Organize your Stuff: Week 18 (round 4): Tools part 2

This is a short post today. Fabulous Spouse is taking us to Idaho, and we are en route sans kids. Thank you Awesome Auntie for watching them! However, the POW did promise a 2nd post, and we have a hot spot (woo hoo!)

For starters, here is a card that Creative Me was totally inspired by one of our talented WOYWW gals (Franka Benjaminsen) to make the following “one-layer” card:

The color inspiration came from the Play Date Café Challenge PDCC #92

As for tools, here is our must have for this round:

Martha Stewart Scoring Pad

Other Must Haves from previous rounds:

Round 3: Tim Holt Tonic piercer (or as Girl Friday calls it “the pokey tool”)

Round 2: Perfect layers Matting Tool

Well, enjoy your weekend!  We will be back Monday with our One Little Word Homework for July!

Organize your Stuff: Week 18 (round 4): WOYWW & Tools

Happy Wednesday! Sorry that last week was a one post-er, but kept waiting for that shot of Girl Friday and the missing tooth! Finally, here it is:

Her tooth fairy brought 5 “gold quarters” (5 one dollar gold coins, which according to the Illusive Middle Child, tooth fairies make…like Santa’s elves make toys) and a little Hello Kitty tin. After this though, she is on the reduced $1 per tooth rate. Not only did Girl Friday finally lose hers, but Illusive Middle Child lost yet another just tonight! (must remember to finish blog and go to bed before the tooth fairy comes!)

Here is our desk:

It is full of crafty things that Creative Me has been making. To skip ahead to other crafty desks, head on over to Julia’s Stamping Ground.

First on Creative Me’s list of craftiness for this week, was our design team card for Tuesday Trio’s Sketch #77- Acrylic paint. We just LOVE these vintage Alice in Wonderland stamps from Clear Art Stamps and are always looking for an excuse to use them! Here, we painted our roses…er..brads red!

Next is a layout from Girl Friday’s 6th birthday. OCD Me really wants to get 2010 moved out of the D-ring temporary binder and into a permanent post bound. This was one of the missing layouts keeping us from calling it done (this and all of July and August). This is TRUE scrap booking, as all these paper blocks car scraps from previous layouts! Girl Friday even helped... it was her birthday after all, and helping is what Girl Fridays do best!

Finally, as you can see on our desk, we have been busy creating for our favorite charity, Operation Write Home using CTMH stamps. Girl Friday helped me put together these cards destined for our overseas troops so that they can write home... did I mention that our TV died this weekend, and the repair man does not come until tomorrow? No? Total family time in the cool rain that is our summer.  Oldest Child, who has been away from home for two weeks at camp almost had a coronary.

As for tools…OCD Me keeps our favorites in a scrapping tote for both ease of transport to crops and such, and ease of finding as Creative Me has a nasty habit of losing tools in plain sight on our desk mid project!

What are your favorite tools? My list will be up by Saturday…Pinky Swear! (We do not need to wait on pesky teeth this time!)

Organize your Stuff: Week 17 (round 4): WOYWW & Punches

To start off this Wednesday, here is a look at our desk. As it is punches week, you might note the row of Fiskars border punches on top of our stamp wall/ mini milk crates. It is actually a little tidier than usual at the desk today, but that is because Creative Me and Girl Friday have been working on a small, yet very important project… a tooth fairy pillow!

Girl Friday has discovered her first wiggly tooth, and as is tradition in our home, now has to make the little cloth sack (with Mommy supervision from Creative Me of course) to put under her pillow to keep her teeth…and treasure… safe. Girl Friday picked out the fabric at the store herself. It is no small wonder as she has thousands of stuffed elephants strewn about the house.

To see other desks and what they have left behind, go to Julia’s Stamping Ground for the complete list of WOYWW-ers this week.

As for this week’s card, we had to incorporate printed text in our Design Team entry for Tuesday Trio’s Sketch #76. Our text came from a 1930’s German dictionary that the Inner Hoarder found at St. Vincent’s (like Goodwill, but for Catholic Charities). It is slowly being defaced and added to Creative Me’s crafts… a total score for $1.99!

The colors were inspired by an Australian site that we found while hopping around the net (probably from one of you WOYWW-ers!) called Just Add Ink.  They post on Fridays, and this week (JAI 76) it was an inpirational photo for your mojo (and as Austin Powers can attest, we are nothing without our mojo!). We just LOVED the colors!

We used punches in a couple places on this card. Creative Me used the Fiskars notebook border punch on the background piece of text (totally covered in glimmer mist!!- sorry, still a favorite new technique). We also punched out the sentiment, and put liquid adhesive on a circle punch to mount the rosette when we were making it.

