A Cherry On Top Haul - Christmas Present From Jon

Good morning! I hope you all had lovely holidays! I was sick through the second half of them, and it's taken me forever to feel better. I had planned to share some Project life on Monday, but I wasn't feeling up to finishing the pages and getting the post ready, so I took a couple extra days to feel better and instead, today I'm sharing the one Christmas present that I couldn't wait to open up! Of course it's craft supplies, and of course I have the best boyfriend ever because he let me order a bunch of supplies for my Christmas present. I know the holidays are about giving, and being with family, and next week I'm sharing the one gift I was beyond excited to GIVE this year.

I hate alphas because I always run out of vowels and have to buy more or get creative with titles, but somehow I've fallen in love them anyway. I love the variety of colors, shapes, fonts, etc. Here's the names of the alphas pictured here (left to right):

Gold Library thickers from Maggie Holmes Open Book line. Sunrise Pink thickers from Studio Calico Atlantic line. Bliss 2 Chipboard thickers from Studio Calico Hey Day line. Ali Chipboard thickers from Studio Calico Hey Day line. Afterglow Black foam alpha from Amy Tangerine Stitched line. Darling Geyser foam thickers from Crate Paper Oh Darling line. Dunbar gold foiled thickers from American Crafts. Every Day kraft chipboard thickers from Amy Tangerine Stitched line. Emma red dot glitter thickers from Studio Calico Thataway line.

Some Studio Calico wood veneers, cameras and snowflakes, as well as the Brighton Pier 6x6 paper pad. I was hoping for the 12x12, but settled for the little one, and bought a select few papers from the collection at 12x12.

I have an older embroidery kit from Amy Tangerine, and though I don't use it much, I want to do a little more embroidery on my projects. The two above are Comrade and Hello.

More Amy Tangerine supplies from her new Stitched line. Rub Ons, Oxford embroidery kit, Ephemera, and Matte Puffy Stickers.

More from Amy Tangerine. I was so excited about her Stitched line that I bought as much of it as I could get my hands on. It's beautiful! On the left we have her alpha book, and on the right, some stickers from her Stitched line. They're beautiful and look like they were painted with water colours.

When I found out Shimelle was creating a line of craft supplies, I knew that I would love them. I bought everything I could (of course). Her stamp, date stamp and ephemera.

Rub ons, layered chipboard stickers, and her sticker book. I can't wait to start using all of these new embellishments! I want to do more traditional scrapbook pages this year, and I knew I was going to need some embellishments to do so.

On the left is a set of My Minds Eye prints. They're 8x10 and ready to be popped into a frame and hung up. They're so beautiful and I can't wait to hang them in our bedroom. On the right are two My Minds Eye paper pads The top is Sleigh Bells and the bottom is Metallics.

I got a set of these stickers from My Minds Eye a while back, and I love them so much, I couldn't resist buying another set. The bottom right set is chipboard stickers.

Chipboard stickers are one of my weaknesses. These are from My Minds Eye Just Sayin' line.

These chipboard stickers are from the My Minds Eye Kate & Co. line.

These are from My Minds Eye Market Street line.

This set is just regular stickers from the My Minds Eye Kate & Co. line.

I also got the following individual papers as well. 

 

    

  

I also bought the following 12x12 paper packs

Amy Tangerine Stitched, Shimelle and Maggie Holmes Open Book.

Thanks for coming by to see my new craft supplies! I look forward to sharing more projects with you this year!

-Alexandria

Studio Calico: 30 Days of Me - Part 5

Thanks for coming back for the final part of my 30 Days of Me album. It's winding down and I'm almost sad that this is almost the end. Though I feel like I've wasted enough of your time with this album, so of course today will be the last day. The first four parts can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

First up, "Daily routine" for this, I just included a photo of my electric kettle, and journaled about my lack of routine. Since work closed in May, my routine has been basically non-existent. I've tried to get myself into a routine, but it hasn't worked. the one constant, was having a cup of tea after I woke up, so I included the kettle.

These two pages are my absolute favorite for very different reasons. The left one, is my favorite content-wise, and the right is my favorite technique/appearance-wise.

