July Stampin Up Projects

We celebrated Christmas in July! I actually love making things for the holidays BEFORE the craziness of the season kicks in. It's fun to think about Christmas projects early! For the first time I used bleach on my card! Yep, bleach! It was pretty cool and I just might have to use that technique again!! First stamp your image (the red ornament). Then pour a tiny bit of bleach on a paper towel in a plastic container, then spritz with a little glitter spray. There's all kinds out on the market these days. Then, using a small stamp (a flower in this case) dab in the bleach and a little in the glitter and stamp over your red stamp. It will bleach out that area. Very cool!! Thanks to my friend and demonstrator Louise!!! She always has fun projects!!!! Plus it's just fun to hang out for an evening!!

The second card had me a little worried, LOL. We inked up a stamp using 3 different colors. Light to dark. The parent in me just kept seeing my kids mixing ink colors from one pad to the next., I'll admit, it drove me a little nuts, LOL. Anyway, ink up your stamp in the light color. Then to the next darker color ink up around the edges of your stamp. With the darkest color ink the VERY edges of the stamp. Then stamp on your card. Cool, right?

Stampin Up Catalog

July means that I get a new Stampin Up catalog!!! It's so much fun to flip through a new catalog and check out all the fun things. Not only the new product but all the new creations, cards, crafts and scrapbook pages. It really is an idea book as well as a catalog!!! One of the first things I do with my new catalog is label all the sections so i can find what I want quicker and easier! And speaking of my label maker, it's wonderful for this use also!!! I have a handy dandy punch for punching page tabs and I just printed my labels on the clear adhesive. So much neater than my hand writing :) Now I just need to take my book to an office supply store to have it spiral bound and I'll be set for another year!

Label Maker

I LOVE LOVE this little tool or machine or whatever you want to call it. I could spend ALL day labeling things in my craft room and around my house, it's pretty cool! I love the fact that I acn change the size of the font, do upper or lower case as well as number and dozens of little pictures! I can print on clear labels as well as white (and other colors I haven't played with yet). This is just a small sampling of the labeling going on around here.

Swimming Lessons

Summer is in full force and the kids LOVE going to the pool. Mason and Spencer have been going to swimming lessons for the past few weeks. They are doing really good! They are fish, just like I was! :) About a week ago I was dropping off the boys for swimming lessons and Carter was having a melt down in the back seat because HE wanted to take swimming lessons too! It took everything I had to convince him that he had to wait just a few short days before he could go also. Carter has now been attending swim lessons for a week now and he loves it!! I can't say that for the first day though. He cried and cried. The funny thing was that he did everything his teacher asked him to do but in between his turn he would get out and cry while he stood in front of me. It was quite amusing!!