So Different

A cute little layout I whipped up the other day using a 6x6 paper . And darnit all if I can't remember who makes it. I imagine it's a fairly recent release as I bought from a LSS right before Easter 2011. But all of my Google searches come up negative and of course I tossed the cover sheet to the pack. Sorry about that.

One of the sheets has these glitter embellished tags. I hand cut them out, staggered them on my layout, and added my journaling to them.

This piece of cardstock has some beautiful embossing on it.

Echo Park Love

So Echo Park is a really neat up and coming scrapbook company. With each release, I think I fall more and more in love with their product. I had the privilege to be at CHA and see this line called "Little Girl" and put it on my keep-an-eye-out-list. About a month ago I heard an episode of Paperclipping Roundtable (love this weekly podcast!) and one of the guests selected this line called "Dots and Stripes Candy Shoppe" as her pick of the week. Ironically, a guest the very next week picked it as well. When I Googled it, I think I began to drool. I need to assess my scrapbooking budget very soon.

Anyways, several weeks ago I got my hands on the Life Documented 12x12 Collection Kit by Echo Park. I was totally drawn to the vibrant colors with yet an aged look. And I loved that the focus of this line was about memory keeping/recording. Lots of journaling spots, date stickers, quotes about life, etc.

So when I happened upon this contest, so to speak, on Echo Park's blog, I knew I had to get busy. And it wasn't hard at all. I dug through my photo collection with no real picture or direction in mind. Just a mission to create three layouts. Below is what I came up with. And at this moment I would like to thank my husband for putting up with my absence over the weekend as I retreated to my scrapbook room.

DADDY, HELP layout


This layout came together fairly quickly. I selected one of the 12x12 patterned pieces as my background. Then filed through all of the other patterned papers and cut out sentiments they had preprinted for me. The pink "life documented" piece, the green "today" bingo card, and the green and orange journaling pieces were all part of larger pieces of 12x12 paper. Every other accent is a sticker. I inked all the paper pieces, adhered them down, added the stickers and there you go.

This shot shows a little of the dimension I added with popdots. I matted that heart sticker with brown cardstock and then popped up the “100% real” sticker.


Supplies:
From the Life Documented Collection
Background piece – 100% real life
Pink “life documented” piece – 4x4 quotes & 6x8 photo mat elements
Green “today” bingo card – 4x6 vertical journaling card elements
Green journaling tag – flash cards
Orange journaling tag - 4x6 monthly journaling card elements #2
from sticker sheet: brown swirls, polka dot heart, green and orange label stickers, “100% real”, rectangular heart, and letters.
Other
Brown cardstock mat for heart – Bazzill

LOVE YOU layout


This layout uses Echo Park's "A Walk In the Life" collection. I trimmed the floral bakground 12x12 piece down to 11x11 and stitched it to a white cardstock background. Then I was pleasantly surprised to find that Echo Park has partnered with Silhouette America and they are now carrying several designs that I can cut out with my electronic die cutting machine (Silhouette). Sweet! So I chose the clouds and the antique frame pieces to cut. Then I simply layered everyting, adhered it all, stuck my photos on top and began to embellish. The "love you" and journaling piece are again part of a larger 12x12 sheet that I cut out by hand. I rounded the corners of each piece. Finally I went to my flower stash and stacked a bunch together with a brad.

In this shot you can see how I popped up the front cloud.


Supplies:
From A Walk In the Park collection
Yellow paper – Element Card Paper
Green paper – Playful Stripes
Turquoise paper – Blissful Day Border
Daisy Background paper – Mother Nature
“Love you” and journal tag – Element Card Paper
Other
White cardstock – Bazzill
Flowers – Prima, Petaloo, and Queen & Co.
Brad – misc.

LIFE IS SWEET layout


This is the most favorite layout I did of the three!

