swimming and more mojo

So Tomio took the kids to the pool on Sunday after church. They had been begging to go since May :) We planned it from the night before, but didn't tell them until after church. They were SO excited :) Miss Emma and I of course stayed home. They had SO MUCH fun!! I'm so glad they got to go. They came home all tan:) and tired and happy. I actually enjoyed the whole afternoon with just me and Emma. I felt like I should do something productive, but I didn't :) Emma and I just watched some shows I had taped from before and relaxed :) I felt a little guilty, but it was a much needed break. Levi keeps saying he wants to go back again "on Friday". I'm not really sure why he chose Friday:) Tomio told him Daddy has to work on Friday, so maybe Sunday. But Levi thinks Sunday means a sunny day, so I'm not sure how long he thinks he has to wait.

I made this card for this weeks Mojo Monday sketch. I actually spent the most time choosing what papers I wanted to use. Once I decided on these colors, it came together pretty easily. I use my favorite kraft for the base. The pp I have had in my stash for ages--I think they might be KMA. The twill and buttons are from Papertrey Ink. I love their buttons!! The colors are so pretty and the designs are cute. Right now I only have the Sweet Blush, but I have more on the way :) I also put a tiny bit of PTI rustic twine through the buttons just for a little bit of something extra:) The butterfly is a punch I have had for years, but haven't used in a long time. It seemed like just the right touch. I covered it with Cotton Candy stickles.

This is a layout I did this week. Iwasn't sure how I was going ro scrap these photos with the bright geen and purple swords, but this great green paper from We Are Memory Keepers was just right. I cut the title with Quickutz Diesel and Exotic Island. For the hearts and stars at the bottom I embossed them with the Cuttlebug paisley embossing folder and then inked them with white ink. I love the look of white on kraft :) Hubby says I need a question mark after the title...he's probably right :) But I think Rhys liked being called tough though:)

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you are having a great week!

a little jealous

I know--it's not good to be jealous of others. And in most things I do manage to realize we all have our own blessings and burdens. But I have to admit I am a little jealous of those girls who are blessed with the perfect skin--you know, that beautiful brown-ish tone that never burns but just tans even more. Now I know what your thinking--that's SO not a big deal. And you're right, it's not really. But for once I would like to be able to go outside for longer than 5 minutes and not have to worry about getting sunburned :) Not have to slather on sunscreen every hour, only to find that I continuously missed the same spot and now have red and white stripes on my arms and a lovely red triangle on my neck :) Am I the only one? Do you have somewhat silly thing that, although not life changing or earthshattering, you would switch with someone else if you could?!
The whole family went to our church's softball game yesterday, and I have the red stripes to prove it :) Everyone had lots of fun though :) And our church's team won both games! I hadn't really been out of the house all week, so it was nice to get out for a day.
Now for some scrappy fun :)
This is a layout I did really recently. The pictures of when Miss Emma was born :) I knew I wanted to scrap them, of course :), but the nature of them made them kind of hard to scrap and look good. But I am really pleased with how it turned out! I used PTI butterfly stamps for the butterflies but added a Quickutz diecut for the body. I also put Stickles on the butterfly body for some extra bling :) I embossed the bigger heart with Quickutz Goosebumpz and then inked over it lightly. I love the subtle look touch it adds :) The scallop border at the bottom is Quickutz too. The papers are mostly K&Co. I love the label shape for the journaling :) I have actually just ordered some Nestablilities label dies. YAY!!

This card I made for the sketch at the Stamping Bella blog. I thought this was such a cute image :) And it is a fun one to color too. Not TOO much detail or little sections that are hard to get the right color. Leah saw me coloring it and thought it looked like her :) All the papers are from Fancy Pants. They are really old scraps that I had, but I was sure I would a good use for them :) They have a sketch each Friday to try out. This was my first time, but I am really liking have different sketches to get me going lately, so I thought I would try it. I love the stamps they have, and they have EXCELLENT customer service :) I would definitely recommend trying them if you have ever thought about it!!

