Today was a big crafty day.  My great niece and I made a video on how to make Lush bath bombs and although the color was a little bit odd, the bath bomb turned out really well.  She and her family had to make a trip into town, so I took that time to make a couple videos of my own.  I wanted to try to paint footie type socks with stamps to make them fun and frisky.  I had bought a four pack of them at the Dollar Tree (where else?) that were really bright colors.  I picked a fuchsia colored pair and stamped some really great flowers in peg stamps with Staz-On and then colored the centers with some Derwent Inktense pencils.  I really liked the result and they are a really fast, easy craft to make with kids or teenagers.  Especially when they want the really expensive decorated socks, and you don’t want to pay a fortune for them.  I have to say, I was surprised at how cute they turned out.

Lastly, my friend Rebecca,  one of the owners of Rubber Stamp Tapestry (the peg stamp people), sent me their latest collection of stamps.  I was really surprised and pleased to get them, and thought that I should get a video up and show everyone their new cute designs.  They made three bee-themed stamp sets that are absolutely adorable.  I wanted to make a card with them and what better than a thank you card for Rebecca.   I used a honeycomb embossing folder and colored it with ink to make it more realistic, then put a layer of cardstock through the center of the card and decorated the center portion with the new stamp sets.  I was really pleased with the results, and honestly, I have a lot of their floral stamps, and these are by far, my favorites.  The flowers just speak to me.  I love their stamps for stamping envelopes, but they are so versatile, and I keep finding more and more uses for them.

I got a bunch of fun crafty things from AliExpress and thought I’d share them with you.

Cathy from Stampin’ Up’s information is kkstamper@comcast.net and faithfulinkspirations.com   http://kkstamp.blogspot.com/

Ice cream cone die  $1.95 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/81-55mm-Ice-cream-scrapbooking-DIY-Flower-Shape-Sharp-Metal-Carbon-steel-cutting-die-Book-photo/32822610955.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.u4RVuL

Triple layer die –third piece  $3.59  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/135-45mm-New-Fashion-ladys-Carbon-steel-Die-Cutting-Dies-Scrapbooking-Embossing-Dies-Cut-Stencils-DIY/32811751547.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.u4RVuL

Slider Diess $2.05  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/29-styles-Customized-Halloween-Christmas-Stencil-Metal-Cutting-Dies-Cut-Practice-Hands-on-DIY-Scrapbooking-Album/32817756678.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.02O1Qr

Doily die  $2.17  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-Design-Customized-Dies-Cut-decoration-gifts-Practice-Hands-on-DIY-Scrapbooking-Album-DIY-Scrapbooking-die/32807509718.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.okQeaQ

Square postage stamp layering dies  $2.71 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/DIY-Metal-Cutting-Dies-Embossing-Stencil-Geometry-Square-Die-Craft-For-DIY-Cards-Album-Scrapbooking-Decoration/32807021287.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.okQeaQ

Grass Die $2.98  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Grass-DIY-Stencil-Metal-Cutting-Dies-Cut-Practice-Hands-on-DIY-Scrapbooking-Album-Craft-Dies-79/32819325570.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.okQeaQ

Dragonfly die $1.69   https://www.aliexpress.com/item/DIY-Flower-Dragonfly-Cutting-Dies-Stencils-Embossing-Card-Scrapbooking-Album-Decoration-Craft-Die-Cutting-Template/32794031384.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.TY96mq

Winter scene $1.69  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2017-New-Metal-Cutting-Dies-Stencil-95X70MM-Customized-Deers-le-Design-Embossing-Dies-DIY-Scrapbooking-Album/32819841096.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.EHWnwK

Tree Stamp Set $1.73  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Happy-Birthday-Girl-Tree-Design-Silicone-Transparent-Clear-Stamp-DIY-Scrapbooking-Christmas-Decoration-Supplies/32813091512.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.EHWnwK

Round Leaf Die $2.16  https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2017-New-Steel-Metal-Die-Cutting-Dies-Scrapbooking-Embossing-Dies-Cut-Stencils-DIY-Decorative-Cards-Embossing/32788128407.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.EHWnwK

Magic die–the place I bought it no longer sells it.

Spent yesterday getting ready for our family to visit…That involved cleaning that I really dread doing, but did anyway.  By the time they arrived, my face was beet red, I was sweating profusely and looked like a million dollars.  Actually, I probably looked like $1.  It wasn’t pretty.

