My vinyl came in today!

I have to laugh a little that the very day I posted about the vinyl I had ordered is the day that it showed up on my door step. All these pretty colors. Now to start sketching out my designs to use with them! I purposely bought extra green for the grass design I've been working on.

On a side note someone seeing my previous blog mentioned to me a great site that has all kinds of cool vinyl art to choose from! It's very inspiring! You can check it out too at http://sejones.uppercaseliving.net/Home.m

Nursery Decorations Ideas

My Aunt(in-law) Jean Shrewsbury introduced me to this new decorating art a few months ago. A lot of stores are starting to sell them too. It's the Vinyl Words(see examples at Amazon.com) Poetry. The great thing about them for me is that they aren't permenant. You can put them up, take them down without worrying about messing up your walls. Being a house renter that's a great thing!

The other day while reading more info on my Craft ROBO I saw that it can be used for coming up with vinyl designs. With a baby on the way my husband and I have been working on preparing a nursery for her and wanting to make it colorful and fun for her. Being limited to our white walls we figured we would have to hang up a lot of things.

But now I have some cool vinyl samples on the way and a few designs in the making for sproosing up her room.

I can't wait for them to arrive! They will certainly save the walls from having a lot of nails and will allow for me to do more designing indoors in the Central AC. For a while I was coming up with wood ideas but that meant going out into the storage shed in this muggy hot weather and using our jigsaw. Not something I was looking forward to.

small box

I've been playing around with various accessories and how to use them on the pillow boxes. And have a few small sample papers that I've been using as well.
Soon I should have this down and really get down to creating.
I also came across this cool box design. Figured it could come in handy for small presents like Jewelry

Other then that I've been busy with doing Vacation Bible School projects for my church and trying to update some other websites that I currently run. I've also been looking into a better design for this blog. There are a lot of cool templates out there.

Happy Fathers Day!

Here's to a wonderful Father! 

My dad.

This photo was taken at my wedding during the father daughter dance. Also something special my dad was the one to marry George and I. :)

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And let's add a  
Happy Father's day to my father-in-law! :)

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Baby Shower Card

One of our married couple friends, Joey & April, had their baby shower today. In just under 6 weeks they are expecting their son, Kenai, to enter the world.

Just for fun I thought I'd come up with a card to attach to the present George and I got for them. Using a template I had the Craft ROBO cut out the design.

Then pulled it off the carrier sheet.  Which is the sticky sheet that holds the paper firmly while the blade cuts out whatever design you've asked it to cut.

I tested it out to see that it would pull together just right. I didn't have any old shoe strings so a thin ribbon had to do.

Then using some of my metallic paint pens and some star brads I decorated it. Using the green and gray from the diaper bag they'd asked for I put silver on the front of the shoe and green for the sides

I think it turned out well and really only took about an hour to do. I could see these being used for putting in gift cards or money for baby showers too. Also could use them for the first few years of a child's birthdays as envelopes. So I'm certainly going to keep this design and possibly use it for other ideas. Not to mention there are plenty of other pregnant ladies in my church.


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Practice Practice Practice

In an attempt to learn and fine tune a new crafting interest of mine I've been playing around with a few gadgets and looking around for hints and tricks online on how to use them. My first find was the Sizzix Big Shot. I mainly liked the idea of being able to add embossing and impressions to cards and envelopes that I send out.

My second find was the Craft ROBO. I liked the idea of not having to take an exacto knife to everything I try to design. Also this machine is great with cutting out vinyl which I could also use when it comes the the small details of decorating my future daughters nursery.

One thing I soon found was that the Craft ROBO was not so easy a contraption to learn. I had to do a lot of searching and reading to find good worthwhile tutorials on how to create the lines that it knows to cut vs. the lines that it just dots for easier bending. Just figuring out the loading of the paper was my first real challenge.

Last night I did some looking into more information and finally tried out a large pillow box design. It worked! haha. Just for fun I ran it through the Sizzix Big Shot embossing to add a little design and finished it off with some color and a ribbon.

Nothing special but yet I'm happy that I've succeeded in making at least 1 pillow box using cardstock. Next task is to try out various types of paper!

Finally have my Art Area setup!

When we'd first moved into this house I saw that we would have an extra bedroom and I declared it would be my arts, crafts, office room. Well, you know how it is. You unpack the things you need right away and then all the little knick knacks and decorative things remain in the boxes. We slowly piled all those boxes along with all my college art supplies in the spare bedroom. It became more and more filled with half empty boxes.

About 7 months later we decided to try for a child and were instantly successful! So now we're looking at this spare room and realizing we need to clear it out to turn it into a nursery. I was a little disappointed that I'd never gotten to turn it into my art room.

I first started thinking about trying to turn our outdoor storage shed into my art room but soon as the weather warmed up and we stepped into there I realized that I would roast during the summer and freeze in winter. I started looking at our front room where our pool table was. With a little house rearranging I could claim the back wall area!

So our first step was to find a reasonable craft table that I wouldn't feel overly guilty about getting stuff stained onto it or accidentally knicking it with the exacto knife. Using an old Staple giftcard from my aunt we got a nice large 8ft table! My husband then helped me move some of the furniture around and now I have my own art area set up and ready for crafting.

I've started using it test out ideas of mine for things I'd like to create and start selling in Etsy. Below I will show you the progress photos over the couple weeks that this task took to complete. It's really not complete yet. But mainly I just have to organize the items I want on the shelves and table.

(Click each thumbnail to be taken to larger view)