Hope you had a great weekend! Thanks for stopping by!

mr. emma and spiders

Levi is at the stage where he says the absolute CUTEST things :) I usually call Emma "Miss Emma"--for no particular reason :) And the kids have picked up on it too. But Levi doesn't call her "miss" Emma, but "MR." Emma :) I love it! And I refuse to correct him till he figures it out for himself. Then today, he told me that his foot was fuzzy :) and that "oh no, there are spiders in my foot!" And proceeded to hop around shaking his leg. He means that his foot is asleep :) But I thought his description of it was too cute. That must be what it feels like to a 3 year old. I hope to remember all these when he gets bigger so I can tease him about them he he:) So how about you? Do your kids say the "darnedest things?" What are some of your favorites?

I have finally been getting some more pictures of Miss Emma smiling :) She likes to be on her tummy and practice holding her head up :) So I had to show off a picture of her too!

Since I haven't been sharing any layouts lately, I thought it was time I did :) This layout has some of my all time FAVORITE pictures of Leah. I just love her smile in them.. I can almost never catch her adorable smile on camera, but I did here :)
I really just wanted to showcase her smile, so I kept it pretty simple. But it turns out that I like simple layouts better anyway :) I just used some OLD Autumn Leaves papers because I loved how the colors matched and my favorite kraft background :) The scallop border is Quickutz and so are all 3 fonts for the title. I really like the look of mixing fonts in my titles:)

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more mojo

Here is the card I made for this week's Mojo Monday 96. I had a little bit of a hard time with this one. I wanted to make a square card like the sketch, but I usually only make little square cards and I didn't want to make it little :) But I decided on this really pretty blingy paper from K& Co. and then things went more smoothly :) The stamp is from Stamping Bella. I LOVE this stamp!! It's so cute and goes on lots of different cards. I especially love to color in the hearts on the tree. First I chalked them with some pink and then put Cotton Candy stickles on them. Love how sparkly they look :) I even used Bazzill bling cardstock for the brown for extra shiny-ness lol! It's very different from the cards I usually make, but I like it! Definitely good to stretch yourself sometimes :) I went ahead and made a matching envelope with my Enveloper since it wouldn't fit in a standard A2 envelope. So fun to be able to make the perfect size envelope for those non-standard size cards.
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That's why...

it's called a challenge :) I almost didn't post this because I had a little trouble getting this color combination to look good. Dawn always picks these tough colors lol!! But I figured that was kind of the point lol. So here is what I made for this week's Raspberry Suite Color Challenge. I have a hard time combining any shade of pink with red lol. I love this stamp set, though!! Adorable cupcake images from Papertrey Ink. The sentiment is actually all on one line, so I just inked one word at a time and stamped celebrate first and then today underneath. Super easy!

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cake and fireworks.

I decided that I wanted to bake at least one fun, yummy thing each week. I started couple of weeks ago with the orange cupcakes (which were yummy :) ). Then last week I decided on carrot cake. While I LOVE carrot cake, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I had had it (gasp!lol ) Rhys and Levi were not so sure that a vegetable should go in a cake, but definitely wanted to get in on the cream cheese frosting :) It went quite well and was even better than the cupcakes! Everyone LOVED it and was sad when it was gone--Levi even shed a few tears lol!

It was very "carroty"--in a good way :) So this is one I will definitely be making again.

Most weekends we do things as a family--shopping or just hanging around the house :) But this week Tomio was gone both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday he went golfing with some guys from church and Sunday his friend from work was getting married, so of course he went to that. But he did get home in time for us to go see the fireworks Saturday night! The kids were so excited--they got dressed in their "fireworks" outfits and everything :) Tomio was able to find a great spot to sit and watch. Miss Emma didn't really watch much, but the rest of us really enjoyed it. And it wasn't too hot either :) Don't they look so cute? (Rhys is going through some stage where he doesn't really smile much for the camera...sigh...)