Our great niece loves to go to thrift stores and today, one of our local thrift stores was selling all of their clothes for 50 cents, which is really uncommon near Washington DC., where they live.    We bought lots of fun clothes and I was so thrilled that she was happy.

We bought her a pair of white tennis shoes so she can make her own tie dyed sneakers and are going to make a bath bomb like they sell at the Lush stores.  I promised her mom that I’d give her the supplies to make graduation cards (as she’s running late on those), and we’re going to make cards probably tomorrow.  I have other crafts I’d like to make with them, including a duct tape tote bag.  It should be a lot of fun to make and will come in handy for transporting school things and groceries (for her mom.)  All in all, we have lots of ideas, but not a lot of ambition as it’s extremely warm here today.

I left everyone else hanging out and talking, to spend a while in a quiet spot with Aggie, our fifteen year old golden retriever.  Aggie doesn’t do well with crowds (crowds meaning more than Rich and I), so she and I are alone.. She’s leaning against a big fan and happy to be there.  I’m happy to be hanging out in a quiet spot with her, to catch up on YouTube comments and this blog.

Tomorrow is probably another big garage sale day, and it’s been so much fun catching up with family, so I might not write again for a couple of days.  I’m sorry that no videos are going live, but am hoping Rich is able to get a haul video up tomorrow.  (That’s my hope, I’m not sure if he’s up for it or not, as he pulled a muscle in his lower back and isn’t at his best.)

I’m so excited because tomorrow our nephew and his family will be coming to spend a long weekend with us.  I absolutely love their daughter, Erika, and if you remember, Erika and I made some videos together last year.  We have plans to do more videos on this visit and I’m thrilled to be doing them with her.  She’d like to make soap and I’m going to show her how to make bath bombs as they are they greatest.  I might also play with making candles with her and I have some small paper crafting ideas we might try.  She’s not really a paper crafter, but we had fun making a couple covered notebooks last year, so I think we’ll be doing that again, as well as covering an address  book and a datebook/planner.  I know planners are really big now, and I would like to make one for Erika’s mother.  I’m sure she’ll get some use out of it, as she’s a busy working mother.  I like to use the ones that the Dollar Tree sells, as they are small enough to fit inside a purse, but have enough space for me to add a mini notebook inside.  I’ve been watching people make small journals out of paper pads they bought at Hobby Lobby and of course I have some of those and why not experiment with them.

And speaking of Hobby Lobby, we were there today looking for a recipe size chipboard album that I could make for Erika, as she’s really learning how to cook.  I didn’t find any that I liked, but they did have a really fun and funky recipe book for her to write all of her recipes in.  It wasn’t a real bargain, but it was exactly what I wanted and I really think she’s going to like it.  She wants to learn new recipes from us and Rich is a terrific baker and I’m a good everyday type cook.  I guess I’d say I make things our grandma’s would have made.  Roast beef, baked chicken, meatloaf, lasagna–these are the things I can make well.

So I may not be blogging every day over the next five or six days, but I’ll try to make sure I blog as much as I am able.

I had all kinds of plans for making cards today, but unfortunately I was waylaid by my poor Aggie.  Rich was trying to cut her toe nails and she’s never been fond of it, so she jerks her feet.  Rich thought he only got the very tip of her nail, but it started to bleed and it was actually spurting blood by the time I got involved.  We really thought that it was under control–we had wrapped it in gauze and used medical tape to hold the gauze in place, until, she went outside.  This is where the story takes a bad turn.  Aggie has trouble picking up her back feet when she walks, so she kind of shuffles.  Unfortunately, her shuffling pulled her bandages off and reopened the vein.  There was blood everywhere.  On our carpets throughout the house, as she kept jogging away from us when she was being corralled.  Once she was outside and the bandage came off, she was on the patio and got blood all over the carpet, the stairs, pretty much everywhere.  The poor thing was so scared because we were holding her down to try to put a flour and water paste on her toe (the vet’s idea), and then wrap it in more gauze.    It took half of a box of gauze, a bottle of peroxide (to remove the blood from the carpets), a roll of medical tape, flour and water paste,  corn starch, and cling wrap to finally stop the bleeding.  She’s been exhausted ever since, just laying in front of the fan on a blanket I put there, in case she started bleeding again.

