Spring Brunch Centerpieces

I recently had a spring brunch with some family and I decided to take that opportunity to try something that I had been wanting to do for quite some time. These fabric lollipops are what started this whole hair applique business and they turned out to be such a cute centerpiece for the tables. I knew that we were going to use a large dining table so I made the main centerpiece very long.
This planter box I bought at Target and it was I think brown to start off but then I spray painted it with my good ole Heirloom White spray paint and then put floral foam in the bottom. I made the fabric lollipops with t-shirt fabric that I bought at Joann's. The pink and blue I bought by the yard, the green I bought a $2.25 t-shirt and then just cut strips out of it. The yellow is actually white fabric that I bought by the yard and then spritzed with Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist in Lemon Zest. I hot glued the strips while twisting them onto circles of cardstock. I had to make two for each lollipop because I then sandwiched them together with hot glue and the dowel in the middle. I tied a ribbon onto them and tah dah!
I covered the floral foam with green rafia grass (which was perfect being just before Easter!) The banner is made of little rectangles that I cut from patterned scrapbook paper and then I ran them through my sewing machine with a straight stitch and adhered them with glue dots and ribbon bows. This was how I displayed our dessert also... cake pops! Yummy! You can tell that the bottom picture was after we had devoured about half of them!

This is the smaller version that I made for the kids' table. Just like the big one but with fewer lollipops (and cake pops!) I only attached a ribbon bow to this one. The planter is also from Target and I didn't have to spray paint this one because it was already this great purple color!

Did you make any fun centerpieces for Spring this year? Or have you ever combined a centerpiece with showcasing dessert before?

My New Adventure

With 4 kids, a wonderful husband, housework, friends, family, scrapbooking, my photography class, and church commitments, do I really need another adventure?.... well, of course I do! I rarely get pictures of myself but if you look at this one you will see the evidence of my newest creations...

I recently have been searching for cute headbands with fabric flowers on them that cost less than an arm and a leg. But my biggest problem is that headbands give me a headache, so when I find one that is comfortable I am in heaven. But what happens when my basic headband isn't enough? Well I created a little something to add some personality.
I have one basic black plastic headband that I like to wear and is comfortable and I did find some elastic headbands I think by Goody that I like. I needed to create these appliques to be versatile to work on either headband so this is what I did...
I am hand sewing snaps onto the felt strips so that I can attach them onto elastic headbands too! I create the base out of felt because not only is it strong but it's soft against your head. The single flowers and even a few of the smaller two flower appliques can be put on with those metal bendy clips. I wore this one on Easter...
It was really cute and went perfectly with my dress. Oh yeah, and by the way, isn't my hubby handsome?! I just had to get that out there in cyberspace. :)


Once my friend saw what I was making she convinced me that I needed to open an etsy shop... so I did! I opened yesterday and I'm really excited. I'm just starting out so I will be adding lots more designs and colors over the next few weeks so keep checking it out! See Simply Harris here

Boys' 3rd Birthday

Here is the story: a couple of months ago when I was working on birthday layouts for the kids, the only one that I had left was for the boys. So I got out the pictures and the products that I wanted to use and decided to think about what I wanted to do overnight and tackle it the next day. Well, at some point in that next 24 hours my 3 year old twin boys got into my scrap room and saw pictures of themselves and decided to take them... and hide them! When I discovered that some of them were gone I tried to get them to find the pictures for me. No such luck. I decided to wait for a while to see if they would show up and a couple of them magically appeared on our stairs one day. But most of the pictures of Zach were still gone. I waited and waited and waited... got other projects done just knowing that they would turn up. I cleaned their room and everything. Still nothing, so I decided to just reprint the missing pictures and move on with my life.
All of that drama to say that I finally finished their birthday layout! I think that I have said it before but I will say it again in case anyone who reads this has twins. I create 2 page layouts of big events for my boys and each page has pictures of one child on it. I also include at least one of both of them plus any detail shots and I always try to have journaling specific to each child and some sort of title. This doesn't always work with my design but it is nice to have in case some day they (or their wives) want to split up the pages. They go together for now but can easily be split for each of them. Every once in a while I do a page about the two of them but they will just have to share or fight over those.
Here it is. I used SEI Happy Day and I think that it went very well with the boy theme with just a touch of pink that you can't really notice.
Zach's page has a semi title, I just used this super cute happy birthday tag and the 3 is a grungeboard piece that I colored with SEI chalk ink in ivy. It works so well on the grungeboard and I love the way that it came out. I did my favorite new thing which is drawing lines around the outside of my photos to make them standout without having to mat each one. I used the Sharpie poster paint pen in white.
Gabriel's page has this cute little cupcake on it from SEI and the border punch is from Fiskars. I used my wonderful EK success scalloped circle punch for the journaling blocks.
Here is a closeup of the 3.