Leah LOVES her yukata! She looks forward to wearing to see the fireworks all year:) The boys had matching outfits, which I loved :)

Since we stayed home most of the weekend, I was able to make 2 cards :)

These stamps are from Verve . I thought this birdie was so cute :) There is a boy birdie that goes with this one too. I wish the pink ink was a little darker, but I didn't have another good shade. You'd think with at least 6 colors of pink ink, 1 of them would have been just right lol :)

For this one I used Butterfly kisses from Papertrey Ink. Such a versatile set! I added little gems to the centers of the butterflies. The border punch is Martha Stewart. I wanted to try making a long skinny card for a change. It was fun to do something different. I like how it turned out.
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Color challenge

I must be on a roll :) Two posts and two challenges in one day!! I made this for
Kristina Werner's Color Inspiration. There were alot of colors to incorporate, and I usually don't use that many. But it was really fun to make. i thought it would be harder to get the red and orange colors to go together, but they actually looked good :)I used PTI's It's a Celebration set for the cupcake and the circle and star patterns. I love to add cupcakes whenever I can lol!

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Christmas in July?

I had so much fun participating in the Mojo Monday challenge that I am doing it again :)

Here is what I came up with:


I'm not sure why, but I keep wanting to make Christmas cards lately. I used PTI Merry and Bright set for this(such a fun set!). The paper is K& Co.
This layout is one I did for a sketch challege over at the A Million Little Things Blog . I never make 8 1/2 x 11 layouts, so I had to modify it some. But I like how it turned out.

The paper and cardstock are American Crafts. The diecuts are all Quickutz :)

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organizing.

I'm not too great at organizing things, which Tomio will be very quick to attest to :) But when we moved into our new house, I wanted to be sure to start out with everything all organized. So I threw away sll I could when I packed up the boxes and I tried to organize as I packed. I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but it felt really good to get rid of lots of stuff I didn't need. And once we moved in, we got rid of maybe 20 more garbage bags of "stuff" :) AND, I am proud to say, that SO FAR, I have done a pretty good job of keeping things organized since we moved in. Even though I don't organize things naturally, I do enjoy having things organized. I especially wanted to make sure my new WONDERFUL scrapping place was PERFECTLY organized :) So I have been working slowly the whole time arranging and rearranging all my scrapping stuff. I decided that it is an ongoing process though, since after I use it some I often find that I need to change things every now and then. That is what happened with my ribbon last week. I realized that I hadn't been using it lately because I had stored it in a way that made it too much of a pain for me to get out each time. So I determined to find a better way to organize my ribbon. Previously I had it stored in a plastic box still wrapped on spools. ( well, in theory, in actuality, it ended up all tangled together...) After a little experimenting, I decided that wrapping each color on an oldfashioned clothespin and fastening it with a straight pin was what I liked best. And I must say I am thrilled with how it turned out. All my ribbon is now sitting on my desk in cute basket looking very colorful and pretty. And I found I use it so much more now :) Yay!!

This is what it looks like:

I mean, who could resist this?! A whole basket full of yummy ribbon :)

After organizing my ribbon, I also got to play with my PapertreyInk stamps! I know I mentioned how much I love Quickutz :), well, PTI is my other love :) They have the BEST stamps ever!!! And I just started using their ribbon and cardstock.....ahhhh, SO nice! Here are a couple of cards I made with their stamps

This butterfly set is the first set I got from PTI. Isn't it so pretty? And the pink twill is from PTI too.
I LOVE this card! Isn't that coffee image adorable?! I used other images from the set to make the background. I had so much fun making these :) It makes me want make some more :)
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a good night's sleep

Today I feel blessed. There are lots of things you expect when you have a new baby. Lots of wonderful things--cute smiles, sweet cuddlles, the joy of when they recognize you :) But of course there are always some things you know to expect that are not quite so fun--poopy diapers, extra laundry, limited shower time, lack of sleep... and they are all worth it:) I expected all of these too, but Miss Emma decided to start sleeping through the night--at not even six weeks. While I was prepared for at least a few months of no sleep, I have been able to actually sleep uninterrupted for a couple weeks now. And as any mother knows, that is a very big deal :) I had forgotten how good it feels not to be exhausted during the day! Now, I know this may not last, but I am thankful for every little blessing from above:) (and I am quite sure that the rest of my family is thankful too, since a rested mama= a happy mama.)

