A "look Ma, no Copics!" kinda card! (TCPTUES0213)

Hey folks! Back again with a new project for the TCP Tuesday challenge for the month of February! Here is the post about TCP Tuesday for February. You can link up on the sidebar of Alma's blog. And, if you are on Splitcoaststampers, please come to this thread and show us your card or project! :)

So, the challenge is "What's Old Is New Again" to use your existing TCP stamps and dies in a fresh new way. I decided to challenge myself by using this ADORABLE Mr. Moon Bun image and challenging myself to NOT color or paper-piece him! It was hard, these can be the kinds of images that cry out for coloring, but I still think he turned out pretty cute :) Goes to show that if you aren't into coloring, you can still have fun with these kind of images!

I used this sketch as the basis for my layout:

In addition to the "Wish" stamp set, I used the following CutUps: The Big Pinking Border and the Circus Panels.

I did accent the stamped image by using Diamond Stickles on the stars and moon, and some Liquid Pearls (I think the color is Rouge?) on Mr. Bun's nose.

This card is 6" square, I like the big square size! 

That is all for me today! How can you use your TCP stamps and CutUps in a new and different way?

xo, Noelle

Swimming With Dolphins Scrapbook Page (CQC178)

Hi all! I took a "personal snow day" last Thursday. Kept my little Ev home. We got about 8" of snow Weds. night, which by CO standards is not a lot. To make my point, we then got well over a foot on Sunday! School was not closed on Thursday, but Ev's school is pretty far. It takes me 30 min. to get there in good weather, so I decided we needed a mommy-imposed snow day. It's nice how you can do that when they are still in preschool! :) We made cookies and stayed in our jammies 'til noon. It was great and I'm starting to feel like "me" again after a few VERY crazy weeks! So, it was a good day to craft. I have two projects to show you today! This is for this week's ColourQ! In about an hour from this post, I'll be posting my TCP Tuesday project for this week, so check back if you can!

Here is the gorgeously blue palette for this week:

I literally was drooling over this palette when I saw it, my kinda colors, my kinda style.... The tie-dye appearance of this shower curtain felt very beachy to me. I knew I had not scrapped the time hubby and I swam with dolphins in Mexico in summer 2011. This seemed like the perfect fit.

I also knew I wanted to do an old-school tie-dye technique on this page, have you ever used the shaving cream technique? It's really fun, an one of the first cool techniques I learned when I started stamping. Here's the gist:

1. Fill up a tupperware or bowl with shaving cream, use the basic shaving cream (like Barbasol) not the gel kind. Drip drops of ink refill all over the top of the shaving cream. I used coordinating colors since I didn't have the refills in the exact shades, except for the Brilliant Blue.

2. using a plastic knife, drag the knife through the cream, one way and then the other, the ink should start to spread out.

3. push your paper (white or cream work best for this) directly into the cream, all the way down until the whole front of the paper is covered with the cream/ink mixture. Repeat as needed.

4. Immediately wipe off all the cream and ink with a paper towel. Let dry-it doesn't take long at all to dry. Voila! You have tie-dye paper, now!

I also used the following sketch as a jumping off place (hey, it is even pretty recent!):

I cut the dolphins and the word "dolphins" using the Cricut Craft Room on my computer. Then I dry embossed them with my Cuttlebug.

I used my TCP Wave CutUp for the waves, being that it's around 6" long, it worked great for these border strips! :)

and that's it for me right now! Be back in an hour with a fun TCP card! :)

hugs, Noelle

My "New" ASCP Painted Hutch (complete with tutorial!)

Hey all, let me start by saying that I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing when your friends find old furniture and think of you before the Goodwill truck! LOL, but I am that girl that my friends call! I have this weird love of making something old and "discardable" into something cool and different, something I love. Now, don't get me wrong, do I love buying new furniture? OF COURSE I do! But let's be real, we are a single income family, and things like new furniture, new cars, and vacations are luxuries to us. So, take my dining room set, for example. I have a very old (30+ years) dining room set. My parents bought it when I was a kid and lived in Germany. And, it's very practical & MUCH nicer than the boys air hockey table that lived in my dining room for 2 years! ;) But, it's not my style.... I really don't love it, I actually really don't even like it that much, except for the fact that the table has built in leaves and spreads out long enough to seat 10-12 people. so, about a year ago, I started looking into buying an INEXPENSIVE dining room set. We need 6 chairs, a table, and I really wanted some sort of serving piece, like a hutch or a buffet. Guess how much that costs, even at IKEA? Around 2K$. Yes that's right, TWO THOUSAND dollars! Yeah, if I have two thousand dollars, I'd much rather take my boys to Disneyland than spend it on a dining room table that gets used, maybe 3-4x per year. Know what I mean? So, to make a short story very very long (sorry, I do have a tendency to go on and on...) I decided that my old set would get a makeover, and maybe I could buy an old dresser or hutch somewhere for the serving piece I wanted. Well, lo and behold, here comes my dear friend Beth one day, offering up this old hutch that had been left in their house when they bought it a while ago. She sent me a pic, good condition, good "bones" if you will... it was cute and I could see it would work well, the dimensions were good too. Here's the before (say hi to my hubby who was helping me with this!)

