Mod Podge Rocks!

I'm featured today on Mod Podge Rocks! Amy, who loves to Mod Podge her projects, searches far and wide for uses for her favorite medium and comes up with the most amazing ideas from around the globe. Today she is featuring my Mod Podged fan flowers. I can't wait to see what uses she comes up with for these little pretties!

Check back with her, though, and learn to use Mod Podge in some very creative ways: redecorating ceiling fans, making over old furniture, creating your own jewelry and yes - getting ready for Christmas! It's right around the corner and once you check out Amy's blog, you'll be crafting right and left and shouting Mod Podge Rocks for all to hear!

Fur, Feathers and Fins for this week's Funday Monday challenge

It's time once again for the Funday Monday Challenge at MAF. This week's challenge is to create a page showcasing our family pets or highlighting a favorite animal to the zoo, aquarium or perhaps in your own backyard.

We all love animals. Whether we are observing tigers at the zoo or cuddling our cat on the living room sofa, we share a very special bond with our animal friends. Our pet’s unconditional love has been shown to have a positive effect on our overall health and well-being; watching a squirrel’s antics in the park can really make us laugh; and spotting a beautiful bird in a tree can give us a thrill.

Why not create a scrapbook page to preserve these animal memories? Simply upload your creation to MAF for a chance to win an RAK from me.

And now, check the slide below to see all the great submissions in last week's Funday Monday challenge where the challenge was to create a page using a texting shortcut. Congratulations to Jeanna for her GLG page for winning the challenge!

Come be a Guest Designer at MAF!

Come join the Expressions of Color Guest Designer Challenge at Memories Always - Forever . This challenge is going to a little different and will require us to sit and think awhile. You will have to create a page using one of these 3 ideas: sadness, anger, happiness. The task is to create a LO (and if you're feeling really daring, create a double page spread) expressing one of the above themes. We should be able to feel your mood through the creation. You can show your emotion through color, design, or the type of embellies you use -- it's up to you. You can not journal your feelings or thoughts anywhere on the LO, but you can have a single title that expresses your mood without actually using the actual theme your are doing.
One lucky winner will win a month of being a DT member at one of the funnest sites on the web. The challene ends on September 30th.
Good luck! 

Texting! 143!

We had some truly wonderful Top-10 pages in the last Funday Monday challenge and our winner was Jamelee Morano from the Phillipines. Her RAK is on the way!

So this week's Funday Monday challenge idea came to me from a challenge done at Making Memories For You and I thought it would be fun for us to do at MAF. I call it the Sign Language Challenge.

In today’s technology-based world, texting has become second nature to many of us. I Love You has been replaced with I “heart” U … “see you later” has become “C U L8R”.
I always use "143" to tell someone I love them, or "TTYL" for talk to you later. There are so many shortcuts to use when texting. What is your favorite?
For this challenge, replace one or more words in your title with a single letter, number, icon or graphic and upload it to your gallery at MAF. As usual, there is an RAK up for grabs!

I have a funny story to go with this challenge. My husband and I (married 28 years now) always leave each other little love notes. One day while I was out, my husband came home at lunch and decided to leave me a note. He wrote on our fridge in huge colorful letters 143 - I LOVE YOU. So of course when I came home I thought it was sweet but when I tried to wash it off the fridge, it would not come off! And this is not our fridge! We live in military housing and this is government property! My poor husband thought he had used erasable markers, but he had used permanent markers! We have tried every product imaginable to take off the marker and all we have managed to do is take the paint off the door. So the moral is, if you are going to text, do it on your cell phone or computer.




Do you have any funny texting stories? Leave me a comment here to be in a drawing for an additional RAK from me! Happy texting and TTYL!

Check out these great pages from the Funday Monday Reuse, Recyle challenge

Aren't these pages amazing? The Funday Monday challenge at MAF this week was to Reuse, Recyle, Repurpose and the entrants dug deep into their imaginations to create these pages using recycled packaging, magazine pages, pocket change and more! The ideas on these pages are sure to spark your imagination! It was so hard to choose a winner so I turned to random.org to choose my winner. Number 3 came up and the third person to enter was Tami White with her wonderful  page Worth Every Penny. She used the receipts from her vacation to show just how much she had enjoyed herself. Well done Tami! PM me your address and I'll send you an RAK!

Be sure to check back here to see what next week's challenge will be.

Embellies On a Budget

Sometimes, I just don't have the right embellishments to finish off my page, so instead of going shopping, I turn to creating my own. It is amazing how far a few items already on hand can go to lend an elegance to a very simple page. I began with a Sketchy Thursday design for my page. Diana always has the most wonderful sketches to jump-start my creativity. 