The odd part of the story, was Honey.  She and Aggie don’t spend much time together, but Honey knows Aggie’s in charge.  When we were trying to bandage Aggie’s foot, Honey was whining and barking and was really agitated.  I felt so bad for both dogs as neither Rich nor I, had time to talk to Honey, while we were trying to comfort and bandage Aggie.   And, hey, it’s not easy trying to wrestle a fifteen year old golden retriever to your way of thinking.  It doesn’t matter what you do, she has a mind as clear as a bell, and she uses it to find a way to free herself from any uncomfortable situation, and today was very uncomfortable for her.

After she was bandaged, blood clean-up took the rest of the afternoon and the evening was spent at the Laundromat with bedding and rugs that took a blood bath, literally.

Two of my closest friends have their birthdays on August 19th and 20th.  We went to college together and they were in my wedding, so we go back a really long way.  (Since I’m only twenty-nine, we don’t go back that far–ok, I’m a liar,  we’ve known each other longer than twenty-nine years, yikes!)

I always like to make cards that are a little bit quirky for them, as they are both a lot of fun and kind of immature (like me.)

I’ve been really thinking about what style of cards I wanted to make for them and found some fun stamps in my stash that I knew were perfect.  One is from AI, and is of the upper half of a woman and then there’s another stamp of her lower half.   The lower half is from the back, so you stamp that on the inside of the card.  The sentiment that came with the stamp says something like “Aging is a pain in the rear.”  I knew my girlfriend would get a kick out of it.  I also had some zombies stamps and my other girlfriend likes to watch “The Walking Dead,” which, if you’ve never seen it, is about zombies, so I thougbt she’d get a laugh out of her card.  I made a video of the zombie card and included a photo of the other card as well.  I’m really glad I got them finished so I can get them in the mail and hopefully get them to them on time.  My biggest problem isn’t making cards, it’s getting them to the post office.  I’m not sure why I take so long to do that, and I get really frustrated by my slowness, but I’m making a vow that these cards are going in the mail tomorrow.  Ok, maybe the next day.

I spent the morning going to garage sales and finally found stamps for sale.  I think this is the first garage sale that I’ve been to this year, that actually sold some stamps that I wanted.  The woman who was having the sale was so excited that I was interested in her stamps, that she kept trying to add more and more to my pile.  At one point she tried to sell me everything crafty she was selling.  Maybe when I started my crafty hoarding, I might have buckled and bought everything, but I doubt it.  She had rub-ons and loose paper and a lot of really old stamps from Stampin’ Up.  They had the country look that stamps seemed to gravitate toward in early 2000’s.  I didn’t want to hurt the lady’s feelings, but I have my own hoarding to deal with and really don’t want to add hers to it.

I came home and uploaded the video for our great niece’s album and that took forever, because it was over forty minutes.  That was a long video, but the album took probably twelve hours to make, so forty minutes isn’t really all that long.  (Unless you have no interest in making albums,  then forty minutes would feel like a lifetime.)

 

Our great niece is going away to college and I wanted to make an album for her that she could put her memorabilia in.

I had some small embellished paperclips from Michaels (bought them last year) and the colors worked well for her album.

Her school colors are a navy blue and a rusty red color.

I started with white 6 x 6 chipboard and painted the outer edges white.  I marked each chipboard piece at 1″ from the left edge on both sides and added tear tape to the 1″ spot.  I made the same number of 3″ x 6″ white strips out of Recollections 110 lb heavyweight cardstock.  I scored the 3″ length at 1 1/2″.  You will place the backside of the folded 3″ piece on the 1″ line of the 6″ chipboard piece and press into the tear tape.  You take the tear tape lining off of another chipboard piece and lay it on the front of the 3″ paper, again lining it up.  You’ll want to line the chipboard up at this point, as you’ll not be really able to line it up on the tear tape.  Add another 3″ strip to the front of the chipboard you just laid down again, right up to the 1″ mark you made, and add another piece of chipboard.  You won’t want to have any tear tape on the back of the last page or the front of the first page.  The video I watched where I learned how to make this book binding method, was from My Creative Spirit and the video was called “how to bind chipboard pages into a mini album.”  I ran out of time to do the outer part of the binding, so I hope her album stays together, although I did put a lot of tear tape inside to keep the pages in place.
I used some different paper pads Jack Frost paper, Salvage District Paintables from Prima and Recollections Color Splash.  I colored the Paintables and the Prima papers with my watercolors so they matched the colors of her school. .  I used the sentiments from My Creative Times This and That and had some embellishments with words on them that I thought would work already in my stash.
I die cut some random shapes to create pockets from and went online and found all kinds of images with the college’s logo and their mascot and printed them out on Georgia Pacific 110 lb cardstock on my printer.  I used a lot of tear tape and Martha Stewart Glue, Simply Defined glue and Tombow Mono Adhesive to hold things in place.
I used the circle dies from AliExpress to create a large circle on the front of the album with the colors of her school layered under the logo of it.