It is another quiet, and cool, week here in the Pacific Northwest. The weatherman has said that we have had 78 minutes of weather above 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) this year, and 18 hours and 45 minutes above 75 degrees (also Fahrenheit). Oldest Child has returned from his mission outreach trip, and is now at Boy Scout sleep away camp. Fabulous Spouse is two time zones away in Connecticut (where they still have real Chinese food) *sigh* and warm summer weather. Therefore, the POW is entertaining the troops, and making sure that Girl Friday and the Illusive Middle Child do not drive Awesome Auntie crazy.

Hopefully, we will have a layout…and a lost tooth… for the weekend!

Organize your Stuff: Week 16 (round 4): Chalks, Paint, Glitter, and Stickles

Well the quiet week has come and gone way too fast! Creative Me finished this layout from our desk picture on Wednesday.

Originally, the plan was to use stickles on all of the red dots, but at the last minute the POW decided to reign in Creative Me and leave it as is. OCD Me was a little conflicted, since we always try to tie in to the week that we are organizing. However, OCD Me is also the one who constantly criticizes Creative Me for swinging too far to the Dark Side and venturing perilously close to the infamous Product Vomit.

The POW, self-proclaimed arbiter of my mind, decided that when OCD Me is worried about our craftiness, then something must be done quick… lest we tear a hole in the space time continuum or something. So, a few clicks later, and we were off to create a card.

This card uses the color scheme from The Play Date Café Challenge #90. Creative Me just loves the pictures that these folks put together each week to represent their colors!

Also, this card uses the “I Miss You” sentiment from Operation Write Home’s Wednesday challenge. The POW thinks that these people rock, as Awesome Auntie gets a card from her deployed spouse every other day or so, and those cards are free from OWH to him so that he can write home.

As for storage, not much has changed since last round.

This little bag has my stickles (name brand for dimentional glitter glue) mists and chalk inks. A reusable grocery bag has two stacked mini-milk cartons of acrylic paints and one set of watercolors in it. 

Hope that you all have a great and crafty weekend!

Organize your Stuff: Week 15 (round 4): WOYWW & Ink, Ink Pads & Embossing part 2

Well, this is a little belated, but the parents are on the road again…or in the air as the case may be…so our shoe has shrunk from 10 back to our pre-June 28th house of 8. …and actually it seems like less. Oldest Child has left for a week of sleep away youth group work with the migrant workers several counties away, Illusive Middle Child has Cub Scout day camp from 8-4:30 all this week, and Fabulous Spouse is working. That just leaves Girl Friday, Awesome Auntie, the WMD, Shark Bait and us at home. It is positively vacant.

That means that we can get back to being creative without feeling too guilty! While going through the D-Ring album that currently houses our 2010, Fabulous Spouse and the POW made a list of missing layouts to work on, and what’s on our work desk today?...The Nutcracker. Santa gave us tickets to see the ballet for the first time (and each child received their own Nutcracker…Girl Friday got a a ballet Barbie too…).

The chair has been cleared of paper mache stars, and Creative Me is hard at work! To see other desks, please go on over to Julia’s Stamping Ground to find more. To those we missed last week, sorry…we have been a whirling dervish of grand-parental activity!

Next, here is Creative Me’s Design Team entry for Tuesday Trio’s Sketch #75 using lace.

This gave Creative Me a chance to break out some of our new stamp sets… Yes, We are Scrappnbee, We have a problem, and it is stamps. The great thing about stamps, though, is that once you have enough inks (the right kind, because we have found that acrylics and rubber accept ink a little differently...then there is Copics..), the sky is the limit. This card started plain blue, but stamps and some CTMH New England Ivy and Chocolate inks transformed it!

There is no secret, the Inner Hoarder is a stamp addict. And with an addiction to stamps, there is the need to have inks to use them effectively. The Inner Hoarder and Creative Me have amassed an incredible arsenal of inks for any occasion. We have a near complete collection of Stamp It Up craft inks from back in our rubber stamp days (because craft takes longer to dry and accepts embossing powder well). StazOn ink lives on top:

Close to My Heart ink, the best that OCD Me has found for use with clear acrylic stamps and photopolymer stamps live in their own Tower (no not the kind that Rapunzel gets to live in... cue the Disney theme music and chick with the too big eyes... rather these are the kind that spins):

Momento Inks for stamping images that Creative Me wants to color with Copics, and Tim Holts inks (there are not many-yet. ...Just wait until the Inner Hoarder has a coupon and some disposable income!)…just because…However, OCD Me did get these labeled with the label maker and stores them all upside down to keep the ink at the surface and they currently live in the mini-milk crates with the stamps:

These are our inks.  OCD Me does her best to keep them in order.  However, if you look at the desk up top, you will see that Creative Me  and PA Me do not always put things away, and therefore there are always several inks stacked om our desk.

