Lovely Lizzy's Peppermint & Lime Tea Pocket Letter

Got a very lovely letter in the mail the other day all the way from Australia. Miss Lizzy Hill at it again with a knock out project! I LOVE these colors! So pretty and so much bling!

If the front of the card wasn't enough, she had the back of it chock full of these lovely goodies! I can't wait to use up some of my treats! Butterflies with gold glitter, oh my! The tea, what a treat!

The little sentiments are so awesome! And check out that owl! I have been hoarding my pocket letter cards because I love looking at them. I am sure you will agree that looking at this one is all kinds of fun!

Not only do I like looking at them, I like taking them apart and arranging them for photos! However, Lizzy gave me an idea. A couple of Easter's ago I did a bunch of RAKs that involved handing things out to strangers. It was awkward and made me feel weird, but I think it brought people joy. It's going to be hard, but I think I'll try taking mine apart and hanging them out. 

For now though, let's enjoy one last close up and give Lizzy a huge hug for making my day!

Happy Tuesday!

A Giant Giraffe and a Four Letter Word: Memorandum Monday

Oh dear. This past week started out with a little scare. We have to walk through a partially dark ReStore to get to the office for Habitat when I saw something looking at me. Something with long eye lashes and what might sorta be called a smile....Yes, we have a large metal giraffe for sale....and because we are fun, we have a bet going on how long it will take to sell....

Anyhow, a fun last week full of calling people for quotes, running kids to volunteer for CMOG and a dinner out with friends. In fact it's this dinner out that got me thinking....

I was telling our friends about the current build we're working on for Habitat...the lady with the previously pink house....she is extremely sick. The kind of sick that is very very sick. Anyhow, we're working on re-siding her house. Others have been in to build a handicap ramp and they will be back soon to make her house more accessable.

The owner is living in her Grandma's house that had been pink since she was a little girl, so she's a wee bit sad that we are re-siding it in tan. Thankfully for the sake of the entire block she compromised and we'll be putting up pink shutters, but that is another story for another day.

Our friend said, wow, that would be the difficult part of the job for me. All the sad stories. It's sad yes, but I like to think we bring hope with us. Hope in the form of hammers and hard work as her house is reborn. Her son is working on the porch behind the house, so every window she looks out of, people are hard at work building things back up.

Since the lady with the previously pink house doesn't actually agree with being ill, this might be a good thing. We'll keep bringing her hope and she needs to keep believing.

Waving a hammer at Sian From High in the Sky who is our most awesome host on these Memorandum Mondays.

Maryland Layout for Another Freaking Scrappy

We swore to ourselves after last year's brutal drive home from the Outerbanks with the camper to never drive more than six hours towing. So we came up with a stop on the way. This was the first time we ever stayed at a camping resort...in fact I was extremely sad that it was too late when we got in to enjoy the tikki bar!

I made a point of taking a photo of the main building when we got there. They used those beautiful beachy colors all over the resort. The little cabins you could rent across from our camper were turquoise and the ones father down were pink. I used my wide format printer with some plain white paper to print that photo. Sometimes a layout just calls for a large photo!

On top of using that epic bike sticker, I slipped in some butteflies! Can you spy two in this photo? One is near the flower cluster and the other is an itty bitty femo one that I found in my stash. I'm using butterflies as that is our July challenge over at Another Freaking Scrappy.

Another femo butterfly is posed on that super cool anchor that was a gift from my friend Lisa who blogs over at BZscrapper. Love the little accent!

Another one done and dusted! I'm making good headway on these vacation photos! Just a couple more pages left!

Happy Friday and long weekend if you are here in the States!

The KOA Flume Layout

This is the accompanying page that goes with one I showed you last week on Penn's Cave. I'm using up the last of a Valentine's Day kit...so it matches quite well...almost done with it! Wow, for not buying kits for months, I'm still going strong paper wise!

I'm also using up those silver letters! I was so pumped I had the right ones to make a title!

This page is rocking at least four washi tapes....I have no control when it comes to those....which is why you can see the very newest flamingo one that has nothing to do with camping...but I had to use it...yeah....doing well on the paper front, not so well on washi....

It's nice having this one done! This page celebrates one of those random times where the kids acted like kids. They are so grown up most of the time!

Luke had wanted to buy a bag of sand filled with gems in the gift store at the cave, but his Dad picked on him. Then when we got back to the campground I noticed that the KOA had the same set up. So, he and I walked down to the camp store to "get an ice cream" and accidentally bought a bag to play in the flume with. It was hot so playing the water was awesome.

Then we texted photos to his sister, who came down to watch and then had to have her own bag.

It was pretty full of semi-precious gems and what not!

