

My card is for Crazy 4 Challenges "Using paper flowers". It also is for
my mother's 89th birthday. My plan is to be there for a week and help her celebrate by taking her out to dinner. We always enjoy ourselves a lot when we are together. There is 20 years separating mother and daughter's ages but we share a lot of the same characteristics.

This is one of the most thought out cards I have made. I have wanted to make the spring-fold card for some time. It folds flat to fit in an envelope but when taken out, stands up or springs up and the front can be seen. There isn't an "inside" of the card so everything is on the front. My card uses 2 kinds of paper flowers that I made by hand.

Mother loves flowers, and I had recently won the Penny Black stamp with a flower basket sitting on a wood chair. I thought it might work out good. The way the card folds, there is a diamond shape that everything has to fit on. I made the diamond shape larger. My only regret is that I did not run it through the Swiss Dots folder on my Cuttlebug. The "hanky" looked a little flat. I wanted it to have that Martha Stewart eyelet lace edge. I fussy cut around my Penny Black image that I had colored with Stampin Up Markers. I matted the image in med pink, fussy cut around at 1/8th" and then matted on a darker shade of pink and fussy cut around that. I pop dotted the image on the white "hanky" and then adhered the hanky to the folded card. I added some striped pink paper on the base, and used double stick tape to help hold it in position. I used my double slot punch to make a place to tie the green ribbon I colored with a marker to make it the right shade of green. I stamped the "Happy Birthday To You" and matted it on the darker pink. I punched circles and used sparkle brads for the centers and made them look like the deep pink Cosmos that are in the image. I only had two of those brads so made a fake brad with Stickles to mimmic the real ones. Can you tell on the card which is the fake? I also punched tiny blue Forget-me-nots and put a creamy yellow pearl in the center of each. They look realistic to me. Lastly I added a shiny silver butterfly held on by double stick tape and some Martha Stewart "green frond leaves".

Jack has been coming into the craft area when I am there, tippy-toeing around until he is in front of me and makes a place on my cut scraps off to the right. It is nice to have some company while I am crafting. He was rescued by me in our MN neighborhood and was a stray and starving. He likes his Mama because she is the one who gets the food out! LOL! Thanks for coming by.

FATHER'S DAY BREAKFAST

Today was Father's Day and we drove our son and his family up to The Shed restaurant and met my Son's FIL and his wife, Susan, for a late breakfast. The Shed is like Cracker Barrel restaurants with lots of goodies in front to buy. Breakfast was really good. Jodi had the Cinnamon Roll French toast and the slices were huge because the Cinnamon Rolls are huge. I tasted it and I am ordering that the next time.

Emma and Matti looked so cute in their little sundresses, They are always so well behaved when we are out anywhere. Here are a few pictures of some of us at the restaurant. There was an old tractor and wagon out front and so there were many photo ops. There will be more pictures coming in another post. The weather was gorgeous and we all had a really good visit. Thanks for stopping by.

TEACHER THANK YOU CARDS

Emma wanted to make "Mr Joe" a Thank You for making her memory book of her Pre-K year. Included was some of her class work, some of her art work, some journal pages that she dictated and he wrote, and lots of pictures from the year. It is a very nice book.

Since her class was called "the butterflies" I showed her what butterfly stamps I had. She picked out a Hero Arts set of four butterflies. Matti also wanted to do a card for one of her teachers, so we had two going at the same time. They picked Martha Stewart pastel chalk inks and did each butterfly a different color. Since they love to punch, they did the front right edge with the Martha Stewart monarch butterfly border. Emma chose blue to put behind it and Matti pink. We then added iridescent Stickles to some of the butterflies on the front. They had a hard time squeezing the bottle to make it smooth. Inside it says "Special Thanks" and inside we added a punched little butterfly with one wing up. Matti wanted purple and Emma stayed with the blue. It is a simple card.

Then we got the idea of making a bookmark. I have the cutest Inkadinkado stamp that is a direct quote by a child named Harris Weinstein, age 7. He says, "if i had TEN thumbs, I'd put them all up for you". So we took a bookmark sized piece of white card stock, they rounded the corners, punched a hole for the ribbon, stamped the quote and there was room where they also stamped a butterfly in pink. Emma had a med blue ribbon and Matti had a lavender. I thought they were sooo cute and hope the teachers like these bookmarks as keepsakes. Both girls signed their cards and the bookmark. Gotta have their work documented. It was a fun morning project.
Thanks for dropping in.

FATHER'S DAY CARDS

Last Tuesday the two grand daughters came over to spend the day with us. I helped them make three cards...one for their dad, and one each for the two grandpas. The one for their dad utilized a photo of their faces. They each had stamped a flower at Archivers for the Hero Arts Demo weekend we attended and I cut the flowers out and used their faces in the middle of the flowers. Each girl drew the stem with a green marker They punched leaves to add to the stems. They love punching ANYTHING! They each helped to punch green grass with the Martha Stewart grass border and Emma requested I add brown dirt at the very bottom. They each wanted a worm too but they are hard to see on either side of the saying "All things grow with love". Inside is the saying "Happy Father's Day".

I let them choose a stamp for each of the grandpas. Matti picked an owl stamp from Penny Black for Papi Bill's card. Emma found a lovely Mallard duck pair in water with reeds behind for Grandpa John. Matti stamped the owl four times and she colored three of them "her" way and I suggested she try some browns and yellows like the top of the stamp. I let her pick which one she liked best, and of course she liked the owl with purple eyes. but she agreed the brown one was the one Papi would recognize. (I let her take the other three home to use on a picture. and she was happy.) Emma did a wonderful job coloring the ducks, asking if the boy duck was the pretty one. She has small muscle control and colors in the lines well for 5 years.

We kept the cards simple but I wrote on the front of the owl card, "Whoo loves you Papi?" and they punched some leaves to add to the branch the owl was perched upon. Inside was the same Happy Father's Day, but I wrote the word "grand" in front of "father" to make it appropriate.

I am amazed at these two little stampers/crafters. They enjoy it so much, and work really hard. I direct some of their choices, but try to allow them input about every design element. Making choices is how we all learn...and that is fun to watch. They have already learned to punch, stamp, use the glue runner and make decisions about colors, images to use, sayings, and so much more. Thanks for stopping by.

HAIR STYLIST IN TRAINING

What is it about bows and clips, curls, and braids and all the things little girls like to have done/do with their hair? Are they training to be a hair stylist, or just want to look pretty and special?

Here Matti combs the back of her sisters hair. Emma was looking up and so not the most complimentary of her. She has beautiful eyes, big baby blues. I have a drawer full of their hair things. They each have their brush and comb...pink for Matti and purple for Emma. There are pony tail holders, flower clips, Princess rubber bands, and others. It is fun to play with hair. I used to brush my mothers long hair at night. Girls will be girls. Thanks for dropping by.

EMMA'S GRADUATION!

Next year Emma, our oldest grand daughter, will be going to Kindergarten. Her years at the Christian Day Care have been wonderful years or growing, learning and becoming the person God wants her to be. Her class was called the "Butterflies" for obvious reasons. They even sang a song about a caterpillar who spins its cocoon and then turns into a butterfly. The program was precious and the teachers have fallen in love with their students. It was very touching and I am glad we were able to attend and watch the ceremony of their names being called, going up on the stage, and getting their certificate and receiving gifts. They were given a DVD with a slide show of over 350 photos of the year. I was told by one of the teachers that I am on the slide show where they show some of the grand parents who attended Grand Parents Day. They each had a scrap book with some of their papers, and pictures, and a few journal pages where the teachers wrote their comments down. And a couple of books to read.

I made Emma a special graduation card. All the store cards were made for older grads and were not suitable. I used my Precious Moments Birthday cake girl stamp. She is carrying a little cake with candles. I used tape to mask the cake, inked the stamp, and removed the tape, and stamped it. I did this six times., two of them I forgot to remove the tape and had a little blob of ink where the cake was. Grrr! Those things happen, right? But I was able to use the heads only of those for layering. I drew a small mortar board cap using the head as a guide for the fit. I also drew a rolled up graduation certificate. I cut out the sleeve of her dress and the hand and got it ready to layer that too. I colored her skirt a blue/lavender shade, used my Copic gray to add shadows to the folds of the apron, and the shadows of the sleeves. So after coloring the bottom image, I layered her sleeve and head with the grad cap. The graduation cap was colored purple, with a tiny purple brad on top. I wanted a tassel and so took lavender sewing thread and dyed it a little darker with a Stampin Up marker. IT WORKED! I doubled the length and wrapped it around under the brad head twice. Next I started tying knots close together until it was long enough to fall over the edge of the top of the cap. I then cut it off about 1 1/2" long and used the cut off part to wrap twice around where the knots stopped, and tied in such away to secure the end and the tails were cut off to make the tassel. The ends were kind of squirrely, so I used some glue on them to hold them together. But it is a handmade miniature tassel and I'm "bustin" my buttons over that one.

I used a purple print paper for the background (all the purple items look blue in the photo but DH took the picture and his camera didn't get the colors right for some reason.) from a little pad of papers from Provo Craft called "itty Scrap Pads backgrounds"bought at Michaels some time ago. I don't think they sell it still but it is called French Country Colors. My matting is two Bazzil pink shades: Strawberry Splash which was smooth and the second was Watermelon Sensation which had a little bumpy texture. And I added two pink tulle folded bands across the matted background before I put the image on. My grand daughters favorite colors are pink and purple and I often use those colors for their cards. Thanks for letting me share.

SPRING FLOWERS

My card uses a wood mounted Rose Decor stamp. It sat on my table for a month staring at me until I started by stamping it four times, and thought some more. I knew it would lend itself to multiple layering. I took one of the stamped images and trimmed around some of the leaves sticking out and then used the inverted Nestie circle die to cut it out. I also think I want to try some other die shapes with this image and see what I can come up with.

When I looked around at some of my samples of punches I have bought recently, I had a piece of green that had been punched with the new Martha Stewart branch punch. It mirrored some of the leaves around the roses and I liked it instantly. I used a rose mat behind the image to buffer the contrast between the white of the image and the green. I also took some yellow and dusted the edges of the white for that same purpose. I layered two panels behind the branch punched piece. That particular punch does not have a "branch" corner The corner for that border has a bird on the branches and that look did not suit. So I just punched straight and let the branches "fall where they may", and it doesn't look half bad. The print paper on the two vertical panels is shades of rose as is the matting. I used a piece of pink tulle for a bow. The saying is one of the Michaels $1 stamps. "You Bless Me" is such an encouraging saying. I used the Nestie #10 to cut it out and then cut a larger one of the same shape but in rose. But it was too large for the front and covered up part of the rose image and Grrrr! I didn't like it. So I cut off the top and bottom portion of the saying and just made it straight across. I did the same with the matting, and it fit and had room for a pink brad on either end. Funny how the creative mind keeps adjusting and trying something different until it "pleases the eye and looks right to the beholder". For taking so long to get started, I am pleased with how it turned out. The layering brings the roses to life. I used my Stampin Up markers to color it. Thanks for stopping by.