Made for Mom with Love

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Kristie Sloan

Made for Mom with Love, Gift Ideas Hop. Join the journey to find some great ideas for gifts to give the moms on your list or create a list to give your loved ones of the things you would enjoy for yourself! Welcome to the Don’t forget, there are some freebies to pick up along the way, too!

In this post:

I’ll tell you about easy little mini albums you can create from one sheet of paper (or even a digital version)
Show you a video on how to create one (even though it is for a different season, it still goes together the same way!)
Offer you printed directions and/or a digital layered PSD file
Link you to the next site in our special hop
Provide you with a list of all the hop participants

Let’s get started!

Here at Artful Adventures, I like to offer you ideas to kick it up a notch – without a lot of hassle! Here is a special do-it-yourself kind of gift that lends itself well to any number of occasions. By taking just one 12×12 inch sheet of double-sided paper, or card stock, you can easily create a special little mini-album. Just a few basic touches will make it special, but you can add whatever you’d like. In other words, how simple or fancy you make it is all up to you! You can add pictures, quotes, stickers, fibers, beads, buttons….. there are endless possibilites.

Here is a look at a little mini album made from one sheet of paper.

Here is the video to show you how to do it.

Just enter your info below to receive your copy of the written directions for the 12×12″ sheet, or for a digital layered PSD file.

Please visit each site on the hop to see the special deal they are offering. There is such a diversity of creative things any mother would love to receive in honor of Mother’s Day. Note: If you joined us somewhere along the way, please start HERE so you don’t miss a thing!

Now Hop on over to visit Vi at Creative Threadz and see what she has for you!

All Participants:

Lain at Layout a Day

Debbie at Scrap Me Quick Designs

Monica at Scrap Inspired

Melissa at Digital Scrapbooking HQ

Pam at Keeping Life Creative

Diane at Capadia Designs

Beth at Scrapping Wonders

Kelli at Use It Scrapbooking!

Jen at Jen Wright Designs

Alice at Scrapbook Wonderland

Gee Zee at Messtaken Identity

Cara at Let’s Learn with Cara Miller

Rebecca at Pictures to Scrapbook

Heather at NoExcuseScrapbooking

Kristie at Artful Adventures <— You are here now!

Creating Hybrid Cards

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Kristie Sloan

For those of us who love to create and enjoy making cards, sometimes we may not have as much time as we would like to get them done! This past weekend, I was going to swap cards with my Stampin’Up! friends, and knew time was going to be tight to get my 17 matching cards completed. You may not need 17 matching cards to swap with friends, but what about a holiday card, party invitation, birth announcement, or some occasion or event you want people to know about!

Making a hybrid card can be the best of both worlds, paper and digital. One idea is to just print out your digital image as a regular 4×6 picture which you have the option to print at many locations. You can print them out at the drug store or wherever your favorite place is to make prints. If you plan ahead, you may be able to order them or use an online coupon and save even more. Of course, it will depend on how many you need as to how economical it will be to order and pay shipping, you’ll have to be the judge of that.

My Digital Studio (MDS) is a great digital software program which is easy to use and extremely economical. It even comes with a Free Trial. MDS has been recently updated and the price lowered to where I think it is such a value, especially for beginners! MDS is what was used for this card, and it only took two digital “stamps” to create this card.

If you plan to print on 4×6 photo paper, make sure to plan your design around combining that photo with your card size. Since we often create a card that is a half sheet of an 8.5×11″ paper, your finished card front is 4.25×5.5, so you’ll need to plan your photo accordingly. I find it easiest to make the size of what I’m working on a 4×6 and just watch my rulers for the sizing I will use for the finished card. After printing, they only need to have a little bit trimmed off, usually about

The digital images on this cards are:

Vintage Overlay – Texture 8
“Ex Libris” digital download (main image over the card)
“Happy Mother’s Day” from All Holidays set

Also, during the digital design process, you can play around with adding embellishments and get an idea of what you want to do as you assemble the card.

The card base is a half sheet of an 8.5×11 piece of cardstock, folded for a final card size of 5.5 x 4.25 inches. After the “photo” portion of this card was printed, I trimmed the 4×6 because photo so that it would fit my card front, and adhered it. Now the embellishments of a rhinestone in the center of the “o” in the word “mother,” and bit of ribbon simply knotted in the center and adhered with a glue dot! That’s it.

Artful Adventures Awarded a Liebster Award for Blogs

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Kristie Sloan

Joanna Grant from Joanna Banana Original Designs who has a blog about Mixed Media with Recycled Materials kindly gave me a Liebster Award. It is an award awarded by bloggers to other bloggers. It’s really about discovering new blogs which don’t have a huge following yet.

Thank you, Joanna for thinking of my blog and giving me this award. I feel so honored to accept this and pass it on to five other very deserving bloggers!

ABOUT THE AWARD

This award was designed to be a blog award in the pay it forward fashion. Once you’ve been nominated, you award it to five blogs that you like that have fewer than 200 followers, to encourage new visitors to visit these blogs.