My friend Wendy and I both love to makeover old furniture, we are both artists, and it's one of the ways that the creativity comes out! You might remember my headboard from a salvage door project, and the vintage pantry door from last Fall. I've also painted countless old dressers. The one we have in our room was purchased at an estate sale in 1998, we paid only 80$ for a solid wood dresser with 9 small drawers in the top, and two giant drawers in the bottom. I don't mind telling you, I'm really attached to it and have painted it a couple times! I also have an old armoire that my Mom bought in the 70s, and it looked like she bought it in the 70s, until it got a facelift. I love that armoire! It holds all the boys games and all our DVDs and CDs. Anyhow, I consulted Wendy, since I knew she had recently done a super cute dresser project of her own. I asked her about this chalk paint, and if it was easier to work with that regular latex paints. She said it was and the real selling point for me was that it didn't require sanding or prep work! It's called Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. It does cost more than regular paint, it's a bit pricey, but long term I'm looking at doing this kind of makeover on a bench, 6 chairs and a table too. I figured it was worth it to pay more to save myself a lot of hours sanding.

I want to give you a tutorial on my technique. There are probably 400 ways to distress or age something, but here's how I did it:

One coat of the ASCP right over the existing finish. I know it looks like the middle one and center are already distressed, but they are just not dry yet in the pic. One thing to note is that this paint dries LIGHTER instead of darker like traditional latex. It does have a very chalky appearance, and sanding it is a dream! I used color Duck Egg Blue, and did not add white.

Then, sand a bit off, wherever you want that distressed finish, I hit the edges/details on the piece, and added a few other spots as well.

Then, I added some Antiquing medium to the sanded places, I suppose you could use stain instead. One thing to note is that the chalk paint is very porous and it will not wipe off easily like it will if your paint has some gloss to it.

Then I hit it with a very dry brush with some more ASCP, anywhere I felt the stain was too heavy, I dry brushed.

My next to final step was to dry brush a similar color on, one that's a bit lighter, this is just the cheap acrylic paint from the craft store. It's the same Americana brand "Spa Blue" that I used on the pantry project. I just really feel this step adds a lot of dimension, like layers of paint have flaked away over the years.

The final step was the wax. I did use the Annie Sloan wax as well. It was the clear kind though, and I'm not sure that regular furniture wax would have been any different, but this kind can be tinted, though I didn't do that. The wax really gives it a nice finish, it brings out the color a bit, and gives it a richness. I was really glad that I had done the waxing step, and it's super easy. Just like the Karate Kid "wax on, wax off!" ;) If you know what I'm talking about, you must be as old as me! ;)

And, you know the hardware is always the fun part! I found these AWESOME (burlap!) knobs at Hobby Lobby! They have a lot of knobs that are Anthropologie inspired. I thought these were too cool! They were normally 5$ each, but the day I got them all the hardware was half off, so they were only 2.50 each. I still can't believe what a great deal that is! The cup pulls on the drawers are from Lowe's.

I really am in love with this! And soon after I picked up the hutch, another friend called and asked if I'd like the 6 unfinished dining chairs she'd had sitting in her garage for 5 years. So, I have a LOT more work ahead of me before the whole room is finished, but I am excited to have new chairs to go with my old table & all my other projects! ;)

 

The one thing I forgot to mention is that I did sand and stain the "counter" part on this. I used a stain that already had the polyurethane built in, pretty simple.