The sketch included a flourish, but I did not have one in my stash to match my page. A Bo Bunny flourish sticker worked out perfectly after it was inked with a gold Adirondack Dabber. The alphas were also the wrong the color for my page, so I used the Dabber to give them a nice textural gold color also.

I was further inspired by this wonderful die cut peek-a-boo paper by We R Memory Keepers to create a pinwheel flower to embellish my LO. All I needed was a few small scraps of paper and a brad and my pinwheel made the perfect accent for my page.

If you would like to add a pinwheel to one of your pages, simply follow the tutorial below.

First, gather some supplies. You will need a paper trimmer, some scraps, a small flower punch, some ink and a brad.

Cut two squares of paper with your paper trimmer. I used 1 1/2" x 1 1/2" squares. Whatever size square you use, take note that the finished pin wheel will be about double the size when complete. Next, cut each square on the diagonal, so that you now have 4 triangles.

Now, following the picture here, take one edge of each triangle and fold it up so that the edges meet. Once you have done that to all four triangles, ink the edges for some dimension.

Take your paper piercer and stick it through the center of your punched flower, then through the edge of your triangle where the two edges meet. Put all four triangles onto the paper piercer in this manner. Then pull out the paper piercer and insert your brad.

And there you have it- your completed pinwheel ready to be added to your scrapbook page. Experiment by using different size squares and double-sided patterened papers. Before long, you will use up all your stash and you didn't have to go out and buy anything extra! If you use this tutorial, I would love to see what you make. Leave me a comment and a link because I would love to take a look!

Another Funday Monday challenge and A Winner!

This week's Funday Monday Challenge at Memories Always- Forever is to Reuse/Recycle/Repurpose
On this Omedeto (congratulations) page I repurposed two peices of packaging from Prima. On the first one, you can see that I used the piece of packaging as is. I love the color of the packaging that Prima flowers come on, so I simply slipped it behind my photo and used the area peeking out as my journaling card.

The second peice of packaging is also from Prima, but was the band used to hold the Sew Cute patterened paper. This band served as the product label and had a lot of writing on it, so I chose to paint it. Once dry, I punched holes and strung my Tim Holtz framents on a chain laced through the packaging.

The final picture is a detail of the tissue-paper flower, made simply by cutting 2 sizes of circles, layering them, inking them and snipping along the edges for a ruffled effect. The flower stem is made with a beautiful Zva Creative crystal flourish. The page was created from a sketch at Let's Scrap.

For the Curlz page (created with a Sketchy Thursday sketch) I inserted my grandson's lock of hair inside a peice of packaging from Me & My Big Ideas rhinestones. The package is clear and kind of raised, so it made a perfect place to stash something. It's sealed shut with the washi tape.

There are so many ways to Reuse/Recycle/Repurpose while scrapbooking. Give it a try and you could win a prize from me. Simply upload your LO to the Funday Monday challenge at MAF. The contest runs Sept 7 - Sept 13.

And now for our winner of last week's Funday Monday In the Garden challenge: Pat Bishop's beautiful LO showcased her granddaughter with this pretty bloom-filled page! Congratulations Pat. PM me your addy and I'll send you the prize of bling including a pack of gorgeous Zva Creative crystals!

Funday Monday Entries

Look at all the beautiful entries in this week's Funday Monday challenge at MAF!
There's still time to enter. You have until 11:45 pm EST on Sunday, Sept 6. All you need to do is make a page with some flowers and post the page to MAF for a chance to win some bling from me.
On Monday, look for a new Funday Monday challenge and a chance to win another great prize.

I'm a Groovy Chick!

I’m looking for fun and feeling so Groovy!
I’ve been a follower of If It's Groovy for a while now, and am so excited to become a Design Team member of this groovy site! It’s great to be a part of a team that has been inspiring me to scrapbook for some time now and I couldn’t be happier.

I’m on the Sweetheart Team which means I’ll be inspiring you to get out the camera and photograph your sweethearts - the men and boys in your life -- and feature them in your scrapbooks. I am excited to be working with Groovy Deb and her great team of designers. Come on over and check us out here. We have the grooviest monthly challenges and give away some truly groovy prizes too!

To start off September, the challenge is to make a page of someone showing a funny face. These photos of my grandsons sure brought a smile to my face! Check out some of the other Groovy Funny Face projects; I’m sure you will find something to inspire you. So get out your camera, snap a funny face and enter on If It’s Groovy. You never know what groovy prize you might win!

While you are there, meet the Groovy Design Team and laugh along with us! You can't help but leave smiling!