Happy Halloween!

Hope you have a wonderful day full of fun, surprises, tricks and treats!

(And that the Rebels beat Auburn!! smile.)

Fun treat for me!

Since we're so close to Trick-or-Treating, I thought I'd share with you a fun treat that I had the honor to do this month. Carrie Harville over at Chatty Scrappers (A UK based online community) contacted me last month and asked if I would be like to be featured as their guest inspiration for their October Super Scraplift Challenge. Of course I said yes! They chose to scraplift one of my favorite LOs:

Adore


You can see all of their takes on my LO here! It's so much fun to see other people do a "lift" of one of MY projects! What an honor! Thanks Carrie!

In other news, today I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off! So much to do, so little time!

We had a little snafu with our Halloween costumes, which has had me scrambling to pull it all together. Initially Caroline wanted to be Tinkerbell. Easy enough. We just ordered online and it's been here for a couple of weeks. The PROBLEM is that it didn't run true to the size chart and is too small for her (and I waited to the last minute to try it on her). So now Sarah Kate is going to be Tinkerbell, and we've scrambled to come up with a Little Mermaid costume for C. Not many "good" mermaid costumes out there right now, but we grabbed one of the last ones at Toys R Us yesterday. I also wasn't pleased with the set of wings that came with the Tink outfit, so I'm attempting to make my own a la the Martha Stewart template. We'll see how those turn out too!

Must go work on them more! Hope you're having a wonderful day!!

More to "Leave you Breathless"

Here's more from my October Urban Anthology kit, "Leaves you Breathless". You can find it here. I did one REALLY Fall LO using a sketch from Stacy Cohen, and then I did a very non-Fall LO too. I love it when kits are so versatile, don't you?

Fall



For this one I hand cut some of Keri's tags, which this month also came in overlay form. I also hand cut the Hambly leaf paper, and popped the leaves up with 3D foam. For instructions on how to do a distressed reverse applique, check out the UA boards here.

Siblings





Part of my "Thrifty Thursday" post is that I used wire cutters to cut the Prima vine, and then used its balls and a butterfly here with more of the vine left over for future projects.

Sadly, this is my last kit from Urban Anthology. Kari has decided that creating kits is no longer her thing, and while UA will still be around, it won't be offering kits any more. You can find the November kit here. The winners of "UA's Got Talent" will be working with that kit, so be sure to check out their work on the site soon!

Fall Banner and a sweet surprise!

One of my Nikki Sivils projects this month is a Fall banner I made for our fireplace. I LOVE making banners! I love how they add a touch of the season. For this one, I used the "Sweet as Cherry Pie" chipboard mini-book trees, only I turned them upside down and made the into pumpkins. Then I covered them with some papers from "Henry's Brillance", not your typical Halloween paper but I'm a sucker for argyle. Plus, I didn't want JUST a Halloween banner, but something that'd last through all of November too. So here it is:


Other products used: cardstock-Bazzill, silk leaves-Michaels, felt accents-Little Yellow Bicycle, chipboard letters-Basic Grey, (my favorite)brown glitter-Pink Paislee, paper leaves & grapevine accents-Prima, and orange Maya Mist

Close-ups of one of the letters.


detailed shots:



*********************

And then this morning I saw some FUN fun news on the My Mind's Eye blog. I WON their Blog Challenge #4!!! I'm SO excited and still a little shocked! Totally didn't see that one coming! Wow! Thank you so much for choosing me Amber! :D

Hope everyone else's Monday has started off as good as mine!

Chocolate milk without the milk

Yep! That's what I found them drinking the other day. They'd gone inside to get a drink, which I thought was just a drink of water. A few minutes past and so I went in to investigate. And this is what I found. It kinda went like this:

me: Girls, what are you doing???
C: We're drinking chocolate milk, mama. Want some? (as she wipes her lips on her sleeve then gives them a good smack.)
me: uh...but where's the MILK???
C: Oh. It's in the frig-a-freighter. We couldn't reach it.

Just as matter of fact as she could be! Hee! And did you notice the Hershey's syrup with top off behind her? What about the open chips? Apparently they were planning on eating something salty too. (sigh)

A little MME!

While we've totally been enjoying the Fall weather around here, and more on that to come, I was totally inspired to use pastels for the new My Mind's Eye blog challenge. the challenge was to use an ad to inspire a layout.


Here's the ad:


And here's my take on it:

I really liked the ad because it used a lot of little pieces, and that seems to be all that I have of my MME collection, so it was perfect for me!

Sorry to be so quick, but I'll have more FALL coming quickly! Promise.

A rare mini album

Rare, because I don't make them that often. But I do like to make them. I did this one as a part of Finals week over at the Nook. (I came in 4th place, which the competitor in me isn't completely satisfied with. Oh well. There's next year. I do like the stuff I made though.)

I particularly like this mini because I was able to use up a lot of my pictures I'd taken at the lake over the course of the summer. And this time I centered not on the fun activities, but how much the lake brings us together as a family.

