Day 5 of GIU ;(

Today is my last day to be the GIU gal;( I'm very sad, I have enjoyed this so very much! Each and every comment has brought a little sunshine and a smile to my life this week, THANK YOU to those of you who have been so kind to me :)

The last two days outside of my little bloggy world have been fabulous! The kiddos and I took an overnight field trip to visit one of my girlfriends that lives down by Madison. I enjoyed time with some friends playing cards and was able to meet up with one of my childhood friends and take her out to lunch for her birthday <3 On my way home I stopped by my friend Pam's store in Baraboo and picked up a reconditioned Sihloutte for a steal of a deal! Thank You Pam! I think I'm about to enter a whole new world of die cutting, so excited :D

Now I'm home and very sleepy so my grand plans of having a fabulously altered wall art piece to share with you have failed miserably. The rain also hindered my plans for this too since I needed to spray paint the frame before I altered it.... (excuses, excuses, blah, blah, blah). So you will just have to wait till next week to gauk at it, because it will be extrodiare, lol! Alright I think the sleepiness might be making me a bit loopy, I hope you are all laughing at me right now like I am, hahaha! Ok, on with the project already, you say...

Squirly Girl Creations presents you...

I am very pleased with how this card turned out. I was a little leary because these are not my usual color choices and I have this little fear of stamping directly on pattered paper, shhhh don't tell. I with my recent counceling sessions I may have conqoured my fear, lol! I hope this card helps you see just how versitle all of your Unity stamps can be.

To make this beauty I used:

Stamps: Unity Stamp Co. (KOM October 2010) and picnic blanket background stamp

Tools: Fiskars triple-track trimmer, Spellbinders circles, Ek Success border punch

Paper: My Mind's Eye (Stella Rose 6x6 collection), WorldWin (Black and grey)

Embellies: Jolee's hotfix crystals

Inks: Copic, Momento and Ranger-TH distress

I hope you have all enjoyed my week as GIU gal and have become one of my new followers. Sorry about the long post tonight (you can't make me go! Do you see me kicking and screaming like a 3 year old here??). If you have a blog leave me your addy and I will hop over and become a follower of yours :)

Till next time,

Day 4 GIU Itty Bitty birdhouse

Hi Ladies and Gentlemen! I truly appreciate all of you who have been by this week and left me wonderful comments, I have had so much fun reading all of them! Tonight is a short (pre-scheduled) post since I am away from home at a girlfriends house playing cards. I know you all appreciate the value of this since I am a stay at home mom, LOL!

So here is today's card!

I used a technique my friend taught me this week. You use a baby wipe to wipe away the portion of the background stamp that you want to stamp you main image in. Not rocket science I know, but her card was stunning. Mine not so much, but it was my first attempt.

I am lovin my WeRMemory Keepers paper lately and how about that fab flower. I used my Maya Road satin pleated ribbon and an American crafts brad.  My inks are all over the chart on this card, Momento, Colorbox and a random unlabled ink from my stash...Oh yes and my new Tim Holtz distress ink in antique linen (thanks for enabling Natalie, hehehe).

Hope you all enjoyed! Now back to the card game at hand :) <3

GUI day 3 Rain or Shine

Happy Administrative Professionals Day to all of you hard working ladies and gentlemen!If you are back for day 3 of my GIU week, THANK YOU! If you haven't figured out that Unity Stamp Co. is my favorite stamp company now you know. Let me tell you why though. Unity is so much more than just a stamp company, they are a fabulous community! Did you know that they have their own community? Check out My Unity Place it is a wonderful place to showcase your Unity creations. They also have a forum on Split Coast Stampers. I also love Unity's Kit of the Month (KOTM)! For only $31 (shipping included) you get a full 8.5 x 11 sheet of FABULOUS images PLUS you get 25% off all of your other Unity purchases AND if you buy $35 worth of stamps you get a set of your choice for FREE, I have not been disappointed once! If you want to check out all the details go {HERE}. If you decide to sign up for the KOTM please tell them that Becky Gromala referred you and then make sure you let me know and I will send you a special thank you :) If I haven't enticed any new comers to go check out Unity Stamp Co. then maybe a look at one of their fabulously priced Itty Bitty ($6.99) stamps will... so here we go :)

My dp is My Mind's Eye and the buttons are random from my stash. I colored my image with my Copic markers on Copic X-Press paper and paper pieced the umbrella.

