New Blog, Exciting New Venture

I have a new blog for all my crafting.  You can find all my creations at http://graybirdcreations.blogspot.com.  I'll now be selling all my crafty little tidbits at local trade days and craft bazaars, but I wanted a place to share my work far and wide.  I'll still post scrap booking tips and all my personal biz here, but the crafts I make to sell, I'll share at graybird creations.  Take a peek...I've been busy crocheting (and not just baby beanies).

More Scrap booking

Can you tell I've been busy!  It's kind of funny that I've been scrap booking so much because, if you know our situation, nearly everything we have is in boxes while we figure out our life, and so all our scrapbooks are packed away.  I have a huge stack of pages complete and don't have my albums to put them in.  Anyways.....more tips....

See the little star accents I added to make my main picture of cutie pie Rex stand out.  I frequently embellish photos with accents and journaling.  Now, I do not recommend doing this to the 1920's picture of your great-grandmother (if you want to embellish a vintage photo, take it to a copy store and have a nice color copy made for you to embellish and preserve your original oldie).  In today's world where we can store 2000 pictures on a cd and print whatever we want from our home computer in 2 minutes.  I say go ahead and doodle, glue, alter, sand, punch, etc, etc.

Journaling strips are a great way to get your journaling to pop on a page.  I also like word stickers.  Sometimes a few words say more than I ever could in a paragraph.  I love the sticker that says "cooties" because it perfectly describes how my 8 year old feels about all girls, including his mother.




You who scrapbook with me know I like to k.i.s.s (keep it simple stupid), but sometimes I too like to go a little crazy.  For this adorable picture of Kennedy and Bailey, I had to make it as girly and fru-fru as possible.  I just kept adding on until I felt it looked right.  So, break out of your box and have a little fun sometimes. 

(Maybe sometime, I'll take the time to figure out why my pictures keep turning themselves sideways when I post them to this blog...)

Enjoy!!

Summer Scrapbook Pages

Here are a few more scrap booking hints from my latest layouts...

Black & white photos are great for adding a twist to the look of your scrapbook layouts.  Sometimes I scrap just one black & white for a sentimental effect.  But to spice things up a bit, I like to play with black & white a little.  In the layout, Blue Eyes, I made the photo black white and then recolored our eyes blue to really make them pop.  The layout is about Emerson's eyes looking a lot like mine.

Another b&w trick is to have several pictures in a layout in color and one standout photo in b&w or have all the pictures b&w and one stand out picture in color.  In Brayden's zoo layout, I wanted to show off the great shot I got of cute Bailey, the baby elephant.

A great photo trick I learned many years ago for taking pictures of people in front of big things like buildings is to have the people stand way in front of the building and only a few feet away from the camera.  That way the people are normal size in the photo, rather than teeny-tiny, and you still get your other subject in.  In Brayden's water park layout, he was on the other side of the park from the slides when I took the picture.  I got a good shot of Brayden and the twisty slides in the background give the photo a real water park theme.

In Emerson's water park layout I wanted to show the motion of her going down the slide.  I took shot after shot of her going down the slide and then lined the shots up across the layout to show motion.









Now for journaling... when I get with other moms to scrapbook they frequently debate handwritten journaling vs. typing.  I say use both.  When I want to tell a long story or give a detailed explanation for a layout, I will print it off my computer and adhere it to my layout.  However, I think even if a mom has what she considers messy handwriting, she should include some handwriting for her children's layouts.  My mother wrote me a letter when I was about 12 I keep in my journal that I cherish.  Not just for the words in the letter, but because I feel close to my mom just looking at it.  It has her perfect teacher cursive and a pretty flower on the stationary.  It is comforting just to look at my mom's writing.  My mom also has told me that my handwriting is similar to my grandma's.  I didn't know my grandma well before she passed, but it makes me happy to think I have something in common with her.  Years from now, when our kids are looking through their childhood scrapbooks with their own children, one of the things they will love best is their mother's writing.  It makes the book personal and homey.  Our children won't care that the writing is a little crooked or a random word is misspelled or that we have chicken scratch, but they will love that we preserved a little of our love for them in a book that can last forever.

T-shirt Dress

We are going to Dallas next month to see BYU play TCU!!!!  Well, I want the kids to be totally decked out in BYU gear, but I don't want to spend a fortune ordering new stuff.  So, I took an old BYU shirt of Kennedy's and cut from the bottom hem up and around to the hem of the arm holes.  Then I stitched the arms and sides back together so it fit Emerson's body.  The sleeves were a little long, so I shirred them to take them up a bit (thanks for teaching me how to shir, Julia).  I also cut the excess length below the graphic off the bottom of the shirt.  I bought one yard of the football fabric and one yard of netting.  Cut both yards in half and sewed the netting to the wrong sides of the football fabric.  Then I sewed the side seams of the football skirt. I folded my big circle of football fabric in half, wrong sides together, sewed two basting stitches all around, pulled up the gathers, and sewed it to the bottom of the T-shirt.  This gave the skirt a bubble dress effect.  The netting helps give the bubble some shape and bounce.  One outfit down...only $4.00 spent!!!  I got the T-shirt dress idea from one of Kennedy's activity day service projects.  They made T-shirt dresses for Mothers Without Borders to bring to orphans in Namibia.  It was a great activity- the girls learned a new skill while doing a great service.

