Birthday Card

I decided to use my sewing machine to make the "Happy Birthday"  on the card.  It worked pretty well.  I just wrote the letters in pencil to give myself something to follow and zig-zagged the letters. 

Happy Birthday little brother!  You might not get the card in time for your birthday, but it's in the mail. 

Paper Bird

Yesterday I made this paper bird with my daughter.  She made a pink one and the one that is pictured is going with a Valentine's gift for her teacher.  I saw this craft idea at Joann Craft Store.  You can find the instructions and template under the projects section at their website.
I wanted the embossed look like the project suggests so I used a set of Fiskars texture templates.  These are really fun to play with for kids too.  My daughter thought it was pretty neat to use with her coloring book.  The paper I used is a color core paper so it has two different colors if you manipulate it.

I went ahead and embossed it. Then I used sandpaper on the embossing to get the second color to come through the paper. 

Next, I cut out the pieces for the bird and assembled it using small brads.  I'm hoping I can get it to work with the Valentine's present for her teacher.  I'll show you a picture of it all next week.

Tags for School Bags

My daughter is headed back to school in a week.  Hurray!  Oh wait, did I just say that out loud.  In preparation for her to go back to school I made some tags for her backpack and lunchbox.  I bought some self laminating luggage tags at the office supply store and got to work making the tags.  I cut scrapbook paper to a little smaller than the laminating tag to have an edge that it could stick to itself.  I then cut her name out on the cricut and glued it on to the paper.  The last step was to insert it in the laminating tag.  A very easy project and it looks so nice when it is finished . 

Scrapbooks

I'm going to admit to you all that I'm not good at keeping up with my scrapbooks.  I love the end product, but do not like how time intensive it is.  I just finished up my daughters scrapbook up until her 2nd birthday.  I'm only 2 years behind now.  My daughter can't understand why I don't have her 3rd and 4th birthday in the scrapbook.  I'm trying to make a real effort to start doing a couple pages a week so I can catch up, but I'm thinking that might be an impossible task with two kids underfoot.  I will admit my daughter absolutely adores looking through the scrapbooks.  This makes all the work worth it.  This week I went ahead and painted on the front cover of her first scrapbook.

Wine Journal

I made a wine journal for my brother and future sister in-law for an upcoming wedding shower.  They lived in Italy for a year and became more interested in wine and I thought this would be the perfect gift.  The journal is made with an 8" x 8" fabric scrapbook.  The stencils for the lettering were made with my cricut using various fonts.

I used white acrylic paint to stencil the lettering on the book. 

On the inside of the book I put together pages that they could fill in the information about the wine.  The bottom of the page is left open for the label.  I hope they enjoy their new wine journal.

Baby Book

I have really fallen behind on my scrapbooking. My daughter will be 4 very soon and the last pictures I put in her scrapbook were from her 2nd birthday. Now that we have our 2nd child I haven't done a thing as far as scrapbooking. I was starting to feel bad about it and went out and bought him a scrapbook. Now he has a scrapbook and I personalized it as well. I've never painted on a scrapbook before, but I think it turned out great. It isa fabric scrapbook and I figured it couldn't be much different than the canvases I paint, so I went ahead and used acrylic paint. I love it and think this might be something that I'll start giving as baby gifts to my friends.