Don't forget that if you stop back everyday this week and leave me a comment you will be entered for some blog candy at the end of the week. I'd LOVE it if you became a follower of mine as well :) 

Now what are you waiting for? Go check out Unity Stamp Co!!!!

GIU day 2 Unity wall canvas

 

Welcome back for day two of GIU week! Some of you may recognize this wall hanging because I made one almost identical on a 4x6 canvas a while back, but I loved it so much I wanted a larger version for my wall. To start this project I sprayed my canvas with Tattered Angel's glimmer mist in coffee, bronze and copper. I then cut the vase from my Walk in my garden cricut cartridge. Next I sprayed my Prima flowers, some with Maya Mist and some with Tim Holtz alcohol inks and Clear Snap's shimmer spritz and let them dry. That beautiful bling is from Prima as well, I just cut it apart and repositioned it to look like the flower stems. My Unity sentiment is called Blossom and you can get it  {HERE}, I layered it with a Spellbinders die, stamped with Momento tuxedo black ink and blinged it up a bit with Jolee's hotfix gems. Last I punched my large butterflies two times each with my Tonic punch and layered them to give a 3d effect and a bunch of little butterflies from an older EK punch. All of my DP is Stella Rose from My Mind's Eye.

Thanks for looking again today! Don't forget to leave a comment to be entered into the drawing for some bloggy candy!

Tweet Tweet Card #2

Oh my and a third post too! Ok really I just wanted to be able to enter both cards I made over at the Unity Blog...

So here is the second card I made for the bird challenge.

  On this card I used My Mind's Eye design papers and that wonderful blackish-brown sparkly gold cardstock is from The Paper Cut. I paper pieced my bird, I love paper piecing! Embellished with a few Ek Success punches, my stardust pen, Karen Foster's scrappers floss. And that AMAZING button is from Martha's Etsy shop you can see her blog Creating is Fun {HERE}. Martha was the GIU designer two weeks ago.

Time for a tweet tweet challenge

Oh my, two posts in one day :p Did you know that they have a new challenge every month over on the Unity blog? Well they do and you should play along is fun and the prize this month is SOOOOO generous! For this months challenge they asked that you use Unity birds in some way on your creation. I actually made two cards for this challenge because I just couldn't help myself, lol.

Here is my first creation that I also entered in the Outside/Inside challenge over at My Unity Place .
There is tons of Unity love on this card! All of the dp is from Crate Paper's Brooke collection, the crystal bling is Imaginesce (i-rock) and the yellow pearls are Memory box. I used Momento rich cocoa ink. Oh yes and I almost forgot a cuttlebug folder on the front panel.

I hope you love this card as much as I do :)

All things Unity Sketch challenge #29 And GIU Post #1

Thanks for joining me today! I hope you will join me all week long for my Growing in Unity (GIU) week for Unity Stamp Company. I am so excited to be featuring projects that I have made with Unity's wonderful stamps all week long. I can't tell you how in love I am with Unity Stamp Company. I love their story, I love their community, I love the quality of their product and most importantly I love how they make me grow as an artist. Some how I feel like I have a little stampy family with Unity. If you don't know about all the wonderful things that Unity has to offer make sure you stop over and check out their blog at www.theunitystampco.blogspot.com or community at www.myunityplace.com and let's not  forget about their website at www.unitystampco.com . They have wonderful spotlights and challenges and just make you feel at home :)


Alright now on to today's card.... I am joining the fabulous crowd over at All Things Unity  for their bi-weekly sketch challenge again. These girls were wonderful enough to feature the berry adorable card I made last week. I am so honored, it is the first time I have ever been featured :) This weeks challenge is to use your imagination and make a creation based on this sketch.

