WOYYWW #116, WOTT #21 and a design team goodbye

Time for What's on Your Workspace Wednesday, hosted by the lovely Ms. Julia. (Check out desks from around the world HERE.) Here's my desk as it sat on What's on Tap Tuesday.... lonely..... wishing I'd finish the bills already..... It still has evidence of the last card I made on Saturday. I'm hoping to clean it up so that I can put some mini album pages together. I joined a free Big Picture Scrapbooking Class that ran for 12 days and was on vacation for most of it so I'd like to get to it. I was thinking that it would be fun to take a kit and just try to use only what's in it to make the pages. I'll let you know how that goes.

For now, I can show you a card I made in honor of my design team position at Chicas Getting Crafty coming to an end. I made so many great projects as a result that I'm super thankful to Laura for the opportunity she gave me. This LINK will take you over to her website where she featured this card yesterday. (Stamps from Stamping Bella, K&Co. paper and that cute word bubble from My Favorite Things.)

Hope you'll link in your workspace today. I love gettin' a peek at your creative area!

*smile*

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

I couldn't resist...

I initially punched out this circle to use on my previous card but the definition didn't seem right for a birthday card. So I put it aside. Today, I decided to make a silly card with it and one of my favorite cat stamps. I call him Sparky (I know, I gave him a pink bow.... but hey, he has no problem with it... he's confident in his masculinity.) He hails from Unity's Hugs and Kitties set (if you go to their home page, you'll see a coupon for 40% off this weekend!) The green background paper is from the Playtime Stack by DCWV. Cappuccino baker's twine from The Twinery.

The fleur de lis charm (which looked like a dagger to me) came from a Making Memories Vintage Findings set that I was able to score for $1.49 from a local dollar store (sweet!) And the alphas are Lawn Fawn's Harold's ABC set. I love how easy it is to line up clear stamps....


Give me one good reason why you have to have this card and I will include you in a drawing for it later in the week. *smile*

Still waiting for Hurricane Irene. We're starting to get rain, but the real fun will start in the middle of the night. Of course.

Have a nice Saturday if you can and stay safe, Northeastern friends...

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

A Sweet Wish

What do you get when you combine a sketch challenge and an impending birthday? The answer is: this card. For Unity's Friends with Flair blog hop this week, I decided to use the August Kit of the Month Sketch Challenge HERE to make an early easel birthday card for my brother-in-law. I chose the June '11 KOTM (all smiles) because of the cute cupcake image and sentiment. But I struggled to keep it masculine, foregoing a pink candle for a white one (it's a real one!) and rather than frilly ribbon, I used rough twine. Don't you just love the papers? The definition comes from Tim Holtz' Idea-ology Paper Stash pad and the plaid is from The Lodge Stack by DCWV.

Take a tour through the blog hop HERE and shop for Unity goodies HERE.

On a serious note, to everyone in the path of Hurricane Irene, stay safe! I'm hoping that where we are won't be heavily affected but I bought power outage provisions just in case. Send good karma to the east coast, please. *smile*

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)
@scrapcollectr on Twitter

Peace and Quiet

I've been wanting to make a card for my niece's birthday using this stamp set, but, like the procrastinator that I am, I kept putting it off. Little did I know that My Favorite Things would come out with a sketch that would inspire me just when it finally needs to get it in the mail. Serendipity. I chose the birthday sentiment from this stamp set. All the other details of the card can be found in my SCS gallery HERE.

The reason that I wanted to use this set is that my niece has two very young children and I know that they keep her hopping so I thought it would be cute to add a note wishing her a little "peace and quiet" on her birthday. I hope her husband complies!

Thanks for dropping by. I hope to have a Unity Friends with Flair installment tomorrow.

Have a great Thursday!

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

What's On Your Workspace Wednesday, once again....

Hi! Here's my contribution to Ms. Julia's WOYWW #116 and my 20th installment of WOTT (What's on Tap Tuesday). Sneaky ol' Wednesday has crept up again (not that my calendar knows) and my desk has, among other things, a pile of Smashbook paraphernalia that came straight from my carry-on luggage. Took it on vacation with me and was able to work on a couple of travel pages but mostly it has all the restaurant cards and various stubs accumulated last week. Pages to be, as it were.

