Valentine's Heart Swap

The mailman brought love to my door yesterday - my Victorian Paper Heart Swap arrived very nearly the moment after I finished my post from yesterday! I was so excited!!!! I sat on the couch admiring the lovely heart that Heidi Meyer made for me for the longest time. Then I very carefully opened and oohed and aahed over each of the little packets of goodness that accompanied the heart. I even used some of the lovely little pieces of ribbon and lace already in a wrist cuff I'm making!!!!

The big heart was quickly hung in the center of our fireplace mantel and will probably stay up loooooooooong past Valentine's Day as it is so beautiful! You can see all of the beautiful hearts crafted by this bunch of amazing women over at the Vintage Dragonfly and see more about Danielle Muller, the lovely woman who organized it all!

I also realized that this is my 100th post!!!! What a milestone!!!! I wasn't sure how I would like this blogging thing but I am addicted - it is thrilling for me to see where it is that people are stopping by from, all over the world, places I can only dream of traveling to at this point, all 50 states - I am amazed!!!! To celebrate this momentous occasion, I'm having a little giveaway. I made up an extra little packet of vintage-y goodness for the heart swap. If you want a chance to win the packet, become a follower of my blog and leave a comment here answering the question, "What is your favorite Valentine's Day food to make or eat?"

As for me, I have many and have tried many over the years including chocolate-filled croissants, chocolate raspberry cheesecake, and this year I attempted chocolate macarons. They didn't turn out exactly as I had hoped, hence no pictures, but I will persevere and keep perfecting my technique. Even though they don't loo perfect, they taste super yummy! You'll also see there is a common denominator here - clearly I am a chocolate addict and so happy to be able to eat chocolate again again after my surgery!!!!

Happy Valentine's all and have a wonderful weekend - romantic for those of you with a partner and filled with so much love no matter who you are!!!! And don't forget to enter the contest by 10:00 pm EST on February 14 - Valentine's Day!

Christmas in November! Ornament Tutorial

I know it's a bit early for Christmas (at least I'm not getting Christmas stuff out in July like the bog box stores!) but since I make Christmas ornaments as gifts each year, I have to get a jump on it! This year's ornaments were inspired by a couple of items, seen here:

Juice can lids and this fabulous find of red buttons that I picked up at one of our local antique stores for $2! Can you believe it?! I just had to have them even though I had no idea what I would do with them at the time.

To begin, I measured a circle to fit inside the juice can lid and cut it out of some heavy antique scrapbook paper. I aged the edge a bit with some brown ink.

Next came some vintage ledger pages. I cut some pieces to fit at the top and bottom of the circle and fancied them up with a scalloped scissors and a bit of green ink on the edges.

Lettering comes next. I first traced around the little red button that would serve as the "o" and then penciled in the remaining letters.

Then I filled in the letters with red using DecoArt Americana Berry Red.

Once the paint dried, I traced over my pencil lines around the outside of the letters with a fine paint marker and glued on a little red button.

After the glue dried, I poured a bit of DecoArt Triple Thick Gloss Glaze into the juice can lid and spread it around. I then placed the decorated scrapbook circle into the lid and poured more glaze in and distributed it evenly in the lid by slowly turning the lid at an angle so as not to create air bubbles. If air bubbles do appear, just use a toothpick to pop them.

Once the glaze is completely dry (I usually allow for about 24 hours just to be safe) add a ribbon hanger at the back. I cover the entire back with a circle of felt cut to size to make it nice and presentable on both sides.

Now it's time to start cranking out bunches of them for my friends and family! I'll be making a variety of them with Love, Hope, and Joy since those words all have "o"s in them!

Thanks again to DecoArt for giving me great supplies to play with!

Also, if you want a chance to win a yard of my Spoonflower fabrics, check out this post and answer the question following the post!

Anniversaries and Aprons!

Today is the fourth anniversary of the day that I got to marry this wonderful man - my best friend, biggest fan, the only one who's always in my corner, my cheerleader, the one who is there for me when I'm lower than low, the one who makes me laugh when he dances,and the one person that I know I can count on. I am so happy to be your wife and I love you honey!!!

Today is also the opening of another Spoonflower contest. The challenge for this week was to design an apron that fits completely on one yard of fabric. I took the challenge and and put this pattern together using my Set the Table fabrics and stitched up my sample to work all the kinks out! If you want to participate in the voting, click here, and feel free to vote for my entry! It has a fabulous prize that I would love to win!

At-Home Retreat

I've been feeling really down in the dumps this winter for many reasons which I won't get into here. At one of the very lowest of those depths, I was talking with my husband and we discussed some ways that might help to lift my spirits and help my self-confidence. In the midst of that coversation, I mentioned something about needing to go to a creative retreat where I could connect with other creative people, but money was obviously a concern. As we further investigated retreat possibilities and there were none that were close enough to our home and they were many months off as well. We then moved on to something more immediate and my husband offered to give me an at-home retreat - he would take care of all the cooking and just let me relax and create to my heart's content all weekend!

So a couple of weeks ago, my husband gave me my at-home retreat. He made lasagna and deep-dish pizza, brought breakfast home, ran out for coffee, even gave me a goody bag of Ghirardelli raspberry-filled dark chocolate squares! I got to just create art as much as I could and as long as I could stay awake. I cut and soldered, made earrings, painted canvases, and anything else that I could squeeze in. I also created the fabric ribbons in the picture above. Those began by painting the selvedge edges of some of my Spoonflower fabrics. Once they were dry, I lettered them and added some little accents. Now I've got about 6 yards of totally unique, calligraphed ribbon - what exactly I'm going to do with it I don't know!!!

Hopefully, I can come up with something fabulous by the time I go to The Creative Connection Event!!!! During my at-home retreat weekend, I finally got a chance to look through some of the magazines that I am so far behind in reading. As I was looking through the latest issue of Where Women Create, I came across an ad for the event and got so excited that it was going to be just down the road in Minneapolis (the closest locale to my home along the North Shore). I became a bit disheartened when I saw the cost as I haven't had regular, full-time employment in about four years, but talked about it with my husband. He was so supportive and we decided we were going to do everything we could to get me there!!! I told him that this was all I wanted for my birthday, anniversary, everything - so my deposit has been sent in and in September I'll get to connect with a whole bunch of other creative souls at The Creative Connection Event!!!!

Long story short - I have a honey of a husband!!!

Valentine's Day gift for my hubby...

I've had this box for over a year just knowing that I could do something fabulous with it. It was a gift from parents that began life as a Christmas coffee collection container from Starbucks. I just thought it was so cool as it had two sections that lift up and resembled a book, I only had to figure out it's newest purpose.

My husband and I have been talking since we got married almost four years ago about putting together a box that would hold brochures, suggestions, dreams, hopes, little gifts, etc. that each of us could access to get ideas to surprise one another. I realized this Starbucks box was the perfect container for this project. I couldn't just leave it as it was - it had to be a lot more creative! So for the last couple of weeks I've been perfecting the graphics for all the elements of the box. I combined vintage elements from my collection as well as some fun French graphics I found at The Graphics Fairy and created others when I couldn't find exactly what I wanted. Once I had them all designed, they were printed out and glued to the box and then sealed with some beeswax to add a more vintage-y feel.

Now the fun part of adding ideas and little surprises to the "Love Wishes" box begins! I can't wait until this weekend to see hubby's reaction!

XXXOOO