 

I used my Unity April Kit of the Month for all of the stamped images on this card. You will learn this week how much I LOVE being a Kit of the Month member. My patterned paper is by Basic Grey. I also used a cuttlebug folder, iridescent gold glimmer mist by Tattered Angel's, one of the labels dies by Spellbinders, some miscellaneous bling that was laying on my desk and some smooch paint on the center of the butterflies. 

Now make sure you stop over and leave these girls some love and play along with all of us!

I hope that you all enjoyed today's post and remember that if you leave me a comment everyday this week I will enter you into a drawing for some yummy blog candy at the end.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter everyone! Today is just a quick post because of the holiday but I thought I would share these adorable and super easy peasy baskets that I made for my classmates. I also wanted to remind you that starting Monday I will be Unity Stamp Company's Growing in Unity girl. I'm really stoked about this because I LOVE Unity Stamp Co.!!!  If you come back and leave me a comment everyday next week you will be entered to win some fun bloggy candy. Winner will be announced next Monday.
  

These little buggers make the quickest gifts. I decided to make first picture tutorial for you so you can make a few. They don't just have to be Easter baskets, I'm thinking wedding favors, baby showers and birthday party favors :)  So here goes the tutorial, please be kind to me (remember its my first), I know the pictures aren't the best.

Step 1:
To start your basket cut 2 pieces of 4.25" x 5.5" (A2 card front) and adhere a strip of 1 3/4" x 5 1/2"  to each piece then adhere your ribbon.

Step 2:
Run your basket pieces through a cuttlebug folder of your choice. ( Sorry no picture for this step)

Step 3:
Tape a small spellbinder inside of a large spellbinder to crate your basket front using painters tape. (stick the painters tape to your shirt or pants to remove some of the stickiness or it will rip your paper) Now cut your basket front and back out. You may have to cut your ribbon by hand out.

Step 4:
Cut one piece at the dimensions on the top of my little yellow sticky (lol).
Cut two pieces at the dimensions on the bottom of my sticky :D

Step 5:
You should now have all of your pieces to finish your basket and your pile should look like this.
Fold the basket on the score lines and assemble. Adhere front and back, embellish and add goodies to your basket.

Your finished product.

I used my January 2011 Unity Kit of the Month to decorate these little cuties.  Well I hope you found my first picture tutorial useful :)

Busy weekend and Monday

I just wanted to let you know I have been crafting up a storm but I haven't had anytime to take pics this week yet. I've had a crazy busy and exciting couple of days!

First two VERY exciting things for me!! #1 Ginger Scraps online magazine choose one of my scrapbook layouts for publication!! Woooowho! They choose little ole' ME! I'm so honored! Ok I'll layoff the exclamations now, but that's pretty exciting its the first time I've every been published for anything :)

#2 Don't forget that next week I'm the Growing in Unity girl. Come back for some fab projects and prizes :)

This is what I've been up to this last few days!
*Last Thursday was a play date and lunch with a good friend and our kiddos.
* Friday was fish fry at home and crafty night after the boys were in bed.
*Saturday was a girls day out at a woman's expo in Appleton, a little quilt shop, antique shopping and of course a stop at Archiver's. My scores?? Some yummy Basic Grey fabric, a metal flower frog, a few new Unity stamps and 3 of the new Tim Holtz distress stains. I can't wait to play with them! After all the "hard" shopping (lol) I came home and my wonderful hubby grilled me a great tenderloin on his new grill (his new toy) along with sauteed mushrooms and my favorite tri-tators :) He is so good to me! After such a yummy meal how could I tell him no I didn't want to watch a movie with him? <3

*Sunday we were off to the outlet mall for summer clothes shopping for the boys and a basketball fundraiser at my husbands school. Home for dinner and Mom over for the night.