Yesterday was a scrappy day :) Well, sort of. My mom came over to scrapbook all day. While she got several pages done, I got half of a card done lol:) But it was still fun to be working on scrappy stuff :) I enjoy doing anything scrappy that I can. But since half a card isn't too great for sharing lol-I'll share some older stuff again.

This is layout I did a while ago of my Rhys-ter:) I loved his smile in the focal point photo :) You can't really see it in the photo, but I embossed the white strip at the bottom with the Quickutz heart 4x4 embossing folder. I just ran it through my revolution a couple of times. The hearts and alphabets are all Quickutz too. I {heart} everything Quickutz :) (if you couldn't tell already by my layouts. 99% of my layouts have Quickutz on them:))
This is another boy layout. I love how the QK Rockstar font went with these papers from Little Yellow Bicycle. They have such a fun look :) Very boyish.

I really hope to get some of my newer layouts on here soon :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Mojo Monday

Last week I tried a color challenge and had a lot of fun :) So this week I thought I would try some more. I had seen this really gorgeous sketch challenges here, and wanted to try them out. I wasn't sure how hard it would be, but I was so happy that it really came quite easily. The sketch made it really easy :) I don't think mine is as gorgeous as what all the talented designers over there created (their stuff is simply amazing!!), but I still am pleased with what I came up with. I will definitely keep trying these!!

I was really excited to use my first ever Verve stamps on this card. :) I love their elegant images and Christian sentiments, but had never had the chance to get any until now. I wasn't disappointed :) and can't wait to try out the rest of the ones I got.
I actually made this card

based on last week's Mojo Monday sketch, but it ended up not looking too much like the sketch. So I chickened out and didn't officially participate in the challenge. I did think it turned out pretty cute though :) The image is from Stamping Bella and the sentiment is from PaperTrey Ink.

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first outing

Miss Emma went on her first big outing since she was born. She went to church and shopping afterwards :) What more could a girl want, right? :) Now, being our fourth baby normally we wouldn't have kept her home for so long after she was born. Because even though when Leah was born we panicked at every little thing and even going out for just a brief time was an ordeal, by the time we had Levi we knew that they really don't break that easily :) and we took them all out all the time. But, since Miss Emma was SO small when she was born and the doctors made it extra clear that she couldn't handle as much, she stayed home with me for the first 6 weeks. (Which of course means I barely left the house for over a month, and that, by the way, can get to be very long!). She seemed to enjoy her outing though, and was very popular at church. Everyone oohed and aahed and said how cute she was ( naturally :)). We even took a walk to the park near our house after shopping. She didn't go on the slide YET, but all the older kids loved it. Except for the mosquitos. Levi was especially glad to hear that, yes, it was ok to get his hands dirty when playing at the park :). I don't have any park pictures on the computer yet, but since I have to post at least on picture of my cuties, here is one of Miss Emma:

I almost never have time to create stuff on the weekends. So when I do it is extra fun :) Here is a card I made. It doesn't have any stamping on it at all, which is pretty unusual for me. But I thought it turned out cute
I wanted to try some stitching and inking the edges of kraft cardstock with white--so I did both of those on this card :) I like how the white looks with the kraft, so I will definitely try it again.
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macaroni on the floor...

When I was little, I LOVED macaroni and cheese--especially the cheap kind from a box. The oranger, the better. I am happy to say that now at least I do prefer the kinds with real cheese :) But, my kids, I'm afraid, feel the same way I always did. They rejoice when we have it for lunch and refuse to let me add anything to it. Levi would happily jump up and down and say "macamonkey---yay!!" So the other day when we had the wonderful macaroni for lunch and Levi asked if he could finish the extra, I said sure. And this is what I came in the kitchen to find:

What is it that makes things taste better directly from the pan? I must say he makes that instant macaroni look pretty yummy....:)

I tried to get some scrapping or stamping done today, but Miss Emma was not very cooperative. So I will post some older layouts again.