To create pockets, I cut my paper to 6″ by 3″ and then score three sides at 1/4″ and then snip the corners that overlap with score marks.  I like to put glue and tear tape on pockets to make sure they stay in place.  I added die cut shapes to the tops of some of my pockets to make sure that the pockets wear better and for decoration.

I made spots for her to tuck memorabilia into that were about 2″ wide and 6″ long scored on the 6″ length at 1/4″.  Add tear tape to the scored areas and place them vertically on the page.  I made some much wide to add large sentiments…those were more like 4″ wide.
The file block I use is a nail file that you can buy in most stores that have nail polishes.
I used an AliExpress die that cut small tags, so I cut papers and corner rounded white cardstock to line the blue and red paper.  I took thin white satin ribbon and doubled it over and pushed it through the center hole of the tag with a sharp object (end of scissors) and then pulled the ends of the ribbon through the loop the was created by pulling the ribbon through the hole to create a knot.  I used a little wet glue on the inside of the loop to hold the ribbon in place.
I used a Martha Stewart paper punch that creates photo corners and punched a ton of them in blue and red so she can put photos in her album using the corners to hold them in place.

I thought I’d take a moment to talk about the giving nature of people.  I was at a garage sale looking at two different camcorders, as I would like to upgrade to one with a better microphone.  I started talking to the man who was having the sale and asked him what he knew about his camcorders.  He said he was selling them for a friend and that he really knew nothing about them.  I explained my channel and why I wanted them.  He said, “Do you know..and then he gave me a man’s name.”  I had met this man on numerous occasions but don’t really know him, but of course, said yes.  This man was a teenager and jumped head first into a river, breaking his neck and was instantly paralyzed from the waist down.  He and his family own a rather large company and he still travels all over the world.  He’s absolutely amazing and has never let his physical limitations slow him down.

The friend who was selling the camcorders started packing them up and said, Mark wanted these to go to a good home, and I know he will be thrilled to know what you’ll be doing with them and gave me both camcorders.  I thanked him very much and said that I would write a note to Mark.  Once I figure out which one works well for me, I’ll find a way to pay it forward with not only the other camcorder, but mine as well.  I am always amazed by the generosity of strangers, and this is just one of many.   Since starting this YouTube channel, I’ve met so many wonderful generous sweet people and hope that I pay it forward, as I’ve been really blessed.

I was thinking about making something crafty today, but then decided I needed to put more of my dies in better storage.  I’d bought some of the heater vent covers that so many people use for dies.  For some reason, I thought that they would be a lot more sturdy than they are.  I couldn’t get my dies to stay on them, as every time I picked them up, the magnetic sheet wobbled enough that they fell off (or partially came off.)  I originally bought this system, but the refills seemed a little bit heavier than I expected, making the box truly unmanageable for me.   You can buy them just about anywhere, but I got this photo from Consumercrafts.com.

Ok, so the photo wants to move every time I type, so I’m just going with it.

I like the sturdiness of the box, but it’s really heavy once you add the sheets and dies.  I thought by adding some of the vent covers, it wouldn’t increase the weight that much, but didn’t take into account the flimsiness.  So I spent my crafty time today, lining all of the vent covers with cardboard..I know chipboard is the chosen word, but I’m an old fashioned girl, with old fashioned words.  That almost rhymed, haha.

So in the long run, maybe the magnetic vent covers aren’t the best alternative.  Hey, I might as well find a picture of those as well, in case you’ve never seen them.  You can buy them at any hardware store that sells supplies for your heating system.  Apparently, these are used to cover the floor grates the send hot and cold air through your house.  I have a really unusual heating system in my house, coils in the ceiling, (weird, huh?) so don’t have any vents.  So much for my day, and frankly, yours, as you’ve had to listen to my long-winded story of how I spend my time.