Next Post: Paints, glitter, and stickles!

Organize your Stuff: Week 15 (round 4): WOYWW & Ink, Ink Pads & Embossing

Hope all of our Canadian readers had a happy Canada Day (and are enjoying Prince William and Lady Kate), and our American Readers had a wonderful Independence Day! We know that we did!

Here is what’s on our desk this week. It looks like a stray mortar from the fireworks display exploded in here, but we had our hands full with holiday fun.  Inconcieveable! We know.  But besides never fighting a land war in Asia or threatening a Sicilian when death is on the line, a little known fact is that there is no such thing as quiet time when entertaining company and celebating national holidays are on the agenda!

Items of note are paper mache stars for kids project on our chair, fabric which had 2 inch strips cut off to be used as bike decorations in our 4th of July nieborhood bike parade, and leftover paint from our OLW project (last post).  We need to let OCD Me out a little more... or at least let the POW order a maid! 

Also, for those who asked, yes, that is a small wall of CTMH clear acrylic stamps (blame the Inner Hoarder who has never found a stamp that she did not love), and they are stored in CD sized milk crate containers.  We got some at Wal Mart and the last few Fred Meyers (used to be $1 now like $1.50...darned inflation and recession!).  Hope that helps.

There are many more desks…most if not all neater, and not assailed by the rocket’s red glare… at Julia’s Stamping Ground. Please take a peak and be inspired.

Here is our Design Team card for Tuesday Trio’s Sketch #74- doodling.  Creative Me got to break out some of her favorite Close to My Heart stamps (D1257 Make it count), and Tim Holtz spinners for the clock hands. The doodling was the flowers and flourishes that framed the clock.  This took FOREVER as the ink marker kept drying up on me! Tip: keep reinkers of your favorite colors on hand...always.

While this may not have been quite red, white and blue...ok, the POW admits it screams autumn, it just worked for the sketch and theme.

This is more Inependance Day...

using the American Made paper line from My Mind's Eye...but no stamps and no doodling.  Just some bling!

Here is the gratuitus family shot...actually the only scene with all three in one place (we even got Shark Bait in the photo)...just because the POW wanted to share...and they look so darned cute!

Organize your Stuff: Week 14 (round 4): OLW Blog Hop & Crops

Welcome to those who are on the One Little Word Blog Hop to see what we all did with our OLW homework. This is the finished product of what Creative Me came up with:

Here is a few before pics.The hardest part for us was the color choice. OCD Me wanted to keep with the blue of the first nine patch because embracing brings peace and calm. Creative Me was thinking more seasonal change, and summer colors. PA Me said that we can do summer colors when we get summer temperatures. Therefore, we compromised, and the POW told us to use a little bit of blue, some green for spring, and a touch of yellow for the hope of summer!

The only other issue that we had was that the embossed clock and numbers were originally clear embossed with paint overtop, but Creative Me was overruled, and we redid it in bronze. Also, the blue first and last card seemed too blue, so we painted it.

We have been doing a lot of embracing these days, especially embracing the end of the school year. However, Girl Friday has not embraced the fact that 62 degrees Fahrenheit is too cold to play in the sprinkler! Nor have any of them really embraced the idea of sleeping in yet…although we wish that they would.

As for crops, the last one that we attended was at CKC Portland. The big thing about crops is to plan ahead. This is realistically a social event, where the pages come second in many instances. However, we have learned that OCD Me tends to over pack, and so when the POW preps our stuff ahead of time, there is not quite as much stuff to cart around.

Here is a link to round 3 with pics of some of my regular crop supplies: rolling cart, tiered shelf, mini table, tool bag...all esentials!

JULY 1 BLOG HOP PARTICIPANTS
Margie   http://xnomads.typepad.com/blog
Rebekah http://istampscrapcraft.blogspot.com/
Kelly        http://kellyxenos.typepad.com/
Julie Ann  http://julieannshahin2.blogspot.com
Jill       http://jillconyers.typepad.com/
Jamie  http://jmpgirl.blogspot.com/
Cherie   http://cheriandrews.blogspot.com/
Nikki  http://www.inkyart.com.au/

Amanda       http://scrappnbee.blogspot.com/  <-- you are here

Melissa S  http://blog.mshanhun.com/

Monica B  http://questtoperfectimperfection.blogspot.com/

Lisa A    http://backtoallen.com/writers_blog/

Sam  http://learncreatedo.wordpress.com/

Karen   http://womenontractors.blogspot.com

Lynn  http://www.crafty-creativity.blogspot.com/

Jenn  http://www.studiojenn.blogspot.com/

Kathryn http://www.katlodesigns.com/

Cindy  http://seriousplay.typepad.com/