The details of the mini album challenge were that it had to be 8 pages or 8 designed surfaces and it was cumulative in that we had to use 3 of the previous "lessons" that had been covered in class. I chose to revisit the Typography, Art 110 (Doodling), Biology (paper pieced animal), Eng. Lit., and Graphic Design classes. Yes, I'm an over-achiever. I know. But it's more like I'm just stinkin' competitive.











One last quick note. The mini is the square scalloped chipboard. Since I left the chipboard bare, it was hard to photograph. So I propped up the yellow paper behind it. Also, I'm aware that I didn't doodle around the edges of the 1st cousin page with my sister in it. That's called procrastination and then an overlooked mistake because I tried to finish in hurry. Yeah, I was like that in school too. Guess old habits die hard.

That's all from me today!

Have a happy Monday! :D

Growing up too fast

Both the girls seem to be hitting a growth spurt right now, but I think it's also got something to do with the change in the weather. Their legs just look sooo long in blue jeans! This has been on my mind for a while now, so I decided to do a LO about it, atleast with Sarah Kate. I'm also excited to report that SK's album size is closing in on Caroline's. I've been determined to scrap her more lately.

Growing up too fast

I used Urban Anthology's October kit. Obviously it's meant to be a Fall-ish type kit, but you can use it for the every day too.

And continuing with the growing/flower theme, I was shooting Tab's kids the other day and Miss Caroline snagged one of their sunflowers as her own. Stinker. At first she was being silly and pretended it was a shower. We all got a good laugh out of that as she pretended to bathe herself right there in the middle of the park!



Then she couldn't keep her nose out of it! Apparently she thinks that all flowers are supposed to smell really good. And then I got this.


An instant favorite, and definitely a keeper.

More with the UA kit coming up shortly. In the meantime, I thought I'd let you know that Simply Obsessed is having a Think Pink crop this weekend in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month. Maybe I'll see ya over there! ;)

Lots of scrappiness going on around here!

Seems like I've been going back and forth with posting a LOT of layouts and projects, and then a lot of photos. You know I've been busy creating even though I've been taking photos too. So here's a sample of what I've been up to. I've been working with some yummy Collage Press "Knave of Hearts". I bought it earlier this summer and am so bummed that I didn't get their "Sweet Shoppe" too. But here's what I've done so far.

So Lovable

Josh and SK at her birthday breakfast this past Spring.





Top of the World

The 2 of us at Amy's reception, which overlooked Birmingham.




I had fun dismantling my Prima swirls and the recreating this pattern with them. I think I like deconstruction. That's what happened to the circular die-cut too. I cut it into arcs and then staggered them across the bottom.

Lucky

An older picture of the 2 of us, but still my all-time favorite. I threw in a few scraps of "Jackson Lodge" and "Camden" in to this one too. And apparently I have a "thing" for using the title "lucky". I think the count's up to 4 LOs with that name now? But who's counting?! What can I say, I AM lucky (and blessed) to have him in our lives!




Btw, I cut out the 18 and put it next to Nov. because that's our anniversary.

Lucky

See what I mean? hehehe! I did this one a while back as a part of a DT challenge on CP's blog.



And then I've made a couple of cards lately.




I did this one for another CP blog challenge.




And here I deconstructed again. LOVE doing that to die-cuts!



Alrighty, that's about it for now. I actually have a LOT more photos from this past weekend, and then LOs with the gorgeous Urban Anthology October kit to share too you'll be seeing me again soon! ;)

Oh, one last thing. The other day I had the wonderful opportunity to do a photo shoot of my friend Tab's kiddos. I'm totally excited with how they turned out!!! Check them out here.

Have a great Friday! :D

Well...we didn't win...

but as an Ole Miss fan, we're kinda used to that. Doesn't make it any easier though. Next time I'm determined to be a pessimist so my hopes don't get shattered quite so badly. But then, how can I stay too depressed when I take one look at this:


What a sight! One quick glimpse, and I thought, 'When the heck did she get that BIG?!"


There goes my heart. And her Daddy's too.


She came up with this pose all by herself. To the best of my knowledge no one showed her. (sigh) Guess we'll be signing up for cheer lessons right along with ballet, cause this came a little too naturally if you ask me. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. I can just hear it now..."Ready? O-KAY! Hit it!"

Hotty Toddy!!!

Hopin' for a big win today and we're all set to cheer on our Rebs!
Appetizers? check.
girls in cheerleader uniforms? check.
All other Saturday commitments postponed? check.

Now bring on the Tide!!!! :D :D :D

Woohoooo! Pumpkins!

Today we went to pick out pumpkins, which was so much fun. In fact, I think we're in double digits when it comes to the teeny tiny ones. Caroline just couldn't stop picking them out. SK was more enthralled with pulling the wagon, but she picked a few out too. And now the front steps look so good, so Fall-ish! Yay! I really love Fall! :D