To start out, I used an old Heidi Swapp mask and Glimmer Misted that pink heart onto some cream cardstock. I then hand cut the pennant border pieces out of a 12x12 patterned paper sheet along with the "life is sweet" piece. I rounded the corners of that piece, added some turquoise stitching underneath the sentiment and then traced a line of glue around the pink frame and added some sparkly pink glitter. While that was drying, I went to the sticker sheet that came in the kit and selected words that would compliment my journaling. In order to get the journaling to look right, I used a light pencil first. Then I went over it again with my black pen and erased the pencil lines. This allowed me to make sure I left enough room for my sticker words. I also used that long scalloped border piece from the sticker sheet and backed it with a pink piece of cardstock. Once all the paper pieces were put on I found some coordinating buttons, threaded them with embroidery floss and slapped them on. As you now know, not a ton of product was used, but I think it all came together to create a big impact.


Supplies:
From Life Documented collection
“life is sweet” piece – 4x4 quotes and 6x8 photo mat elements
Pennant pieces – Life Is Good
From sticker sheet – words, scalloped border, and heart under pink button
Other
Pink cardstock – Bazzill
Cream cardstock background – Bazzill
Buttons – misc
Embroidery floss – misc
Glitter – Mark Enterprises
Pink Mist – Glimmer Mist

Happy Home

This layout I don't feel to great about but I am glad I scrapbooked the picture and the journaling. It uses Echo Park products from their Life Is Good line.




It's hard to see in this picture but I popped the houses up with popdots. The crystal swirls are from ZVA Creative or Prima. I can't exactly recall now but both companies carry beautiful crystal swirl embellishments.

Big Girl Panties

I love this layout!!! and it was so simple. I used the background piece of patterned paper from Ym Mind's Eye and basically popped a few dimensional items on top of the already printed designs.

Can you believe those photos came from my old 3G iphone? I love them so much!

Poachlay

Here's a layout I did featuring my oldest daughter's obsession with Chipotle. It's her all time favorite place to eat. She's loved since she was two years old.



I am kind of thinking I should outline the title letters in a brown pen to make them pop a bit more.

Lucky Me

Here's another layout I did at scrap weekend.

I love all the shaped pieces of patterned paper out there on the market. But more often than not, I can't bring myself to buy them. Want to know how I got that scalloped background piece? I didn't buy it like that? It came as a square 12x12 piece in one of the kits I ordered. My local scrapbook store has an AccuCut machine with all sorts of large scale dies that you can use. AccuCut will cut through thick chipboard. So what I did was take 12x12 pieces of thick chipboard and run all of my favorite dies through them. Now I have a stack full of templates that I can trace onto my regular old patterned paper at any time.

Some Scrappy Goodness

Last month I snuck away to what I call Scrap Weekend with some wonderfully talented scrabooker friends. I love these trips. So much so that I have tweaked my schedule and done a lot of eyelash batting at my husband to be able to do it again in September. Yay!

I always come home and think I am going to add the dates to the layouts and then submit them for publishing. But that never happens. In addition, I can hardly remember the products I have used on the layouts so I would be dead in the water even if they liked something.

So for the past month, they've sat in a paper bag and I am finally getting around to posting them here.

Here's the 1st one. And since I like to see my blog look different as often as possible, I'll post all of the others in the days to come. :)


"Best iPhone Photo"

The "iPhone" letters were actually bright pink, but I used a Jenni Bowlin paint dabber in Malted Milk to change the color. The little letters are from Cosmo Cricket.

A close up shot of some of my dimension. The flower is made up of a canvas print tag (I believe the middle has some pale teal and salmon pink sentiment on it). Then the brown plaid part is fabric tape (by e2Daily) that I made by beginning on the outer edge of the flower and folding and sticking as I curled around towards the center. Then I threaded the green button with some twine and stuck it in the center of the flower. Super easy!

Finally Getting DeTANGLED

I did an Etsy search for Tangled ideas. (an excellent source of inspiration) Little did I know that there are a ton of amazing designers out there that will make invitations for you in a digital format -- for a very reasonable price. I saw this one (see below) and decided to try my hand at creating my own digital invite via Photoshop while using this as my inspiration. If you don't quite have the Photoshop skills, I highly recommend using this route for your party invitations. The quality is amazing, the price is totally affordable, and you can quickly email it to all of your party guests or upload the file to Costco and have them printed out so you can send in the mail. Mine went out via email ... see part above where I started late.

Just in case the link above doesn't work, this invite is from assilemward's shop in Etsy.

