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.