Happiest of Hump Days to you!

Always Ready for Use 12 tags of 2016-June & One Little Quote

I have been watching a lot of the June Tim Holtz tags come in on Facebook and it looks to me that especially with this tag, lot of artists take his tag and jump! Jump into things that get their feet wet and hands dirty and come up with something unusual. Which makes me feel better as my tag looks nothing like his...

He had white tissue paper, I only had black....I didn't have archival ink, but white embossing powder...I didn't have the cool dude with a top hat die cut...So I made use of what I had. ;-)

My black tissue paper needed a strong stamp...pulled out my very favorite which happens to be a woody from Stampin Up! and some white embossing power. I then adhered the tissue paper to a base of cardboard with some white glue and a paint brush. I then decided I need a cut out, similar to the man with a top hat....so I used a scallopy punch and then went hunting for a dude with a top hat image...

Here is where things went horribly wrong...I ended up finding the one I wanted on a site called Sexy Victorian Men. I was somewhat astonished that such a thing existed so when I went to my stash of Tim Holtz paper, the piece with the slogan "always ready for use" jumped on my cutter and was glued to my tag in about five seconds flat amidst giggles...so there you have it....yes sometimes I have a dirty mind!

I am half way through my One Little Quote! I thought it would be cool to use a quote instead of a word this year. It's got even more meaning now! 

Happiest of Tuesdays to you!

Something Went Terribly Wrong: Memorandum Monday

I didn't break it, honest. It was broken before I got there. The fact that I had this catchy little tune sung by a purple alien in my head daily as soon as I walked in the door at work was a constant reminder that things were f-ed up. (I'll leave you with that YouTube video at the end. It's worth a watch if your pc ever died unexpectedly).

The first five minutes of my new job involved the guy who hired me telling me that he wasn't my boss anymore.  He was gone two weeks later, RIF'd. Shortly thereafter a senior guy left on family medical leave and his contract was terminated two days later. Then the girl who trained me quit. The fact that she was eight months pregnant and had managed to find a higher paying job even though she'd be starting and then leaving for six to eight weeks was astonishing. I'd walk down the row that my team sat in and people were working on resumes. Outsourcing in two years was the offical word, but word on the street was that by next year, everyone would be gone.

I'm a fixer. In fact, I spent an hour and a half before I left telling soon to be ex boss some ideas. Don't hire another person who will just quit, pay the ones you have a little bit more and offer them overtime to cover the slack. Think out of the box and come up with things that make people happy to stay, even if you can't do much.

And then I fled into the sun and rolled down the hill with the tunes blaring. Randomly, Carry on Wayward Son was playing. I'm off to work today at Habitat for Humanity as a Project Manager. I can go back to fixing stuff. Stuff that I can fix.

And since this is Memorandum Monday, dreamed up by Sian over at From High In The Sky I must leave you with a tid bit of knowledge or in this case a quote for you to ponder:

“A house is to a family what soil is to a plant. A plant needs to be rooted. A family is like that. If a family is not rooted, it will not flourish. But once a family is well-rooted, all kinds of wonderful things will begin to happen.” Millard Fuller

For a giggle, check out the little purple alien below....




P.S. Thanks CW for stabbing my cake. It made a most epic photo...

In My Corner

Last week I got lucky and found a couple of more corbels at the Corning Habitat ReStore. I didn't know I was collecting them until I found two more...The bottom one is resin, so I just cleaned it off with a wet soapy cloth. The top one is wood, so I spent some time with the spray paint last weekend layering and spritzing to get an aged look. Believe it or not, I even used an ink pad!

I really like the splatters. It's a bit nerve wracking applying just enough...But I'm pretty pleased on how this corbel turned out. 

The last project I did similar to this I used mists...nothing is sacred when you are working on a project! 

Happy Hump Day! Or should I say, Happy Corbel Day! 

Sweet Lights Layout: Penn's Cave

I've really been enjoying getting some pages done and dusted. It's even more exciting when it's a page from a recent trip. ;-) I blogged about our trip to Penn's Cave just a couple of weeks ago. There are a ton of photos that are neat from inside the cave, but I picked my favorite. They have a little light show with different colors at the very end of the cave that I enjoyed quite a lot.

I loved the Penn's Cave House. It's so vintage and pretty! That is exactly why I decided to print it out smaller and add it to the bottom of my page. I also dug out the tickets we had from the day (they were lurking around in my purse) and added them.

Love that little metal camper I used down in the corner and some little gold and pink splatters...

Just a super fun day that I'm happy to share with you! Happy Tuesday!