"I dream of..." at first I almost put a photo from the old TV show "I Dream of Genie" but I actually hated it, so instead I found some photos from the internet that were of things I do actually dream of happening in my future.
Top right: The house we want to build out on the 6 acres of land next to Jon's parents' place. We browsed plans for a couple months, fell in love with that house, and found out it wasn't possible right now. I dream of this house, literally. I'm looking forward to building it, hopefully next summer.
Bottom left: One day (hopefully soon) I dream of Jon proposing. We've talked about it a lot, and I've given him a few ideas of what he could do that would make my heart melt, and he has a few ideas of his own. We've talked about rings and I sent him a picture of what I wanted, we agreed on a metal so that when we get married, our rings will match. I know that I want to build the house before we get married, but a proposal is a totally different thing in my opinion.
Bottom right: I also dream of having a family. Preferably after we get married and build the house, but who knows. I took this photo from pinterest. It was the best way without having a strangers face in my album, plus I just love that photo.

This page was either going to work out beautifully or fail the minute I started. I only had one attempt to do it because I made the mistake of putting the alphas on the top before I painted it. If it hadn't worked out, I probably would have still used it, just covered it with something. For this prompt "Life is..." I didn't want to try and use one word to describe life, because life is so much more than just one word. I took out my Acrylic paints and painted two green and one purple strip. It's rather thick on one side, and there's so much texture that it was a little tricky to write on. I love the way it looks. I used a white uniball pen to write on it, and added an arrow wood veneer from Freckled Fawn.

"Evidence of me" I struggled with a little bit. I had a few ideas, (dirty dishes, baking, my pile of dirty laundry on the floor in the bedroom, bobby pins all over the house), and decided on this photo. Its a close up of all the little scraps and bits that have fallen onto the carpet by my desk in the craftroom. These little paper bits get stuck to my feet and I always find bits of paper in the kitchen and living room, which are on the opposite end of the house. It's my little way of leaving evidence that I've been crafting.

For the "I love..." prompt, I wanted to keep it simple and wrote a list of things that I love on a little tag and punched holes to attach it directly to the rings. I love how simple it is. I fit pretty well everything I love onto here.

"Currently Playlist" was a prompt...I think. I'm writing this from work and my list is at home on my desk. I added all the songs that I've been listening to, mostly on repeat. I used some music paper from the Music Mini kit from Studio Calico. I added some stickers and little acrylic music notes from the kit as well.

Just a close up of the acrylic music notes and the sequins.

The last prompt for my album was "Goals". My sewing machine needle broke when I was trying to stitch this pocket closed, so I had washitape holding it closed (that ugly pink and green striped tape you can see in a few of the other photos). When I went to photograph this page I remembered I had the tape on there, and had fixed my sewing needle, so I quickly stitched it shut. When sewing a pocket closed with things on both sides of the pocket, make sure to complete both sides before sewing!

I kept my goals simple, and hopefully attainable. My goal is to finish all of them before I do this again next September. We'll see how that goes!

The spine with its cute little purple label I made. I just measured the label that came inside of it, and made a text box in Microsoft Word, the same size, and typed my title in there, printed it and cut it to size.

Plain front cover. I was thinking about adding something, but there's so much going on inside that I think I'll just leave it plain black.

The bursting right side. You can't really see the dividers here either, but I know they're there. I love that crochet cotton showing on this side!

All the ribbon, and twine sticking out of the top. I think I should add something to the rings to hang out the top/over the spine a little.

Another shot of the bottom, I shared two photos of the bottom (halfway through, and finished). It's so full!

Here's a flipagram I made of the whole album, for those of you who might not want to read the blog posts, but just wanted to see the album.

Thanks for coming by to see this mini album. I'm so happy with how it turned out. I think Studio Calico has taken the class down, but you could easily make up your own prompts to just focus on you right now. I hope you enjoyed looking through this.

Have a great day!
-Alexandria

Studio Calico: 30 Days of Me - Part 4

Good morning! Thank you for coming back to see Part 4 of my 30 Days of Me album. It means so much to me that you came back to see part for, if you missed the other parts you can find the rest here: Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3. Just click on the part you want to see! Happy reading!