This one is of the boys last summer. I used QuicKutz Merry & Bright for the title. I wanted to add some dimension, so I rolled each letter out about 4 times and glued them together. All the papers are Fancy Pants ( I love all of their papers!!).

This one is about some of the fun things we do when Tomio is off. I really like the Fancy Pants felt. Isn't it cute? I try not to let myself hoard it too much lol:)

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cupcakes and cards.

Well, I decided to make some cupcakes. No big surprise there :) But there is alot more involved in making cupcakes with 4 kids (including a newborn) and having limited ingredients. Determined though, to make some anyway, I looked online for the perfect recipe--one that looked delicious and I had all the stuff for. I found one (almost, I didn't have powdered sugar, but decided to make my own in the blender...) and waited until Miss Emma was sleeping. And I got started. Of course I had to allow for about double the prep time with at least 2 extra little hands helping at any given time....but, we did it :) We made some yummy orange cupcakes. And the excitement they brought to all was definitely worth it :) Miss Emma even managed to sleep till almost the end.
Don't they look yummy?

Of course they always taste better when you decorate them yourself :)

Unfortunately around this time is when Miss Emma decided she wanted to join in on the fun and any pictures I got had to be taken while holding her...

It definitely made for a fun afternoon for everyone :)

Now for some crafty fun. Here are some cards I made a while ago... For this one I stamped some plain white cardstock with this cute circle image from Papertrey Ink's Butterfly Kisses. Then I just die cut it with Quickutz trees from the Merry & Bright set. The bigger tree holds the top flap closed.

I used PTI Butterfly Kisses for this one too. The script at the top is a stamp too. (Fancy Pants, I think) I embossed the butterflies at the bottom with clear just to make them pop a little more :)

Hope you have a great day!
Thanks for stopping by!

challenges.

One of the reasons I started a blog was to have a way for me to get more involved with scrapbooking and stamping challenges. I figured it would serve as good incentive to try some new things that I normally wouldn't do. So I decided to participate in Dawn McVey's Raspberry Suite Color Challenge this week! AAhHH! It is kind of scary for me ( in a good way!) Anyway, so here it is.....my first attempt at a challenge:

The colors were bright red, bright pink, grass green, soft gray and black! It seemed a little hard to get all of them on there at first, but when I thought of using these super cute trees from Papertrey Ink's Merry and Bright set, it came together pretty quickly. I used black for the trunks instead of a brown :) I actually had a lot of fun creating this. I hope to keep participating in these each week. I always love seeing everyone's creations each week :)

Thanks for stopping by!

sweet smiles...

It's started. The sweet little smiles that only babies can give you. Miss Emma had given us a few smiles up until now. But they were the kind that, cute as they were, you couldn't really be sure if she was smiling at you or just had gas :) Over the last couple of days, though, she has really started smiling. It is so adorable, I keep trying to make her smile all the time. Once I was sure she was really smiling at me, I was determined to catch one on camera --which is easier in theory than in practice. Because while Emma will smile for ME, it is almost impossible to get her to smile when there is a big, black camera looking at her.... BUT, I did it! Today I actually got a picture of her smiling! I'm so proud of myself :) So here they are--the cute pictures of Miss Emma :)

You can tell she's smiling, right?! Ok, maybe it wasn't a full on big grin, but still, she was smiling :)

I thought I would share some cards I made today instead of of a layout. These are some cards I made recently with, yes, cupcakes on them :)

Just a simple card I made the other day. The cupcake image is from WhipperSnapper. Isn't it cute?
This one I made a few months ago before Miss Emma was born. I LOVE this cupcake image from Pink Cat Studios. Possibly my favorite cupcake stamp I have....possibly :) Both simple cards, but I liked how they turned out. Lately I have been liking my simpler layouts and cards better. Unfortunately, those usually end up taking longer to get to look right.... not a big deal since I like spending hours making them anyway, right? :)

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