*And finally Monday early start to the day with dropping the boys at the sitter's for the day and off with the girls to Baraboo for a trip to The Memory Bank (LSS) some more antique shopping and checking out the town. What a good time!! Much needed break for Mommy :) Today's scores??? A printers tray (the real kind) for....wait for it....$20!!! I couldn't believe it considering the antique store we were in before that I found one for $95 (Yipes) and the one I got was in better condition. Go me :) I also got about 6 new twinkling H2O's, some fab ribbon and a new Spellbinder. Good day today :D

So I will do my best to take some pictures for you tomorrow... Thank You to all of you who check in on me from time to time to read about my little ole' life and see my creations!

Friends with Flair

So I finally got a card done for the Friends with Flair (FWF) challenge that they have every Friday over on the Unity blog :) They have made some fun changes over there this week make sure you hop over to check them out and their NEW challenge is also posted! The prize is pretty generous if you ask me.

It has been a pretty gloomy day here in Wisconsin, I thought it was supposed to be spring, come on already! But that's o.k. because it gave me the inspiration I needed to get a few projects done for my upcoming Growning in Unity (GUI) spotlight the week of April 25th :) I'm really kind of excited about this and I have some really fabulous projects in mind for you guys! I hope that you will come back and check them out and besides I'll be having some blog candy that week too, who doesn't like a chance to win. So without further ado here is my FWF card for today.

I used My Mind's Eye papers, copic markers and with the watercolor technique, Viva Decor pearl pens and glassy accent pens and momento ink. I wish the lighting had been better today, the gloominess made it hard to capture all the detail on this card. 

I hope you all enjoyed today's card :) Thanks for stopping by!!

Link Up the Love

So I've been thinking about this post for about two days knowing that I wanted to do it but not sure how I wanted it to go....

I'm joining a great group of people from over at K Andrew's blog, http://www.gettingcricky.com/ this week K asked us to "Link up the love" because the bloggy world has become a bit impersonable and we don't always take the time to get to know the person behind the post. I agree with her and admit that I am even guilty of not always leaving a comment even when I think a project is faboulous because I think the person won't notice or I'm short on time. I have made a vow to be better! It only takes a few seconds and it could make the persons day, I know that I ALWAYS smile when I get a comment :)

So instead of a project in todays post I'm going to tell you a little more about me, the person behind the post, and hope you will browse and enjoy the projects in the posts below.

...Most of you already know my name is Becky, lol, so I'll skip the obvious. What you may not know about me is why I have a small, ok big, affection for squirrels (but I'm sure you can tell from my blog) This affection stems back to my college days when my friends told me that I had the personality of a squirrel. Now this involved a lot of drinking, come on it was college, but it stuck and it became my licence plate and I now have little squirrel knick knacks all over my house. They have kind of become my mascot and they always make me smile. I think it may be my way of hanging on to my college days and staying close with those friends who so long ago gave me that nick name without knowing how far it would go :)

I also love to browse antique shops for fun. Now that doesn't happen to often anymore with little ones you know little hands and breakables are not always a good combination. But when I need an escape every once in a while I will find an antique shop and get lost. I am usually looking for buttons or things I can incorporate in my crafty creations. But I also like to collect things to decorate my craft room with. In some of the pictures below you will see some of the vintage thread spools that I found on one of my last trips. I also found this adorable little cast iron stove that I couldn't pass up. It now adorns the shelf in my new scrap room.

But the most important thing about me above and beyond my crafting passion is that I am the mom to the two most wonderful and beautiful boys in the whole wide world! They are the light of my life and they keep me going every day and recently I was fortunate enough to be given the chance to stay home with them again.

There is a ton more I could tell you a ton more about me but this post is getting a bit long winded. So now I would love it if you would all play along with us and join the rest of us in "Linking up the Love".

All you have to do is add your link to this list and don't forget to stop by K Andrew's blog.







 
Thanks for reading tonight!