Happy Spraying & Washing Memorandum Monday

This weekend was well....interesting. I have some news to tell you on what I did Saturday, but I'm not quite ready to dish yet so you'll have to wait on that patiently. I say patiently, but I don't exactly resemble that trait myself...I'd be tapping my foot a little looking annoyed so you are welcome to do that too. THE MAN held down the fort while I was gone and pressure washed the garage with his new Father's Day pressure washer.

Working with water was a smart move on his part because it was blazing hot both weekend days. I mean not as hot as say like the desert, but probably in the nineties. He's prepping for staining the garage in a weekend or two.

As it was a nice hot day perfect for drying spray paint, I took the opportunity Sunday to set up the spray painting table and play with this frame a little. I wanted a nice vintage antique gold color. I was really leaning towards NOT painting the frame, but it smelled a little too vintage for my taste, so cleaned it off and painted it. The internal part has since been painted in silver leaf which is now currently drying...that has it's own special smelly smell. I am toying with the idea of adding a mirror in the middle...but still thinking....

All that warm weather has inspired my rose to bloom even more. It's such a lovely pink orange color. You can also see that someone was keeping his dog eye ball on me when I took this photo. He highly approves of hot afternoons that involve chasing chipmunks, long drinks from the water dish and then throwing youself on the kitchen floor to pant and enjoy the air conditioning.

Hoping for a few more dog days of summer and a week that goes quickly so we can have more weekend!

Join me in waving hello to Miss Sian From High in the Sky, our Host here at Memorandum Monday....if she was my neighbor I'd snip off one of my blooms for her scrap room table!

Red, White and Blue (and Aqua blue) Layout for THE CUTTING CAFE

 The very epic thing about a good digital file is that it can be used in various ways...print on a large format printer and you have background paper for a scrapbook page! I used THE USA PHRASES........PRINTABLE STAMP SET from THE CUTTING CAFE to make this patriotic page. I used this photo of my son's Civil Air Patrol unit to cover up the very middle section which said Happy 4th of July as the photo was actually taken early spring here...

The Civil Air Patrol kids were actually helping at a Wellness Retreat, but since they took the photo in front of a flag, I thought the printable worked quite well. Add in the part where I then didn't even need a title or to find special red, white and blue paper, the digital file made this page extra easy. 

A simple flower cluster, some ink drops and a little torn paper....completed the page. If you are curious as to which kid is mine...I put his name over his head in this photo....yes he's one of the tallest even though he's likely one of the youngest....

Love that I have this layout done! Thanks Regina for an epic digital file! I've got a little list of layouts that have been stacking up as we've had a lot of weekend events and end of the school year things....

Happy Father's Day!

GlassFest Layout & the Market Street Collection

Recently we celebrated Glass Fest here in Corning, NY. We are totally big on all things glass, so why not block off all of Market Street, invite in food vendors and crafters and have fun.....Lexi was down at Centerway helping face paint little people for Sister Cities but lots of her friends were out and about so she joined them later for some food and fireworks.

Look at those pretty girls! They are on the walking bridge that connects Centerway with the other side of the river & eventually takes you to the Corning Museum of Glass. It's cool on that bridge...they have a garden running down the middle and you can look over the side at the huge carp that swim in the Chemung. I do suppose it would be epic to watch fireworks from, which is what she did later that evening.

We wandered around GlassFest ourselves with Grandpa Roger and Grandma Donna. Of course I had to score a beer cozy & a free bowl at the Corelle store. My plan (which worked perfectly) was to fussy cut the logo off the beer cozy...and then add glitter....love how that M turned out...that is the new logo for Corelle's new Market Street Collection which of course is named after OUR Market Street and is a pattern I really love....so we're taking a quick field trip to look at some plates...

Yes, I see you agree. They are epic....but not available for purchase yet of course! ;-)

Happiest of Thursdays to you! I'm busy making a list for the weekend....lots of crafting I think and perhaps some spray painting....gold anyone?

Meant to Be Frame from the Corning Habitat ReStore

I walk past a LOT of things at the Corning Habitat ReStore. A LOT. My theory is that if I love it once, I'll love it again when it's still there next week. Sometimes this doesn't pan out very well and I make an emergency trip back for something that must be mine. Or, it's gone.  In this case, the $7 frame was still there.....meant to be!

It's MOSTLY in one piece......and it's only slightly smelly....but oh I do love it. I need to dust it and let it air out a little...and then decide whether it needs a very light coat of spray paint or not....

I don't want to use too much spray paint and lose that detail! Check it out!

Love the wood pieces I found. Again, not sure what I might do with them, but they need some warm soapy water and then a decision! Good thing the weekend is coming up again! Might have to have a date with some spray paint!

Happiest of Hump Days!