i did it...

I finally got this color combo to work! I love doing the Raspberry Suite Color Challenge that Dawn McVey puts up every week. But I have a hard time with it! I just don put red and pink toghether well lol!! But after struggling for long time, half deciding not to do it this week, I finally got something that I liked :) So here is what made this week:

I used Papertrey's Butterfly Kisses (again!) . I stamped it in white on the red cardstock and then heat embossed it. I also dry embossed the white with my Cuttlebug swissdots folder. It is simple, but I think it turned out ok :) Thanks for stopping by!

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:)

Thanks for stopping by!

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.
Thanks for stopping by!

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!

Thanks for stopping by!

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.
Thanks for stopping by!