H2O inspired

I told you ladies about the blog hop that Creative Imaginations and Memory Box have put together this week and I can't tell you how inspired I have been by playing along. I decided to break out my twinkling H2O's last night and play around. ( They haven't seen the light in years!) So here is what I came up with...  If you want to see the details more clearly you can just click on the pictures. That adorable topiary tree is an Impression Obsession stamp and the sentiment is from Unity stamp company. They dp is from October Afternoon and beautiful little brads are from American Crafts. I love everything about this card and the pictures just don't do it justice. It is very hard to see the Twinkling H2O's in the pictures.  Anyway just a quick post today to share my latest favorite creation.  Hope you enjoyed :)

Busy as a bee

****Edited**** I completely forgot to link this to the All Things Unity Blog!! I entered my Berry Adorable card in their All Things Unity (ATU) challenge #28. This challenge was all about buttons, one of my favorite things :)  Make sure you hop over to their blog and see all the wonderful creations over there! Those girls really out do themselves and are a constant inspiration to me! Make sure you leave them some love while you are there :)


I have been bitten by the crafty bug and I just can't stop! I don't even want to sleep at night (and if I didn't have little ones I probably wouldn't). Inspiration is coming from everywhere this week.

I want to start with a card I made for the challenge over at K Andrew's Simply Sunday Challenge at Getting Cricky blog. If you haven't been by her blog to check her out yet, PLEASE go! She is a super talented and sweet lady! Kristal is the person who designed my blog banner for me :) She has such a huge heart. Her challenge for this week was to create an inspired heart project using anything that inspired us. Well if you don't know this about me, I love to browse antique stores looking for fun finds to use in my creations and decorate my scrap space. The strawberry buttons on this card were found on one of my recent trips and they were the inspiration for this card. I'm always like a kid in a candy store when I find a booth with a button bucket in it. I have to stay away from those glass cases, lol, the price starts to go up when you get to those :D So for this card I left two of the strawberrys naked and I used my copics to color the other one. All of the design papers are Jillibean Soup and the cardstock is Bazzill. I know its hard to see but the die cut that is behind the dp is a Heartfelt Creations Spellbinder. The Stamp is Unity and the ribbon is Maya Road.

Now when you are done looking at all my scrappy goodness hop over to K Andrew's blog and check out all the other crafty creators this week!

Today has been a great day! I won my first blog hop prize ever! Creative Imaginations and Memory Box, two of my favorite companies, teamed up to do a blog hop and the projects they are posting are amazing. If you have a few minutes jump on over to the Memory Box blog or the Creative Imaginations blog. I'm telling ya these projects rock!

I have been in more of a card making and stamping mood lately than scrapbooking, I've been having so much fun with my Unity stamps and all the paper that I have around I've been a card making maniac! So without further ado here are some more of this weeks creations...

Wow, sorry about all the pictures. I hope you enjoyed and thanks for listening to me ramble on tonight! See you again very soon!

Cards Cards and More Cards

I'm so proud of myself! Today's major accomplishment was organizing all the photos in my computer and getting 3/4ths of them edited so that I can send them off to snapfish. Plus I got my post for you ready in the same day, yeah me! So I've been telling you about all the fun I had at my crop get-a-way in Baraboo and all the projects that I got done so I thought I would finally show you, lol! This was going to be an extremely heavy picture laden post but I decided to make a photobucket slide show for you. *Warning* I may be OBSESSED with Memory Box papers and Unity Stamp Company stamps right now, hahaha! Just a theme I noticed. No really, I found the Minuet 6x6 paper collection at The Memory Bank  and I couldn't put it away it was so irresistible. I have always loved Memory box but this has to be my favorite paper collection by far. I also brought all of my Unity Stamp Company Kit of the Month (KOTM) kits with me. If you don't know about their KOTM it is absolutely F.A.B.U.L.O.U.S! For only $31/month (includes shipping) you get a full 8.5xll sheet of cling mounted rubber stamps and a ton of perks to go with it. Go check out all the details {HERE}. Moral of the story, I love them and can't get enough.

Here are some pictures of the quaint little cabin we stayed at and some of the fun we had at the dress shop across the hall from Pam's store. We called it our princess party, really we were just being kinda dorky :) (keep in mind this was a don't do your make up pajama kinda weekend, lol)

I think this picture is appropriate for "The End"Hope you enjoyed...