Green is the Loveliest Color

Well, the fresh asparagus inspired me. I remembered some of the greens I've enjoyed this summer.

Ferns from this spring. Sadly Vegas loved to eat them too.

My herb buckets -- sweet basil, chives, oregano, peppers, chili peppers, and wonderful sage. Look at them now!

My birthday girl.

My New Obsession - Cupcake Piks!

I've seen some on etsy and thought - I need to do this! So I made a bunch for the craft show last week, Halloween, baby shower, retro Christmas.  I got an order for a wedding shower of 20 piks.  Yeah!

The colors were black, silver and ice blue.  Hmmm . . . So, this is what I came up with.  

I used square inchie and circle punches.  I found the stickers at Joann's.  Then I just used whatever ribbon, stamps and frou frou I could find. 
Can I just say - I love Stickles!
The dollar store is a great place to find stuff if you dig.
I freehanded the white hearts with black and blue pens.  

Next Up . . . Baby Love!

Havana Quilt

I wanted to share some pictures of the completed memory quilt my mom and I made for the Havana church. She did quite a bit of embroidery around the church and the crosses that really set it off and tied it together. I think it looks great in the foyer.


I suggested that since many of the pictures do not have captions, it would be helpful to have a scrapbook with more information on the pictures on the quilt and other pictures. They could add stories and other documents that would go along with the picture as well. She’s started working on that, but it requires more work than the time we had before the 85th anniversary. Many of the pictures were printed directly onto the fabric with an inkjet printer. I ironed on freezer paper as stabilizer, cut it to 8 ½ x 11 size and ran it through the printer.
We also used iron on material for other pictures. I painted the large church and the denominational seal. Mom and I worked together on the stained glass window, which is the design in the church previous to the current building. I don’t know how familiar most of the people are with those windows, so it was nice to reclaim that. It is primarily applicait (sp?), with some paint and thread attached. Mom, of course, did a lot of the embroidery, but we both worked on different embellishments for the pictures and design.

Chance 1996-2008

The Princess Gracie Album - Finished!

This is a peek at Gracie's album.  I'm pleased with how it turned out, although, you know how you find more stuff after you're done, like a crown stamp, stickers, etc.  

Thanks to Amy too for letting me borrow her stamps for some of it. That definitely helped give it some extra pretty.

I had some fun embellishments - flower brads, and cardstock stickers as you can see in this pic.

These stickers were perfect because they weren't too commercially - like most Disney stuff is.  They could kind of have a vintage old feel but still were pretty for a little girl.  I chose the papers from there.

I also did two pocket pages for tags and journaling spots.

This page was a little crazy with sequins. 

Wedding Bliss

We were in Decatur this past weekend for Marsha and Kent's wedding.  I put together a paperbag book for their wedding gift.  I tried to coordinate the colors and design with her colors. Here are some pics.

Most of the papers I had were solid colors. so I experimented with sewing some of the papers.  It gave it a lot of texture and extra design element. 

Girly Girl Baby Banner

I put this banner together as a gift for a baby shower we had at church.  I used the colors and elephant from the nursery bedding the parents were using.  I thought it turned out pretty well.

I got to use my Cricut on this and was pretty happy with how it turned out.  I glittered the outline after cutting it out. 


I also used some new embellishments that I hadn't used before - flower brads and jewels.  They'll be showing themselves in some other things soon.

Post Number II - April's Shower

I will try to get more photos of the event up soon. Some technical difficulties right now. 

We celebrated the anticipated arrival of Anna Pauketat a couple weeks ago with her mother, April, and brother, Jayman at the church.  Amy and I were the decor committee and we used April's french toile nursery theme.  Amy had put together a beautiful 12x12 scrapbook using papers April had picked out.  We took those papers and went crazy.  

Tag Book:  I don't have pics of this yet, but we made about 50 tags that were placed around the tables for guests to write little notes to April or Anna giving advise and wishing them well.  

Centerpieces: I made photocopies of some ad babies from the turn-of-the-century ephemera I have, enlarged them and used them as the basis for the centerpieces at the tables.  I also collected some shabby chic metal candleholders and vases.  I spray painted them and added tea-stained roses to the mix.  We just added more candlelight with votives from the church.

Cupcake picks:  Melissa made red velvet cupcakes that were absolutely delicious.  Because I had so many extra do0-dads left over from the tags, I made little collages and glued them to sandwich picks and we stuck them in the cupcakes.  I'm probably going to reuse these and make more to sell.

Banner: About 30 minutes before the shower Amy and I were inspired to throw together a "Baby" banner.  Amy just printed out the letters and we added some of our papers and froufrous and viola! a banner.  It was may inspiration for the pennant banner I made the following week. See future post.

Diaper Cake: The piece-de-resistance (spelling is French . . . )  that I made from 70 diapers, a bottle of lotion a small bottle and cranberry toile fabric I found at Walmart for $2 a yard.  I used more baby pictures and tea stained roses.  We set it with the scrapbook on the gift table. It was a great focal point. 

I also did the games and I think everyone had a really enjoyable time.  The food was great. The conversation was interesting. 

Now, we're just really looking forward to meeting Anna. 

O Christmas Tree

We weren't going to get a Christmas tree since we had sold the ones we had in Guymon. But toward the end of last week I thought, "Hmm, I think I do want a tree." So Evan agreed and we ventured out to Meijer over treacherous and snowy roads on Saturday night and finally found this pretty narrow one. Evan wanted LED lights because they save energy and I wanted white ones. So as you can see we both got what we wanted. A lot of my ornaments and Christmas stuff is at my mom's. But here it is with the birds and butterflies and vintage ornaments I could scrounge up.