I needed to make a belated birthday card so I used some new Stampin' Up products on my desk that came my way before I left. Namely, a new Designer Series paper pack called Big Top, a new stamp set called Four Frames and a new frame punch to match. I modified the concertina card that I linked you to last Tuesday by using an entire 12x12 sheet reduced to 9" tall and divided into 3 - 4 " sections. I cut a little piece off the first section so that the pretty reverse side of the paper could show through and popped up the elephant and lion head for a little dimension. The birthday greeting came from a recent SU playground stamp set called Recess.

Wanna link what's on your desk this week? (You can do it in two places, here and Julia's blog, if you like.) Do you have some newbie stuff on your desk? Use it to create something spur of the moment and join us!

I think I'll go add some glitter to those stars....

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

The Dollar Dance

Thanks for coming by for a peek on a Saturday!  My post today is a DT assignment for Chicas Gettin' Crafty. We were each given a different aspect of a wedding to make a scrapbook layout about. Mine was to focus on the dance and we celebrated an usual tradition at my wedding (over 30 years ago.... yikes) that made for a fun layout. It was a Dollar Dance. It's a Mexican tradition that for one dollar any wedding guest can take a quick spin on the dance floor with the bride. I explain more about the obstacles I faced that made this layout more fun than I had planned, so head over to the Chica blog (see link above) for the scoop.

Now I hope you can get back to your Saturday fun.

Enjoy!

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

Friends with Flair on location

Welcome to another FWF blog hop with Unity Stamps.

Before heading to visit home, I scrambled to get an album finished for my brother in honor of his 50th birthday. The bulk of it was page after page of tribute letters but it also had a little filler of photos of him and our family. The following is an example of that. You can tell I was in a hurry because it is a very simple page but it made me happy and the album as a whole made him happy, so that's what counts, right? I used sentiments from the Nov 2010 KOTM (Picture Perfect) and the May 2011 KOTM (think Happy thoughts).

You can find the blog hop HERE and a wide array of wonderful new stamps at Unity's website HERE.

Have a great weekend! I hope it's full of family fun....

*smile*

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

Desk on Location and a new folded card

My What's on Tap Tuesday has a twist this week: it's on location.

During my visits to my parents over the past few years, I've amassed a tiny stash of scrapping products under a guest room bed for the times when we're just hanging out and I feel the need to satisfy my creative urges. Yesterday, I pulled out the three small bins and decided to make a simple card that I saw demonstrated on the Kaisercraft blog yesterday. Here's the LINK but the measurements are in centimeters. So to convert to inches, I used a 9" x 9" square as my base. Once folded, it fits in a legal-sized envelope. Just like the demo, I chose a sturdy double-sided card stock with a pretty collage print. The sentiment was already on the paper so all I had to do was stamp a cute little bird, color him and pop him up on the card, then add the trimmed kite from the piece of card stock I removed. This is called a concertina fold and I love the ease of it. It has to be the simplest folded card I've ever made. I hope it inspires you to make one, too.

Link in below if you'd like to share your desk top with us.
*smile*

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

An award, thanks!

Recently, I received a surprise comment from Dotty, whose lovely blog is Dotty A Cards & Things (check it out). She told me that she had an award for me on her blog (thanks, Dotty!) and this is what I found when I visited:

There are a few rules with receiving this award and here they are:

• Link back to the person giving it to you
• Share it with 7 recently discovered blogs
• Tell 7 random things about yourself.

Here are 7 blog sites to visit:
Understand Blue (love her projects and reflections on everyday life)
Millers Ink (gorgeous cards and a studio I envy!)
Robinsons Nest (love her cards and she's an Ippity Chick)
Stamping Mathilda (love her style)
Creatief Blog Van de Week (use Google translate because her projects are super!)
Papir Diva (lovely layouts and photos)
Campfire Chic Blog (just joined her 30 Days of Lists event)

And the 7 random things about myself..... will lets see......

1. My moniker is Scrapcollectr because, sometimes, paper scraps are just too pretty to throw away.
2. I collect journals and sketchbooks which is good because now I can consider them "Smashbook" inventory.
3. I just started playing tennis again and I've become a fanatic. Now I understand my dh's love of golf. 
4. I'm originally from Texas but my East Coast-raised dh turned me on to country music.
5. I love Scrabble but I had to wean myself off of the online version... too addicting.
6. I recently discovered Twitter and I'm not sure how I have 47 followers already.
7. I believe that dancing + singing + crafting = happiness and should be done everyday.