I'm just so happy that it is done and now I can move on to Halloween and other Fall stuff and not be worrying about where those pictures are. I'm sure that now that I have finished this page I will find them!

Slice Elite and Zootopia

I have been working on a gift album for a friend lately and have finally finished it! I can't wait to give it to her this Sunday. The album is of her grandson and he is adorable. I can't show you actual pages from the album because it's not mine to share but I did want to share some of the cute little designs that I cut using my Slice Elite and the Zoo-topia design card.
There are even some words included on this design card and I am so in love with the shadow feature! It just adds so much to the designs.

Here is the little frog that I cut and I am loving the layering feature. I normally wouldn't have used the polka dot paper but I was trying to tie in the papers from the album. I adhered him with dimensional adhesive too.
I love clouds on layouts and these clouds are so easy to do because you can quickly change the size and it even has a layering feature for them but I just wanted basic white fluffy clouds. I used dimensional adhesive for the little ones to define them a little more from the big one.

I have to tell you how much I am in love with this tree! It was so easy to do and I even used this wood grain paper from AC. I used the same polka dot paper that I did with the frog to tie it in once again. Please excuse my horrible zig zag stitching here... sometimes my sewing machine does this and I don't know why. The back always looks perfect so it must be something with the tension in the top thread? I have no idea what I'm talking about!
Here is my absolute favorite! This sweet little boy was a lion for Halloween last year so this was perfect for the page. I cut his face out of kraft paper and I some how got a smudge of sharpie on his face from when I colored his nose ( I didn't want to have to cut the face again in black just to get his nose) so I re-cut his face in the kraft and then adhered it with foam adhesive so now he is dimensional and I like it even more! I love how fixing little mistakes can make things even better. As the saying goes...
"There are no mistakes, only the opportunity to embellish!"

You & Me

One day last week when I got about an hour or so in my room I wanted to create something. But I didn't want to jump into Halloween yet and the other two pages that I need to finish I was waiting for pictures to be printed at Costco. What I really wanted was to work with specific products that I hadn't had a chance to work with yet, namely, Echo Park's Little Girl collection. So for this page I started with products and then searched for pictures. What I found in my little power sort box of photos waiting to be used was some random pictures of Kaley & I that have just never found a home.... well, there was my inspiration! Here is my 12x12 layout that I created for her...
Each sheet of Echo Park paper is so cute on both sides and I don't have the extra money to buy two of every pack just so that I have two of every sheet so I have to be creative in how I use their papers and stretch them out as far as possible. Which is where this idea comes from: I took one sheet of patterned paper and cut out a 10 1/2 inch square out of the center using my trimmer, I then adhered an 11x11 inch sheet of white cardstock onto the top of that. Then I stitched around it twice, once pretty straight (as straight as I can stitch!) and then once very wavy.

