Recent Projects

*remember to click on the picture for a larger image view (sorry some of them are blurry)

Well folks, I've been working a lot lately and not in the professional sense! Birthdays, graduations, swaps you name it! I've been making a lot of different items and thought I would share some of the high lights with you!

This jointed mermaid was created for my friend Polkadot P. I really like the way it turned out. I know a lot of folks get really detailed with their dolls by adding more 3D embellishments, but I like the simplistic look only paper can give.

The cool thing is, if you take out the brads out of her clam-shells, fins, and tail you can flip them over to reveal other coordinating patterns. I also made 3 parts to her hair so their is lots of movement to her.

I've been slacking on my homemade cards lately, so when a few birthdays came up, I tried a new style.I started making these fold out cards. I've only made a few, but I need to branch out with some different ideas. The Giraffe one got great reviews! I find that putting googlie-eyes on anything makes it 10 times cuter! The Giraffe was done in bold marker and I chalked in the back ground to give it an airbrushed effect. These are really fun and different and VERY easy to make. One of these days I'm going to sit down and make a bunch of them to keep on hand. I'm having a hard time finding ideas for these cards. I've thought of doing other animals like a wiener-dog, snake, alligator and maybe something naughty for a bacholorette party (I'll leave it up to your imagination)! The Pinocchio card was made for a friend of mine who is really into Disney. She thought it was pretty funny. I think if I ever remake this card, I'll draw some leaves coming off his nose. I had to make it in a rush, so the close up of the picture might reveal a few errors on the paper. If you have any cute fold-out card ideas, I would love to hear them!

Another project I worked on was a creative Matte frame for my best friend's little girl's first birthday. Her baby room is done in a jungle theme so I thought (since I'm poorer than a church mouse) that I would make her something for her room that would last through the years. I first bought two mattes. The bottom one I lined with DCWV glitter stack paper and the top one I chalked with various yellows and greens for the back ground of the "jungle". On watercolor paper I painted bright animals and added glitter. I used really cute tropical letter stickers to add in her first name and birthday. This picture doesn't do it justice!!! I figured that mom could put in a family picture from the party, or a picture of baby Paige eating a messy cupcake! The frame was a HUGE hit at the party. Little Paige liked it and I love this picture of her pointing to a lion. I know that this frame will be on the wall for a long time as it has her baby theme and hopefully a cute 1st birthday picture! Oh, and for those of you wondering, yes Paige is really 1 year old, but is the size of an average 2 year old. She got her dad's genes and he's built like a linebacker!

I think my favorite new project has been Matchbox fills! I really had no idea what they were until swap-bot had a bunch of listings for them. Basically, you take an empty matchbox, decorate it, and fill it with tiny items. You can make different size matchboxes depending on what you want to fill it with. I found that making the matchboxes from scratch using the template on swap-bot found here: http://blog.swap-bot.com/rachels-matchbox-template/was way easier than trying to cover up an old one. The one shown here, was for a summer themed 32 count matchbox fill swap (BTW 32 count means that the matchbox holds 32 matches). I think anything "sun" colored reminds me of summer so I stuffed this matchbox full of yellow, pink, orange and white items. Some Disney, spongebob and hula hello-kitty stickers were added to represent various destination vacations (beach, Disneyland etc.). I have seen a few pictures where people had only filled their matchboxes with a few items, but I stuffed mine as full as I could get it! I hope my swap partner likes it! Since I had a lot of fun with this project, I whipped out a few more in different colors and themes! when things slow down, I'll host a matchbox fill swap myself! I love brads and tiny embellishments to use in my projects so the more the merrier! I also find myself saving small odd items for future fills.

Those are just a few things I've been working on lately (outside of regular scrapbook projects). I've had a lot of fun experimenting around with different projects. I've been getting so much inspiration lately that I've been full of ideas!!!!