Today I'm sharing all the pages inside the "Fall in love with your life" section. The focus of this section was things about my life that I love. I included prompts that focused on important pieces of my life right now.

First up, is a little sequin pouch, and behind it, something very special!

Because I wanted this little sequin pouch to be directly attached to the ring of the binder, I stitched a little square and punched my hole from the center of it, just to ensure it didn't split and have sequins come out everywhere.

This is something I'm pretty excited about. It looks like some patterned paper stitched to a pocket page and tied with ribbon, but it's so much more than that.

Just a close up of the stitching around the pocket page.

The pocket opens up on the right to reveal this.

It opens up into a little 6 square mini album page, inside my mini album.
This was inspired by Nicole Reaves' minibook class at Studio Calico. She made these little 8x12 pages, and glued them together to make a mini album. I took that idea and made a litttle 8x12 page, cut the right and bottom sides off of a 4x4 pocket page and stitched my page to the pocket page. I tied it with ribbon to keep it from flipping open whenever it wanted.
In this little mini album, within a mini album, I put the "Loving right now" prompt. All of these are things that I love right now. From ampersands, to cupcakes, history to my messy desk to mini albums and sequin pockets. I did a bit of journaling for each item with a photo, and created a list of things I love in the top left square.

 

I left the back of the mini album within a mini album, blank. I didn't want to make it look busier than the paper already was.

For the "Around the house" prompt, I included photos of a few of my favorite things. My new writing desk that I painted this summer, Gracie sleeping in her new favorite chair, and the rustic clock, and chrome owl that are my favorite two pieces from my livingroom. The title card is from the Marcy Penner minibook class and the alphas are from Studio Calico.

For "On the menu" I included a few new recipes we've made in the last little while, and all the baking that I did in preparation of work opening, and us not having as much time as we'd like. I made so many muffins, I'm surprised we're not sick of them yet. I tried out a recipe for a cucumber salad, and one of our favorites: Chicken Bacon Ranch in the slow cooker (recipe to come).

The "In my bag" prompt, was something I was actually a little excited about. I just bought a new wallet, and I had been meaning to clean some junk out of my purse (the empty icebreakers container, the receipts, the little Boston Pizza mints), but instead of cleaning it out before snapping this, I took a "real life" photo, because not everything can be clean and organized.

On the back of In my bag I put "Currently". I included the date, and filled in the prompts on the card. This card is from a Studio Calico kit (I think), but might also been in another of Becky Higgins kits (I'm thinking a Dear Lizzy mini kit perhaps) I wanted to keep this simple, and clean, I feel like that's exactly what this is. I love the title being down the side.

Next up I included the "Working on" prompt. This was a fairly simple one for me. I knew exactly what photos I wanted to include because all the projects I'm working on right now, were either on, or near my desk. There's way more than what I included here, but these were the three I'd worked on the most in the month of September.

"I love to..." I also did this one near the end. Tried to keep it fairly flat, and I wanted to include more of my handwriting. For this one, I just chose three things I'd done this particular week that I loved. I bought new books, my Studio Calico kits came in (including my 30 Days of Me class kit. Better late than never), and I went shopping at a local shop that I love to death!

I don't normally make "To Do" lists, but in preparation of a dinner we were making for Jon's parents before going to the movies, I made one so I made sure that I didn't forget anything. Rather than rewrite the list, I just attached it to a scrap of patterned paper, and added some staples to the bottom to make it extra secure.

The "lessons learned post was a tough one for me. I didn't want it to be overly serious, but I didn't want it to just be generic things I've learned. I also wanted to keep it a little light hearted. Just used some ledger paper, and alpha stickers to keep it simple.

 

Here's my final divider. It says "There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind". This section is more about the future, and it has two pages that make my heart happy.

Thanks for coming to see part 4 of my 30 Days of Me class album. It's winding down, and I'm grateful that you've stuck with it so far! If you're just starting, don't forget to click the links at the top to read the other 3 parts!

Have a great day!

-Alexandria