time for magic!

Ah, my favorite time of year is here - Fall! Or, at least it's here in spirit. In the hot hot land of Newport News we haven't seen much fall action yet. In fact, it was 90 degrees today. Not too fallish at all. It actually bums me out in a major way.

I'm taking baby E (toddler E now) to a thing called Fall Festival at the park this weekend. Haven't decided if we'll go on Saturday or Sunday yet. There will be crafters, fall activities, food booths. It should be fun and very festive. And cheap, we love cheap!

The fall/Halloween decor is out here at Chez Nichole. I always have so much fun spooking up the place. I added a few new things to our collection, including a black faux owl and a spooktacular banner. I intended to hang this on my book shelf, but it didn't work well there.



Neat-o, huh? Yeah, that's me trying to act scared. Joe says this picture reminded him of the movie The Ring. I like the banner on this mirror a LOT.

Halloween always revs me up, and in the spirit of the season I joined a new ATC swap at the Faerie Zine (which is a Flickr group I belong to). The theme is magic, of course, and the cards are due by Oct. 21. Mine are done, and going in the mail asap!



This is one of 5 identical ATCs, almost finished. I added a black glitter border tonight, and they are all drying right now.

The little girl's dress was originally blue, the same shade as her socks, but I decided to change it to orange with the magic of technology.

I added some details to her with pen: darkened her shoes, gave her socks stripes, outlined her dress for definition, put a little rouge on her cheeks, and gave her curls.

I cut the hats out of black cardstock, then hand drew a silver moon on each one with a silver leaf pen.

The papers are meant to represent wallpaper. The green polka is from Brenda Walton's Dollhouse collection, the Halloweeny pattern I have no idea...all I know is I saw it and had to have a piece, and it ended up working perfectly for this project.

The rubber stamp alphabet I used to spell "time for magic" is actually from the $1 bin at Target. Yeah, so Sharon you might want to go over there and see if your Target has them, too! I love them!

So, until Halloween this is really all the fall stuff I'll have to show. Eleana is dressing up as Lumpy this year, so I have some Halloween papers that incorporate purple for just that purpose.

Hope to see more fall projects here, y'all!
<3

Ladies of the paper, pen and glue ~ I present to you my latest in crafty goodness.
This weekend at work I was presented with this item.
My directive - To alter it and use a Halloween line (the "underdog" as it was called) in order to promote it.

Immediately I thought of tombstones. But when I returned back to my crop table, my hands and arms went to work - much like Edward Scissorhands - and the end result was quite different, below:


Ooooh. Notice how scaaary it appears when upshot like that. I think Jon D. and Nichole will stand up and applaud this. Feel free to comment on that below (cough, cough, hint, hint)


Up close and personal:


Right now there is a lot of ribbon and yarn throughout the store. I wanted customers to start thinking outside the box and go beyond the paper and the brads for embellishments. So I created a sort of "message board". I used paper from the different lines to mat and frame the pictures. I loved the "hairy" yarn on the top and mat of the picures.

Notice also how I tore the edges (perfect for my sloppy technique) of the background paper and rolled it back to reveal pictures peeking out.





The pictures by the way are from over 2 years ago. My older digital camera had a screen that could flip around - so the subject could see themself through the photographer's point of view. This explains why Shayna is looking off-center at times. She's actually "posing". I must have taken several dozen of these. I was psyched to find them because they fit perfect into the theme. On my printer setting, I discovered "Contact Sheet" which printed them into thumbnail size. Perfect!

Yes, that's a meat cleaver. Someone at my crop table that night happened to have this left over from a receipe card of all things! I thought it went perfectly with the pictures.

Other embellishments include my Cat's Eye inks - purple, white and black. I don't leave home without 'em! Black buttons, yellow scrap floss, and other little goodies throughout. Click on pics to enlarge.

Happy Haunting!

My Challenge (aka the Winner) hahahaha

I rose to Nichole's so-called challenge.

See it here.

Perfectly imperfect!

Alright ladies, game on!
I actually rose to the challenge and completed my page! Can you believe it? I can't!