If you won this award from me, please copy and paste and share the love! If not, just enjoy the links above and thanks for visiting... *smile*

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

WOYWW#114, WOTT#18 and an easy ABC book

Hi friends! It's time for What's on Your Workspace Wednesday and What's on Tap Tuesday, where I share the chaos that is my desk at the moment.

Around the periphery of the desk is the detritus that will eventually make another page in my mock Smashbook. I have little photos, restaurant flyers, a Playbill for the show we saw on Sat, et al. But in the center of the desk are the makings of a little ABC book I made for a friend's toddler. I found these K&Co playing cards on sale at Michaels and I soon came to realize why they were on sale. A couple of letters were misprinted, but I found a way to fix that. I punched holes through the cards, typed the ABC words on sticker paper then cut them and applied them to each alpha card. I had to customize the front and back covers with a little DCWV Grade School paper and Making Memories alpha rub-ons. Then thread all the cards through two rings and added a little monkey ribbon so that the little one could carry his book around with him more easily.

Thanks for peeking. I hope you'll share what's on tap by you today. If you are so inclined, link in below.

I wish you an A to Z great day!

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

Happiness can come in the mail...

I'm telling you, check out Craftysteals.com because they've got daily specials and this was one of them only a couple of days ago! (And, guess what, they still have the green book available...)

I'm in the middle of spending a beautiful Saturday trying to backup my hard drive, so that I can update my operating system, so that I can install a new scanner that I need for scanning old pictures that relatives want returned, that will go in a birthday album, that I have to have finished by Thursday. Whew. So when this package arrived, although I didn't break it out yet, I did take 5 minutes to throw some items onto another mock Smash page (the background is a page in a 2004 art journal calendar from Stampington & Co. and I just let the sketch of the girl drive the page.) And I was happier for a few minutes.

Back to my technology headache. Hope you're having a better Saturday!

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

FWF and a Smash page, of sorts

Time for another Friends with Flair blog hop over at Unity. Okay, I've jumped on the Smashbook band wagon. But while I wait to get my very first one, I thought I'd get in the mood now. I've done this before. Take an empty journal, fill it with found inspiration. But this Smash idea is fun for documenting real life, too. So I found an old spiral bound weekly calendar on my shelf and went to town on one page with recent memorabilia of favorite things. The quote comes from the Unity/Melody Ross kit called All Worth It and that favorite kitty (Sparky) comes from Hugs and Kitties. That credit card sized photo comes out of a Fujifilm Instax Mini 7s camera. Lots of fun!

There are lots of new stamps to browse over at Unity, so have a gander using this LINK.

I wish you a SMASHing Friday! (For another look at a layout with an Instax Mini print and a chance to win a Smashbook, check out this post by PapirDiva.)

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

An orange accordion card and WOYWW

***My WOYWW desks are in the post below ***

Over at Chicas Getting Crafty (formerly Peachy Kats) we're celebrating National Orange Month. My contribution is this little accordion book that I made with one sheet of cardstock and 2 sheets of patterned paper. Step-by-step instructions can be found HERE. But I just want to show you how I placed a favorite kid's joke inside the pages.

So there it is. Not only are the directions over at the Chicas blog, but leave a comment here and there and get a chance at winning this little beauty....

Have a great day!

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)

WOYWW#113, WOTT#17- Two desks and one adorable bird

What's on Your Workspace Wednesday and What's on Tap Tuesday again...... Desk #1 is actually my kitchen table. You know how sometimes you have a project that just needs more space to come together? I had to spread out my brother's album project. As soon as I organized it and put each note in plastic dividers in a ring binder, it was removed. DH doesn't understand the need for 2 work areas. Lol.

Desk#2:

Sometimes, a card can evolve like this:

I caught up on my favorite blogger's latest post HERE.

She linked her inspiration to HERE.

That blogger linked her inspiration to HERE.

So, I took a long glittery scrap of paper from the DCWV Playtime stack and folded it in half, drew a bird on white paper, colored it with COPICs (but I will try the watercolor method soon), cut it out, popped it up (created its own shadow), punched Martha Stewart butterflies from a scrap then added word stickies from a Pink Paislee pad that came from an unbelievably generous kit offered by ScrapbookSteals. Sign up for their newsletter because they offer daily sales.

Hope you "love life" this Tuesday and Wednesday....

Link in below if you'd like to share your work desk today.....

Cindy (aka Scrapcollectr)