In Need of A Little Sparkle

My 1 year-old daughter refuses to wear ANYTHING on her head. I've tried sun hats, beanies of many kinds, bows, clips, head bands... Nothing ever stays on for longer than a few seconds. The only thing I have found she will gladly keep on her head is her brother's ball-caps - SO NOT GIRLY! Before I went out and purchased yet another hat for her I decided to give one of her brother's a makeover. If she doesn't like it - it's okay, I didn't spend a dime!

I dug up some unused flower buttons from a project for my niece, glittery gem stones left over from our Christmas Ornaments last year and one of my favorite products - Aleene's Tacky Glue (in the gold bottle). It works on and for everything!

I used my knee to keep the shape of the hat while glueing on all the fun and my 3 year-old helped picking which flowers should adorn the hat. Since the hat is for my 1 year-old I made sure to get glue all over the back of each item so there would be less chance of her picking them off. I had to be careful not to put too much stuff on the hat actually - I found myself wanting to add more and more flowers and gems.

Still camo - but now it's camo with SPARKLE!

Finally Got Some Time...

I finally was able to get both my kids down for a nap at the SAME time. A very rare occurance! I decided to spend this golden opportunity addressing a problem I've been meaning to take care of for a long time. Let's see if you can guess what I made...


No idea huh? Let's try another angle...

Ok then, here's a BIG clue...

I made a cord organizer! Well, technically not a cord organizer, but a cord hider I guess :)

I have a wonderful (if rarely used) office. Unfortunately, because my kitchen table is so central to my entire house I tend to spend most of my computer time there. Between my cordless mouse transmitter thingy (no idea what it's called), my external hard drive, my ipod cord and my phone cord I have quite the mess at the table most days.

I needed a way to make my mess appear more organized and make it easier to move the laptop from the table to other parts of the house when needed. What I came up with was a very simple solution. I used:

• A box with an attached lid
• 3 coordinating pieces of 12x12 scrapbooking paper
• Mod Podge

It was as simple as wrapping a present and I think my table looks much cleaner! Yeah me! :)

Digital Scrapbooking - Getting Started

Paper scrapbooking. I tried it, I didn’t like it. There were many reasons but all in all it just wasn’t for me. I was ecstatic to discover Digital Scrapbooking a couple of years ago and have been in love with the whole creative process ever since.

I personally use Adobe Creative Suite 2 and haven’t felt a need to upgrade to 3 or now 4. There are so many programs available ranging from VERY affordable to VERY pricey. Choosing the right software is a personal decision you should base on you budget and computer skills. I highly recommend any of Adobe’s Create Suite software, but then that’s all I’ve used.

Beyond the software, creating a Digital Scrapbook page can cost pennies or even can be FREE. There are tons of websites that offer free kits to download. A lot of times these kits include background papers, embellishments, text, and journaling pieces, special effect brushes etc. I have purchased TWO things for digital scrapbooking and spent a total of $9 on them. Once downloaded, you can use these kits over and over and over. Simply searching the internet for “DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKING FREEBIES” will produce hundreds of sites to look through. Here are some of my favorite shops:
Shabby Princess has offered some of my favorite kits.
Two Peas in a Bucket offers a lot of smaller kits for free. This link takes you to all of their items priced below $2, including their free items
Scrapbooks Etc is a great resource for How-Tos and has several free downloads
Peppermint Creative
Retro Diva
Simply Clean

A note on free downloads: All of the free downloads I have found and downloaded are for personal use only. There is the ability to purchase and download kits that can be used for professional uses. If you want to use any of the downloads to make money or commercially you NEED to get permission from the designers and most likely will need to buy a commercial license to use their products.

There are many more sites and I’m sure I’m forgetting some really good ones. To be honest, I haven’t downloaded any freebies for close to a year now. I have found that I have more than enough cute stuff to complete anything my heart could desire.

Once you have the software and paper/embellishments you want all you need to do is put them together and there you have it – your first scrapbooking page.

I looked through all the pages I’ve done to select my favorite but wasn’t able to narrow it down. Instead, you can see my pages here:
2009
2008
2005 - 2007
If you have any questions about how a certain effect was accomplished feel free to ask and I'll make a "How-To" for you (keep in mind I use Adobe CS2 - instructions will most likely work for CS3 & 4 but I'm not familiar enough with other programs to be able to compare them)

I’ll post more information about Digital Scrapbooking at a later time. I’ve learned lots of fun tricks to making pages one of a kind and can’t wait to share them!

Kids Rooms Are SO Fun!

When I look at my creative endeavors over the past few years the project that I am the most proud of is my son's bedroom. It was the first room I really took the time to plan out and execute it fully and I couldn't be happier with the result.

The room was inspired by a rocking horse I got from my Grandpa Decker when I was 2 years old. It had been sitting in storage for countless years and needed to be refinished. This project itself was especially hard as my Grandpa passed during my pregnancy with Xander.



Here is what my rocking horse looked like before. It was made by my Grandfather and painted by my Grandmother and Aunt Liz.




I changed him up a bit. I tried to keep the face the same with the exception of the eyelashes.

I dragged my mother around to dozens of fabric stores looking for the perfect materials. I sewed everything in the room myself (except the sheet) without patterns.

Recovered and painted the rocking chair. Also painted the sidetable to match the closet doors.

We replaced the paneled closet doors with jut plain core doors, painted them red and added white trim to make them look like barn doors. :)

Making the border took longer than I had expected - but that was because I didn't think through everything I had planned. We had to hang to wood, staple up the rope, paint the little embelishements by hand (all 30 of them) then glue them on! Whew - talk about a project. The name was fun and once I got the layout of the rope figured out it went really smoothly. Painting the room was a blast. The bottom was done with a denim paint finish and the top was spounged on.



All 3 hats were white - I painted one tan and one brown (it's hard to see the difference in the picture but you can tell in the room) and sewed the had bands with scraps to match the rest of the room.

James was kind enough to make me a window box to match the border. The curtains were super easy to sew and I keep meaning to add some little details to them but they are still the same. This picture is a more recent one and has his toy box and rug that were added later.

Overall I LOVE the way this room turned out. Luckily I finshed everything just a few days before Xander decided it was time to join the family. My only wish is that I can be as happy with all my decorating attempts as I am with this one.