That 10 1/2 inch square that I cut out of the base paper? I flipped it over and adhered it to the center of the white cardstock! One sheet of paper but used in two different ways and giving me lots of color and layers. Here is a view of the back of my paper.
Once I cropped and lined up my three pictures I knew that I wanted to title to be in that empty square so I cut some paper out just big enough to cover my Tim Holtz Alterations label die and ran it through my Sizzix. But I found that just the label wasn't enough to really fill that space. What did I do? I used the negative space that I just cut out and flipped it over! It looks like two sheets of paper but really it's one. Here is a close-up.
I stitched around it as best I could (it was not easy!) and then added one of their cute little journaling cards that is on one side of their paper and then added some letter stickers that come in the pack and I stamped the ampersand symbol.
This little cluster consists of the i love you sticker from the collection pack and the little heart I got at Michael's in the dollar section. It was attached to little clothespins but it seemed just too bulky so I took it off and just added the heart.

I journaled around the outside and voila! A pretty cute page using very little of my precious Echo Park paper.

Bedroom Corner

There is a corner in our bedroom that is kind of behind the door where I knew I wanted to put this little setup. These 8x8 frames are from Creative Memories and I got them before I stopped selling it years ago. They are magnetic and so they are very easy to change out the layouts and I don't have any glass to deal with. I have two 12x12 versions downstairs also.
Here is a close up of the four frames. Obviously I have one for each child and I try to change out the layouts every season. They then go into 8x8 albums that I have for each of the kids. Instant albums... I love it! The only thing I wish is that the ribbon wasn't there going across them. They come with little black clothespins so that you can clip things onto it but it just seems to be in my way. I haven't yet figured out how to take them off without ruining the frames. The black circles in each corner are the magnets that hold the layout in place.
I always do the layouts with one 4x6 picture and I always put their names on it. These layouts have been up for quite a while but the colors went so well in our room that I have left them up.
This little antique sewing machine table sits under it. It is something that has been in my family for a long time and I love that I own it now. On top is a beautiful doily, a vase that my grandmother gave me (that I finally bought flowers for) it's from Thailand, and the glass lotion bottle that was my great grandmother's complete with her lotion still in it, and a little glass dish that was hers also. It has been almost 10 years since she passed away and I like having these little pieces of her surrounding me.
This is the opposite corner of the entry into the bathroom. The only reason why I show this to you is because that framed picture of my husband and I used to be in between the four magnetic frames at our old house. It didn't fit in this house so I split them up. The picture we took using a tripod and remote and then I did some fancy stuff in Photoshop Elements to it and printed it at Costco. Now it sits here in our little workout corner. I have just recently started back on the elliptical after 2 months off (shame on me!).

I love creating scrapbook layouts but often times they go directly into albums and I don't get to enjoy them much. It is nice to have places like this that I can rotate my creations and get to see them before they get put away. The bigger ones downstairs are more for seasonal pages like at Christmas I put up last year's Christmas morning layout, and St. Patrick's Day I put up the girls' clover artwork. The clipboards that are in my office are for current 12x12 pages that I complete and want to enjoy. You can see that here
I hope to get into my room today and create something, as much as Spring Cleaning makes me feel good creating something for just a little while will make me feel better!

So Excited!!!

I am so excited to share with you my next little adventure... I am officially enrolled in Maggie Holmes Beginner/Intermediate Photography Class! I normally shoot in Sports mode because I find that it gives me the best color without the flash and yet still has a fast shutter speed so only half of my pictures are of blurry moving children. But I will learn, in this 6 week class, how to shoot and be comfortable shooting in Manual. I am very excited to no longer have dark and flat pictures and I will be soaking up all of the information that I can from this class!
These are just some bits and pieces of Maggie's photos that I love! She finds the most colorful and texturally interesting places to shoot and I am currently on the lookout for great places and great props to use during my class...
And in order to be a better (or shall I say... better looking) photographer I ordered something that I have been wanting for quite a while now. This came last week...
My very own Jo Tote! If you have never heard of this before they are beautiful camera bags that are roomy enough for me to fit my purse stuff too. So I can basically take my good Canon with me all the time and look good doing it! The inside is customizable with velcro inserts and it is black and white damask, which I am so in love with right now! Here is my new bag in sugarplum...
I think that I am ready for my new class which starts in less than two weeks now. I am already figuring out places that I want to go and people that I want to shoot... I can't wait!