RULES FOR ACCEPTANCE

Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to their blog. Post the award onto your blog. Give the award to five bloggers who you appreciate that have fewer than 200 followers. Leave a comment on their blog letting them know that you have given them this awesome award!

PAY IT FORWARD

It’s hard to choose only five bloggers who I find inspiring but here are my choices of art blogs that have less than 200 followers and that I know you will enjoy:

Beth Solar – ScrappingWonders.com

Danielle Taylor – ScrapperOnTheStreet.com

Alice Boll – ScrapbookWonderland.com

Gina Z – MesstakenIdentity.com

Heather Dubarry – NoExcusesScrapbooking.com

(I may have included a blog with over 200 followers as the number of followers was not always listed but I still felt that these individuals were very deserving as some of these are newer blogs!)

Recipients, you may copy and paste to your blog and change the introduction and the list of blog awards. I hope that you decide to participate and award some other very deserving artists. Make their day!!!

Cheers to YOUR Creativity!

Kristie

NOTE:

There really doesn’t seem to be an official Liebster Award site, and if you do the techno-research, you can actually find several versions. I think it is a great idea, and even in it’s chain letter style, I still appreciate the thought and the idea of supporting other bloggers who are working to offer great content to others!

Event Reminders, Don’t Miss Out on the Fun

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Kristie Sloan

I have FOUR things I wanted you to know about. I didn’t want you to look back and say, “She never told us that!” So here we go!

1. Paper Pumpkin April Sign-up is due by April 10th!

My Paper Pumpkin

Don’t forget to sign up if you want to participate in this month’s kit shipped right to your door. All you need is adhesive and you have a fun little something to make. Our first Paper Pumpkin kit video is online, and there will be more. I’ve tried to take out the confusion, given you a lot of info about the program, but you’ll go directly to sign up at the MyPaperPumpkin site, and please indicate you’d like to work with me for the “demonstrator” – Kristie Sloan, Eden Prairie 55347. Thanks!

2. Get a Clue! Join up for LOAD513

LOAD513, otherwise known as Layout A Day, May 2013, is a challenge to create a scrapbook layout everyday for the month of May. Any scrapbooking method will do! Paper, digital, hybrid, 12×12, 8.5×11, 8×8….. made from scratch or by template…. it’s not as hard as it sounds. I will happily tell you that I have numerous pages with so many stories that would have gone untold, which are a result of prompts or ideas we have received from previous LOAD events.

Space if filling fast! Hurry to grab a seat with you, me, and 498 of our closest scrappy friends! Use the code FNF to save $10. HURRY! For more info and to sign up, click here!

3. Scrapbooking Wonders Sketch Challenge

If you’d like to join a scrapbook sketch challenge, go check out the the April challenge at ScrapbookingWonders. It’s never any fun to play alone – make a page and link it up for a chance to win a prize! Go check it out! I’ve already submitted a page.

iScrap-n-Snap April Sketch Challenge

4. April Free Scrapinar

Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Envelope Art with Windy Robinson

Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Envelope Art with Windy Robinson. Windy will show us how to create gorgeous hand-crafted and hand-embellished envelopes and mail art that will make even the postman smile!

April Scrapbook Challenge at iScrap-n-Snap

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Kristie Sloan

iScrap-n-Snap April Sketch Challenge

Some people create their scrapbook pages based on different online challenges that they participate in. Beth over at ScrappingWonders.com has started having a monthly challenge. Beth is a great source for learning how to work with your mobile phone to actually use all those pictures you take with it. She regularly does reviews of apps that are very useful for just that!

The April scrapbook page has a template to use, as well as an idea for a color palette in honor of Earth Day this month. You will find information about the challenge here. This month’s sponsor is Cara from CaraMiller.com. If you like to do any die cutting, you’ll be interested in finding out more about Cara’s Whisper products! Cara even has a digital template for Beth’s challenge, if you like to do digital!

Once you’ve created your page, and uploaded it, go back to Beth’s site and link it up on this page. Just go towards the bottom of the page, and you’ll see the little thumbnail pictures of people’s pages. Under the last picture, you’ll see a little bluish button that says, “Add Your Link.” Click that and add your info!

It not fun to play alone! Above is my page I’ve made for the iScrap-n-Snap April challenge. Once you see the sketch, you’ll notice that I turned the sketch 90 degrees so that it would better fit my pictures. You could also you 2 or 3 pictures and use 1 or 2 of the areas for journaling. That’s the beauty of a sketch! You can really do so many things with it. We talked about varying how you might use a template here.

I can’t believe how old these pictures are. I always remember it was a great day, but never have gotten the pictures onto a page. I am also making a companion page to this that has more of the “people” pictures from this event.

What pictures will you use for the challenge?

Artful Adventures

Ideas for scrapbooking, art journaling, mixed media, card making and stamping projects.

Monthly Archives: April 2013