Thanks for sticking by this looooong monster post! I appreciate you stopping by! :)

hugs, Noelle

One wild and crazy (unicorn!) bridal shower :)

 I think I've mentioned, my baby sister is getting married in a few months. She lives in CA and the wedding will be there, too. She was heading out here to visit for a few weeks, and my Mom and I decided it would be the perfect time to have a bridal shower for her. She balked a bit at first, being that she is not one who likes to be the center of attention. But I promised it would not be a "typical" shower.  I promised it would be a fun party that she would enjoy, and I think it turned out pretty good, too! :) We decided against games, and called it a "Sprinkle" instead of a "Shower." She has always loved unicorns, and I thought wouldn't it be both fun and funny to have a unicorn party for her, instead of a "typical" bridal shower. Now, the unicorn part was a surprise. She knew when and where the party was (my house), but I made it clear that she was NOT to know about the unicorns! I really wanted it to be a fun, and creative party-very fitting for my art school grad sister! ;)

To start off, the invitations! I got this Unicorn digi stamp from TiddlyInks. It worked great, since I had a very tough time finding a rubber or clear stamp that was a unicorn! Also, this was the look I wanted, a very elegant unicorn vs. a cutesy one, since it is a wedding shower, and not a party for a little girl. I kept the design simple, because I had 30 to make! I colored the manes and tails with Copics, and added some Diamond Stickles for some glitter. This patterned paper was old, and I had a whole pad of it, so it worked great. The strip behind the unicorns was punched with an EK Success border punch. The labels are Martha Stewart Crafts/Avery, I cut each one in half, so they went a long way! The sentiment stamp is an old acrylic stamp that actually goes with a baby set, unsure of the brand on that....

Here's the inside poem I wrote, I thought it turned out cute! :)

For the party decorations, I was able to get a few cute unicorn and rainbow things from Oriental Trading. I also got a lot of solid colored things (mostly in green, since that's Shelley's fave color).

I ordered this CRAZY, FUN cake for her, after seeing this one on Pinterest. There is a lady in my hometown who makes custom cakes, she also made C's Lego cake in November. Isn't this a kick?

I used my Cricut to cut vinyl letters and a unicorn to put on my sliding glass door. I started doing this for parties a couple years ago, and it's a fun way to personalize a party for practically nothing if you have a Cricut or a Silhouette.

One of my VERY favorite projects I did for this party, were these fun favor cones! I took a 12" paper and cut it in half diagonally, then curled it to make a cone. I used a stapler to hold them together, I tried two different adhesives and hot glue, and nothing held, so in the end I used staples, not as pretty, but it had to hold! I used my TCP Star Rosette CutUp, without creasing it to make the rosette-in other words, I just left the die cut flat. A cloud was the perfect spot for a sentiment, and the unicorns are Sticko stickers. I decided not to add the punched border at the top after making a couple, it just was not working well. They were filled with cute lime green Sixlets and white heart shaped candies from Oriental Trading, as well as a cute twisted sucker in each, that reminded me of a unicorn horn.

I used my banana hanging fruit basket to stash them! It turned out to be the perfect place as I could hang a lot of them from their (hot pink) ribbons, and the rest went nicely in the bottom fruit basket part.

I found these cute teeny frames at Michaels for 1$ each. I put pics of her as a kid in them, and spread them out on our breakfast bar, along with the cute candy boxes and adorable kissing unicorn salt and pepper shakers that were sent for the shower by our stepmother.

and a plastic unicorn I found at Michaels became the centerpiece for the taco bar! I knew she would want a taco bar and margaritas, it's just her style, and that's what I went with.

And, I kept my promise, no games! But I did come up with a craft (of course, it is *me* after all!) and it was also a keepsake for Shelley as well. I got a bunch of dish towels, hot pads, dishcloths, etc. then printed out a bunch of the digi uncorns onto printable fabric, then used some AWESOME Heat N Bond iron on adhesive from therm O web to adhere them (no sewing!). I die cut both the adhesive and the fabric unicorns with my Nestabilities and than ironed them right on to the hot pads, etc. Then people were just able to color one with fabric markers, and sign it for her, so when she's using them, she will know who made it!

In this pic, you can see the fun polka dot lanterns,
that were another decoration! :)

There were a few that didn't have unicorns, so you could decorate your own, which is what I did :) Used her new (and old!) last initial! 

Had a craft for the little girls that came, too. They each made her a sun catcher. :)

My sis is 7 years younger, and was also *MY* "first baby," in a way. I can't believe she's getting married! I'm really happy for her, he fiance is a wonderful guy and they are really happy. Now, just looking ahead to the wedding! ;) 

xo, Noelle