Features Friday - Show Me the Money

Another Friday post to inspire you to create, showing projects from our Yahoo group members at Your Scrapbook Place. If you are interested in joining this crafting, PIF'g, RAK'g, and challenges group, please see the sidebar or leave a request when you leave a little love.
Meanwhile, we have two members whose works are fiscally sound and monetarily creative.
First up we have Virginia, who has created a pocket card in which to slip a few notes for the birthday boy or girl.

Paula altered a photo frame and is popping a photo of her house into it. She called it her "Money Pit" frame. I can relate with her on that attitude-this week it's the water heater that needs replacing. We just got finished paying off the new fridge!

That's all for this week. Wherever you find inspiration, let your imagination take over and craft your hearts out!!

Technique Tuesday - Homemade Shimmer Misting Sprays

I love using alcohol inks in all forms -ink pads, sprays- and for all types of media -cards, altered art, mixed media canvas, using masks.  So imagine my delight when I discovered that markers,especially sharpies and such, are made with alcohol!!
So, I went to work cleaning out all the "dried-up" markers that are used at the school I work at. Can we say TONS of markers that I got to take home and re-purpose? After my granddaughter Bella sorted them into color families, the fun began. First, I poured some alcohol into glass jars.

Then we took off the markers' caps and I pulled the nibs off, placing them in the glass jars by color family. Within five minutes the jars were sporting nice colors. To really get the most out of those "dried-up" markers, I cut them open and pulled out the cores and added them to the jars.

After about an hour (we were very impatient), I was ready to play. Then I remembered that I have had some Pearl-X powder for the last ten years that I hadn't used but of course couldn't bear to get rid of (thank goodness).

So I added roughly a 1/4 tsp of powder to my bottles of alcohol inks and made some homemade "glimmer mist."

Can I get an "ooh, shiny" from you?  The next step was to make sure I had all my inks in spray bottles with the Pearl-X added. Now I have a nice supply ready for me, and all it cost was the price of a bottle of alcohol from WalMart (98 cents).

Bella was disappointed that I didn't have enough spray bottles/misters to make her some purple shimmer spray! I do have another bottle, red, that is still "cooking" and I promised her that I will have purple ready for her on her next visit.
One last Note, that I guess I should have put at the very top:
Wear gloves and do all this in the sink. I lost half my blue and 45 minutes of stressed out time frantically cleaning up a major spill on my kitchen counter top (and dishwasher, new shoes and tile floor) when a stubborn nib wouldn't come loose without the jerk that sent  most of the ink spewing all over. I wept while I cleaned. Don't tell hubby but there is a slight tint, almost not noticeable, on that kitchen counter--you know, the one I've wanted replaced with pretty marble ever since I moved into our house 19 years ago.

And here's a pretty card I made using my new shimmer mists on both cardstock for a background and the paper doily. The image is from Squigglefly by artist James Horvath, and the sentiment is from a rubber set from SU.
If you like those glimmer mists but don't want to pay the fiddler, try this method. I am VERY happy with what I got, and there are loads of "dried out" markers left to make more!!

Christmas in July Midway Reminder

Want to get a headstart with your Christmas cards? Join in the SBP Christmas in July challenge through July 14 for some great prizes!  Four lucky winners will receive prizes from our guest sponsor, Decosse's Dynamite Doodles. 

Today I used a FREEBIE (don't you love freebies?!).

My snowflake paper is a free giveaway from Decosse's Dynamite Doodles offered as incentive to create for the SBP challenge. DDD is this month's sponsor and she's giving away some great digital papers, sentiments and embellishments to FOUR lucky participants!
So after I printed out the paper and created my card base, I printed out my image and colored it with Copics. Aren't those mischievious cats cute?! The image is from DigiStamps4Joy. My sentiment is vellum from Daisy D's and I used some leftover rub-ons to frame the words, then colored in with Copics just the holly berries to coordinate with the colors in my tree, as well as the baker's twine I used to embellish my card.

To help your creativity get a kickstart, here's some inspiration from some of the ladies over at Your Scrapbook place Yahoo Group. From Linda Weber, a fancy-fold card-

From Pammie Lehto, using one of her own images- 

From Diane Hickman, our featured SBP group member- 

Lisa has generously donated the following prizes to up to FOUR lucky people:

• One random participant will receive the full mini kit.
• One random person who leaves a comment will receive both paper sets (patterned and textured).
• One random follower of the blog who leaves a comment will receive the word art set.
• One random player who uses the following FREEBIE digital paper (Click here for the link) from Decosse's Dynamite Doodles will receive three embellishment sets (frames, ribbons/lace, brads)

Challenge Rules:
You are welcome to combine your entry with other challenges.

New projects/cards only - no back linking. Limit three submissions per person.

Please link your project post to the challenge blog, not your entire blog link. If your project is not linked, it will not be counted in the random drawing

Please include a link back to this blog in your entry post. If it is not linked back, it will not be counted in the drawing. 

It's a WIN-WIN deal, ladies! Create and link up your Christmas card and you win two ways:

First, you'll get a headstart on your stash of cards to send out this hoiday.

Second, you'll be in the running for some fabulous prizes!! Link up HERE.

Paint Chip Inspiration

I have a very messy desk today, so I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't pull anything out of, well, anywhere, without using what's already on my desk. So what did I find first but four large paint chips. I decided to keep them as strips and make the card above. Bim, bam boom. I was done and had leftover strips so I made the bookmarks below.

 I used a punch for the butterfly topper, and I used the tiny butterflies that were punched out to mismatch each bookmark. The stamp is from a Stampin Up set. The projects took less than ten minutes in all!
What can you use with paint chips? If you don't have any, I believe all the sales people are helping other customers in the garden center, so now's your chance to grab a few (handfuls)!
And as always, crafters, have fun!

Technique Thursday - Paper Piecing 101

Paper Piecing 101 -
Give your images a New Look by Paper-piecing instead of coloring them! For this project, I used Squigglefly’s Moon Fairy. Since it is a digi-image, I printed out several images onto full-sized papers.

When you use rubber or cling stamps you can stamp onto leftover pieces of patterned paper. I used PaperTrey’s Raspberry Fizz and Hibiscus Buzz cardstocks, as well as 2 sheets of patterned paper leftover from my rummage sale stash.

Building up from your base layer (I’m using a sheet of white paper), cut out pieces from your colored papers and adhere to your base.

I always make at least two copies of my base image, so that I can color if needed and add layers from it (and for mistakes, which everyone makes!).

I cut out the full image from the lace patterned paper and attached it to the white base first. I then cut out the lighter pink cardstock, just the fairy image, and attached it. I then cut out the darker pink cardstock and placed it on my image.

I colored her face, arms and legs from the second white image, cut it out (keeping it one piece) and attached it. Finally, I cut out her hair from the second image on the lace paper and added some color to it before attaching it to my image. I added some Yellow and some Icicle Stickles to help her outshine the moon.




Once everything that’s wet is dry, you can cut out your paper-pieced image and apply it to your background paper!

It’s not as hard as it looks, and the finished product is a nice change from coloring. Even if all you did was print or stamp your image onto one extra piece of patterned paper and used it with your base of cardstock, you will have tried something new! So, what are you waiting for? Let’s see your projects!!