You will need to view it on my Picasa page because I am Mac illiterate and can't figure out how to change the file type to import the pictures here.
http://picasaweb.google.com/JSchelin/Challenge1

My challenge color is pink. I don't get to use pink very often because I am usually making pages about my son (he doesn't look so good in pink). I happened to find this paper that had all these wonderful words that described ME. I printed a picture that I actually like of myself in color, then resized and made that same picture a sepia tone and blurred the edges to add a little artsy flavor (thought about Sharon as I was working on that). I formed the pictures into a sort of corner frame to frame the larger color picture.

I circled a number of the words that were already on the paper, that I really felt described ME.

Then I added "MOM" which was a premade sticker, "wife" I cut out using the Cricut, cutting each letter 5 times and stuck them all together to make the word pop. The last thing I did was write additional words to describe ME on my title letters. One of my favorites is "perfectly imperfect"...Why? Because I don't care about perfection...and if you really look closely at my page you would see that I didn't try to cover up the mishaps that happened when cutting out letters.

Hope you like it. It's perfectly imperfect and I love it!

Oh, and I had to add a blue flower just because blue is my favorite color! :)

Nichole's challenge

Hey folks! I did my scrapbook challenge last night! Here's my finished page!





I used this goofy picture of me 3 times. I was going to go for 4 in a photo strip style, but my printer wouldn't print these any smaller without pixelating them for some reason. I think if you click the image it'll open bigger in a new page. The color I barely use was the teal in the background!

For details on this layout go here.

I can't wait to see the other layouts!

something new

I am desperately avoiding blogging on the other blog, so I'm finding other things to distract me. It isn't that I don't like blogging about myself and my munchkin, rather that I've not blogged in so long about anything of any consequence, I feel there is so much to catch up on. It feels akward to just start up new from now, and skip all the other stuff. Psh.

So the girls and I have been tossing around ideas about how we're going to keep our creative jazz up in spite of my moving away. (I know, girls. I'm the totally inspiring one. you don't have to say it!) I truly miss having face time with my friends from the north, and find it very chore-ish to scrap now as opposed to fun.

Before I moved, in preparation for the impending doom, we thought perhaps a round robin of some sort would be cool. As far as I know, a 6x6 round robin "book of friends" is still a valid and possible idea. At any rate, I think it would be awesome to do.

Well, I found this AWESOME site called How Much is Too Much. This little blog poses a new challenge every week, allowing a week for completion. The purpose of HMITM is to get scrappers to use the supplies they've been saving up. I think anybody can participate, all they require is that you post your image on a link at two peas (another site I wish I had a limitless amount of money to spend at!).

While I want to participate in at least one HMITM challenge, just to do it, I think a challenge group of our own is in need. So, after talking and talking with the girls but not really doing anything (summer is SO busy, I think now we're starting to see some time free up for us) I implemented a new challenge for us! Yay!

Of course, we can each make up our own challenges as we go, but I made the first one to get the ball rolling.

The challenge for this month is this:

Create a layout of any size using the same photo multiple times AND

Use a color you don't normally use/favor as your main color element!

I give the girls a month or so to do this, as I know they have other things to work on and commit themselves to.

So gals, if you're reading this, GET MOVING on that layout! And start turning your brain wheels about a challenge idea you may have!

Thank U

It appears I'm the only one posting at this here blog...which is fine. I know the other fabulous gals are constantly turning out great works of art, whether scrapbooky, altered, or other. And I'm aware I promised pictures of my friend album. Those will be added soon, I promise.

For now, here is the latest thing I crafted. A thank you card for my mom, in the form of art that she can hang/display as a reminder of my everlasting debt to her for everything she's done for me and mine.




It looks a little gray on the left because it was raised a bit from the scanning surface. The metal/enamel heart is thick enough alone, and I fixed it to the page with a foam dot, just for added thickness. ;)

supplies: velvet ribbon, lace, enamel heart, fabric "mom" tag, "mom" brad, sticky gemstones, acrylic stamps, inks, large eyelet (green bullseye looking one), hat pin, rub-ons (bird, white heart near "rock"), patterned papers.

Sharon gave me this card with a lovely matching envelope when I first met her. love!