Fun with Easter Eggs!

Here's the latest artwork that I accomplished, a very seasonable project. :-) I thought it turned out so cute!

My sister gave me this neat egg carton, which instead of having 6x2 rows for eggs - had 4x3 rows for eggs. It still held a dozen eggs, just a bit differently. And of course, I had to decorate more than just the carton! The carton color left a bit to be desired, so I mixed up a little reinker with the Delta Ceramcoat paint and painted it first. :-)



These are real eggs decorated up. (My husband was sooooooo nice and "blew" out all the eggs for me and got them ready to go. How nice is that? And then the kids had scrambled eggs for a few days... HA!). First I painted them with some of our Create-a-Shade Pearl Paint mixed up with a little Delta Ceramcoat paint (for opacity) and reinkers (for color). Then I just had fun decorating them up with paper, flowers, ribbon, sparkles and more!



I even decorated up the inside of the carton. The papers were from our Caboodle kit, which inspired the color scheme for the whole project: Buttercup, Crystal Blue, Sorbet & Sweet Leaf. It was fun to do an Easter project without using the typical pastel Easter colors. I used a variety of stamp sets while decorating this up: D1338 Bird Basics, D1332 Boutique Borders, D1259 Eastertime, D1415 Springtime & C1405 In the Month of April.



What do you think? I was so happy with it! Hopefully more art to continue here soon!

Dani

My first Studio J layout!

I finally got around to making my first Studio J layout. I used a lot of photos that we had just taken at Delaney's first soccer tournament for the Spring 2010 season. (Yep, it's started already.)

I think it turned out really great! I'll have the layout here to showcase at the next Open House for the Summer 2010 Idea Book for everyone to see.



What do you guys think? LMK!

Dani

New Trend: Doilies and Lace!

If you read the Moxie Fab World blog, you will know that Doilies and Lace are an upcoming trend! :-) They had a great post about it on March 4, 2010. If you've never checked their blog out, I highly recommend it. They have such wonderful art and inspiration galore!

In fact I was so inspired by this post, that I decided to try to enter their Moxie Fab World Challenge - Diggin' on Doilies and Lace. Here's my card:



Most every part of the design -- minus the sentiment, cardstock, ribbon and sparkles -- is ALL LACE! I have the background piece stamped with a tone-on-tone lace design. Then I have a large border of lace stamped towards the bottom of the card, with a small lace corner accent and a small lace flower by the sentiment. But my most fun addition is my "lace flower" that I created out of a small little curved lace stamp and attached with 3-D Foam Tape for some dimension. (I built it up around a circle punch and kept layering it on top of each other to create the flower.)

I knew just what stamp set I wanted to use for the lace accents for this challenge, a beautiful stamp set by Close To My Heart: C1297 Lovely Lace. No brainer there, huh? Then I was browsing through my other sets to find the right sentiment, and "True happiness is drawn from the heart" just seemed to be it from D1365 True Happiness.



For my colors, I found my inspiration from a Spring 2010 Pantone Color report:

See my sad little circle on the top right there? I was matching their turquoise and tomato puree color with CTMH colors. I decided on Ocean and Tulip with White Daisy for the final color scheme. I can honestly say that I don't know if I would have chosen those colors on my own -- but they worked so well! It's fun sometimes to stretch your boundaries and try new color schemes. I always seem to be naturally drawn to earth tones, so those brighter colors are exciting to mess around with.

With my relatively recent diagnosis, most of you know that my whole life has had to adjust to my chronic health issues. I've been struggling a lot with finding time to create, since I used to just craft away at night after the kiddos went to bed and stay up until the wee morning hours with no worries on my end. Now, I know I need to listen to my body (which always seems to be tired way too early) and get to bed at a decent time. So.... finding creative time has been a continual struggle.

I'm making a point to try to give myself permission to create during the day sometimes, instead of just always doing the never-ending house chores, because I miss it so much! I made a couple of Baby's First Calendars for the kids' teachers just recently, which really brought how much I missed creating to my attention. I have a huge list of "wants" to accomplish, and the first one on the list was create a card for the Moxie Fab World Challenge - Diggin' on Doilies and Lace. Check... first item accomplished! Woo-hoo!

Moving on to my next project...

Dani