Snowman Brick

Every December and at the end of the school year, we have the children at preschool present a gift to their parents which the children have worked on (I still have the projects my daughter made when she attended preschool here!). These gifts often tend to be items that showcase some sort of growth element or else they are something solid and long lasting (sometimes both). This year the teachers picked something solid and long lasting! Yes, we had the kids make bricks! I am lucky and have the smallest class in the school so I only had to transport 7 cement bricks back and forth. But some of the teachers at school had to deal with up to 16! My own children came with me to Home Depot to buy the bricks and they asked for their own bricks to turn into snowmen. I also bought an extra in case of breakage. None of the bricks for class broke so I just decided to have some fun with my extra brick and make my own snowman. Even though it's not a typical scrapbook or card posting, I thought I would share anyway since I did happen to use some scrapbooking supplies on it. I used some of my old CTMH buttons (which I miss!) for the eyes, as an accent on the scarf, and for the snowman's buttons. I used a pencil tip painted in orange for his nose. I sometimes have issues with my skinny wrists and repetitive motion so hammering eyelets has never been my favorite thing to do. Now with CTMH's Soft Set eyelet system, I am just getting rid of my traditional eyelets. I am overjoyed to find a use for my eyelets! Check out that smile!

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Season's Greetings

The following card was based on a sketch I came across while looking at different blogs. I can't find the original sketch but some sites I use often for sketches are http://cardpositioningsystems.blogspot.com/ and http://cleanandsimplestamping.blogspot.com/. Aside from the paper piecing, this card came together pretty easily.

Supplies Used: (D1380) Just for the Holidays stamp set, (X7130B) Mistletoe Level 2 paper pack, (Z2137) Olive stamp pad, (Z2116) Cranberry stamp pad, (Z578) Corner Rounder, Red ribbon, Nestabilities

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Gingerbread House Thank You

I had seen many great examples by other CTMH consultants of using the Around the Block stamp set as a gingerbread house when this stamp set was first released, but I never tried it out until now. What a fun look! The striped paper from Mistletoe reminded me of peppermint so that's what I decided to use. At preschool, we've been reading Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and the kids had an enormous cardboard box decorated as a gingerbread house that they could play in. When they would go inside, they said that they were gingerbread babies! So cute! My students gave me a tote bag with their handprints and names on it, so naturally, I thought gingerbread house thank you cards would be perfect to send out to them.

Supplies Used: (D1377) Around the Block stamp set, (D1361) Thank You stamp set, (X7130B) Mistletoe Level 2 paper pack, (X5644) Brown Bag cardstock, (Z1336) Opaques Pearl Adhesive Gems, (Z1326) Sparkles Red, Pink, & Purple Assortment, (Z673) White Daisy embossing powder, (Z891) Versamark Ink Pad, Nestabilities

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Studio J Layouts

I think I am addicted! I've been playing around with Studio J, CTMH's digital scrapbooking software, for awhile now because it's so easy and fun. And when I'm not scrapbooking with it, I'm thinking about scrapbooking with it!

I try not to think about "catching up" with my scrapbooking because I want to enjoy the process. It's my creative outlet afterall. But sometimes the guilt piles on. I have birthday albums for each of my children and my daughter's is all "caught up" whereas my son's is definitely NOT. I have all sorts of excuses...my daughter has less birthdays for me to scrapbook, when she was a baby I had to put a lot of scrapbooking on hold which means my son's birthdays didn't get scrapbooked during those years, it's fun for me to use the more stereotypical "girl" paper than boy paper (I just had to scrapbook her tea party birthday right away whereas my son's water themed birthday---third year in a row, but so perfect for a summertime birthday---could wait!) , etc., etc. Well, when I started playing around with Studio J and was able to scrapbook while the kids were getting ready for bed, the first thing that popped into my head was, "Now I can catch up with that birthday album!" My next thought was, "and with all of our summer photos...and our fall photos...and," well you get the picture!

I took the plunge and just bought 10 double page 12" x12" layouts. Since I have a membership, I get the jpegs for free so I can share some of them here. You can click on each thumbnail to get a larger image.

In that last layout of our visit to the zoo, can you imagine how long it would have taken me to trim all those animal photos in the upper right side to the correct sized squares? Now I have done it before on other layouts and if I had a large enough square punch, it would certainly help, but all I had to do for this layout was drag the photo I wanted into the photo well I wanted and it resized automatically. If I didn't like it there, I just dragged it to a different one. I was able to enlarge and shift photos right, left, up, or down as well...all while the kids were getting ready for bed! I'm not going to give up traditional scrapbooking anytime soon, but this is really nice!

Studio J is free to experiment with. The only costs are for your actual layout purchase and memberships if you choose to buy one (worth it for me for the free shipping, free jpegs, and discounted price on the layouts). So even if you don't think digital scrapbooking is for you, you can still play around with it and even use it as a planning tool. See how your photos will look in a certain layout with certain paper before you trim them or your paper. For more information about Studio J, please contact me or click here.

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