I really wanted to try and recreate pieces of the movie for this party. Thanks to my sister's boyfriend who works at Lowes, I was able to score several huge pieces of cardboard. On one large sheet, I sketched out a tower (trying my hardest to use the movie's tower as my guide) and then used my stash of acrylic paints to color it up. My husband then built a simple wooden frame and attached it to the cardboard tower so it could act as a photo spot for all of our little Rapunzel princesses.

I also used several rolls of yellow curling ribbon to create a Rapunzel headband. I have no pictures of the process but to do this, I first covered the entire length of a plastic headband (purchased from the 99 cent store) with LONG individual strands of yellow ribbon. I used hot glue -- be careful, it's hot! Then I cut 15 LONG strands of ribbon. Tied them in a double knot at one end. Then I hot glued that knotted piece to the headband. I repeated this process, placing each kotted piece as close to the prior one, until the whole headband had knotted strands across it. When the headband was covered with "hair" I went back and snipped off the tails on the double knots.

Here's my little birthday girl in her tower, letting her hair hang down. I think it turned out pretty nicely. Even some of us adults got into the tower for a picture.

I also very much wanted to recreate the purple flags are prevalent throughout the scenes when Rapunzel and Flynn Rider are in the town for the celebration. Now I know that in the movie they are triangles, but given my time constraints as well as my budget constraints, they were gonna be rectangles at my party. I purchased twelve 12x12 sheets of purple cardstock from Michaels. I cut each sheet into six 4x6 pieces -- these were my flags (12 sheets will give you 72 flags). Then I used my Silhouette cutting machine to cut out several sunburst shapes on some scratch cardstock. I tossed the actual sunburst diecut created and used the negative part as a stencil. Then I put my husband to work painting (stippling) the paint onto the flags. I used acrylic yellow paint from my stash and a foam brush. You may want to cut several stencils out because the paint will begin to soak the paper stencil making it impossible to create all of the flags in one pass. I had 6 stencils and I am thinking 12-15 would have been a good number. I then punched holes in each corner of the flag when the suns were dry and tied them all together using some thin purple satin ribbon. Tada!


In my head, the yard was to be strung with hundreds of lanterns to replicate the scene in the movie where the kingdom releases lanterns for the lost princess. But those darn budget restrictions prevailed and I had to limit the number I used. So you'll see that it looks a little sparse. I also had to factor in the rope swing range which prevented me from going directly across the yard. I found this website that seemed to carry paper lanterns for a good price. They also had paper bag luminaries in various colors. My thoughts on those being that you could hang them from a line and have them resemble some of the more cylintrical lanterns in the movie. This was a daytime party so none of the lanterns nor luminaries would be lit up. Although I think an evening Tangled party would be super awesome! You could totally buy light up paper lanterns and then set luminaries all over the ground with their glowing candles inside (note: fire hazard for little ones, best to go with battery operated candles in this case). Below you can see a shot of the party with a string of lanterns in the background as well as a shot where I hung a few of the lanterns under the patio cover. I used purple, pink, and yellow paper lanterns in various sizes and then lightblue, lime green, orange, and fuschia luminaries.

We commissioned a face painter for the party. No relation to the movie but we thought it would be a fun change of pace. She was awesome!

While walking through Dollar Tree, I saw these straws (below) and HAD to buy them. I thought of all the flowers that were put into Rapunzel's hair when the little girls braided it up for her. Little did I know that when you fan out the paper center, there's no good way of attaching it (no flap to tuck it into, no sticky back, etc). So I had to Scotch tape every flower which was sort of an unanticipated pain and time sucker. Probably why they were at Dollar Tree huh? Normally we do boxed drinks for the kiddos at our parties but given the straws, I bought 1/2 gallon juice cartons. Probably won't do that again. I am not sure how many parents picked up on that and we had almost all of the juice left over. I feel terrible if there were thirsty kids! I could always have just used the fancy straws in the boxed drinks. Lesson learned.

We have a rope swing in the yard and my husband had a good idea of trying to make the rope portion look like Rapunzel's hair. To do this, I took more yellow curling ribbon and tied about 100-150 strands from high up on the rope. Then I proceeded to braid all these ribbons down the rope. In all honesty, I probably should have used more like 1,000 strands to get the effect I wanted, but oh well. The kids LOVED the rope swing. If you have the tree and yard space, I highly recommend it.