Scrap Book Ideas

So you all know how it goes when you're living in a little rental with no place to scrap.  When the urge comes, the living room, dining room table, or where ever you can eek out a few inches becomes your scrap spot.  This time mine was the living room.  For about a week and a half, my living room furniture was pushed out of the way and card tables were placed where the coffee table usually is and the place was a scrap booking mecca.  Here are some of the pages I completed with some of my own scrap booking tips....

1.  If you have more than one child you want to scrap an event for, just tweak the layout a little.  For my little girl, the layout is pink and brown with polka dots and hearts.  For my little boy, I manly-upped the colors to bright yellow and orange.  The layouts are roughly identical and evoke the same memory, but the different color choices are made to appeal to the main reader.

2.  Spotlight something special.  See the little dinosaurs cupcake topper?  Kennedy and I spent the afternoon before the party modeling these babies out of fondant.   In the big picture you can't get a good idea of what his cupcakes looked like, so I zoomed in on one.

3.  Use up your scraps.  The little squares on this layout are little scraps from other layouts.  All together and in the same color scheme they are really cute.  Also, use up your letters.  It's okay to use different letters from different fonts and different colors all mixed up.  It gives your layout personality.

4.  Some times one picture is enough.  I know our kids are cute, cute, cute.  But...sometimes too many pictures on a layout can drown out the message.  I wanted to show Rex relaxing in the sun on a day at the splash park.  One picture conveyed relaxation more than multiple pictures would have.

5.  Take pictures and scrap every day events- not just birthdays and holidays and vacations.  These boots were bought for Kennedy 10 years ago and all 4 of my children have loved them.  This one especially shows an average day in Emerson's life...one in which she has stripped down to nothing but panties, but still insists on wearing shoes.

I'll be back with more hints and tips the next time I scrapbook.  Which will probably be soon since we just made a trip to the zoo to see the cutest baby elephant....until then.....

First up...Kennedy's Quilt

Kennedy has been wanting a more mature room ever since I first decorated her Myrtle Beach room in a garden theme...mural and all.  Now that she truly is a 'tween and will be sharing her room with a little sister for a while, it is time she got an update.  Of course,  Kennedy wanted a totally modern, bright, polka dot room in lemon and lime colors which totally doesn't go with my decorating style.  But, when I spotted a cute kind of polka dot quilt on the cover of a quilting magazine and took Kennedy on a trip to the fabric store I knew we could come up with a compromise.  We cut out the circles on my Cricut Expression and ironed on the circles and their outlines onto white squares.  Then we sewed around the circles and outlines leaving a little space for fraying.  This quilt should get prettier as time goes on.  I did most of the cutting and sewing while Kennedy did most of the ironing.  It was my first quilted quilt... I've always tied before...and it was fun, if not totally perfect, except for sewing the binding (my fingers were sore).  This quilt will be the inspiration for a combination 'tween and toddler girl room when we move to our next home.  (Does it seem like we are always moving????  We are.)  Kennedy wants to accent the room with owls, so our next project is to make a few owl throw pillows.  I saw some cute ones at Target that I'll use for inspiration and I have a few cute owls on my Cricut cartridges.  Girl fun...I love it!

Crafting Away

A nice thing about moving where I know no one is that I've had plenty of time to craft.  Even though we are renting a dump, I'm dreaming about the next place I'll call home and making things for the future.  This summer, I've made several men's shirt dresses from some of my formerly pudgy but now fit and hunky husband's closet,  (Thank you, Julia, for the quick show how), a quilt for Kennedy's bedroom for when we move, whenever that may be, another dress for Emmy from one of my favorite shirts that was torn on one of the gazillion nails in the walls of our dump, tie-dye scarfs, and I've caught up on some of my scrap booking.  I'm going to start posting some of the cute crafty things I make so you can get inspiration just like I do from you.

Overkill???

So, I saw these adorable pillowcase dresses at a craft fair a few years ago and thought they were too cute. At the time, I didn't have any "little" girls to make one for. But, lately I've been in a crafty mood and decided to give it a whirl. I made the hot pink one first, from an actual pillowcase. Then, I saw so many cute print ones online that I headed out to the fabric store and went a little crazy. I ended up making six dresses all together; three for Emerson, one for Kennedy, one for Brooke, and one for Piper. It took me about an hour to make two dresses at once. I love them, but where is Emerson going to wear all these dresses???