With another large piece of cardboard, I projected an online image of Rapunzel and traced her. Then I painted her with my acrlic paints. You can see in the picture below that I also posted WANTED fliers all over the yard. I found this online too.

For a fun food item, I made jello boats. 4 boxes of the Blueberry Jello made me about 22 boats. Super easy. Pour the jello into the clear plastic cups, pop and orange slice on top (the boat), then stick a toothpick through a triangular piece of purple paper and stab it into the orange.

For a game, we played Pin the Tail on Flynn Rider. Unfortunately I didn't get pictures of the game in process nor a picture of the frying pan. But all we did was Google an image for frying pan, print it out on plain paper, cut it out, glue it onto black cardstock, cut that out and there was your frying pan. Slap some two sided tape on the back and you're good to go. Below is the picture we used. This is after the game, hence a piece of leftover tape on his neck. To get this image, I asked on the guys at my work to print it out on our plotter. If you know anyone who works in an architectural or engineering firm, or for a graphics design company, they'll have a large format printer and can do this for you. I am not sure if a printing place like FedEx Kinkos can do it for you since it is a licensed image.

For favors, I did two things. I purchased some paint sets at Dollar Tree. Then I bought a 500 sheet pack of white cardstock from Staples. I cut the sheets of cardstock in half and then packaged a pile of the paper with a paint set, tied it with some of that yellow curling ribbon, and stuck a little note on top saying "Thanks for coming to my party. Here's some paints to let your inner artist shine, just like Rapunzel." Sorry, no picture, but I assure you, a very easy thing to do. I also made some marshmallow pops (see below). To do this, you just buy some candy melts (got mine at Michaels) in purple and white. Melt them per the instructions. Stick a lollipop stick into a large marshmallow, dip in the melted chocolate, and then immediately into a dish of sprinkles. Let harden and then place in bag and tie with more yellow curling ribbon. I got the lollipop sticks and the bags from Michaels as well.

I knew I wanted to do a tower cake. I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this since I am by no means a pastry chef. Initially I thought I would make a sheet cake and the on top with rice cereal make a box type shape and frost it with buttercream. But then I saw this cake from Family Fun's website and I knew I was going in that direction. You'll see that I did end up doing a layered round cake on the bottom and then constructing the tower like theirs on top.

Other details not shown:

For food, we served deli meat, cheese, and bread for make your own sandwiches. We had lots of fruit (pineapple, canteloupe, water melon, raspberries, etc). We had rainbow goldfish crackers.

There were outside speakers so we piped the Rapunzel soundtrack over them.

If I had more time, I think I would have bought or made more luminaries to use as centerpieces for the tables. Instead at the last minute, I bought two containers of plastic purple gem stones from Party City and threw them down the center of the table. Then I let each kid take a gem stone home.

Things I would have liked to have done:

Chalked a big sunburst on the driveway like Rapunzel does in the movie

Created a Maximus out of cardboard for the boys to stand behind and take a picture.

Invented some sort of game using green silly string and a target to act like Pascal's shooting tongue.

Made my own braided bread.

BIGGEST LESSON LEARNED:

Make a timeline list of all the things you want to accomplish in your party. Then assign a mom the task of reminding you of one task at the designated time. Why do I recommend this? Because I forgot to put out the jello boats and also forgot to give the first 3 guests that left the party their favors! Argh!

I am going to take this into consideration and begin to plan my other daughter's Nightmare Before Christmas party now. It's in October. :)

Simple and Cute

A cute little card for my sweet niece's 4th birthday. My first time using baker's twine and I love it. I know it's been super trendy for some time now, but I am always late to the game.

Another Baby's Mini

Here is a mini album I completed today, just minutes before I needed to leave for the party at which I was giving it. Hence the terrible photos. My apologies.

The cover:

Pages 1 & 2 (with acrylic insert):

Pages 3 & 4:

Pages 5 & 6:

Pages 7 & 8:

Pages 9 & 10:

Back cover: