May Flowers Blog Hop!

Welcome to Team L. I. 's second Blog Hop!  I am so excited to be part of this fabulous group of crafters for the second time!  We had so much fun with our "April Showers" blog hop that we just had to do it again!  If you are coming from Sharon Armstrong's blog, then you are in the right place!  Our group has grown since last month, so we decided to split into two groups.

                                           

Day 1 started with Elizabeth Mindemann.  If you would like to start at the beginning of the hop on Day 1, then go here.  We are now on Day 2 of the hop, which starts with Valerie Ward.  There are 15 blogs in all (8 on Day 1 and 7 on Day 2), so be sure to visit all of them from both days!  Read all the way through, because near the end of this blog, you'll have an opportunity to enter our monthly Raflecopter giveaway!  The prize this month is sponsored by none other than your's truly and I'm really excited to give away some fun things to the winner of our contest!

This month's topic is "May Flowers" and I have some great flower tutorials to share with you over the next few weeks!  For the blog hop, we will concentrate on one of my favorites that I learned while teaching classes at Scrappin' Goodtime in Corsicana, Texas...this super simple mum/carnation made from a phone book.  Yes, that's right -- a phone book!  If you've followed my blog for very long, you'll know that I just love finding new uses for old items, and I am a big fan of recycling in any way.  Recycle, Renew, Reuse!

Stubborn

Some days, the inspiration comes quickly.  Today was one of those days.  I needed one of those days.  Our LOAD 513 prompt was “Modus Operandi”, and my first thoughts went to our household routines and how I really should document some of those, but I really didn’t have any pictures prepped that I could use, so I went on a photo hunt and ran across this one of Christen when she was in high school (she’s almost 30 now!).  It made me think about how she always slacked off at school and then did some kind of great project that gave her a passing grade.  That’s how she operated right up through college, and it really needed to be scrapbooked.

The papers and some embellishments are from Close to My Heart.  The burlap banner is Little Yellow Bicycle and the font is by Quickutz.

Stay tuned for our second Team L. I. blog hop.  The hop kicks off today on Elizabeth Mindemann’s Broken Treasures blog.  Our theme is May Flowers, and we have 15 blogs for you to visit and see some great projects, so be sure to check in and visit all the blogs.  The hop is going to be divided into two sections, and my blog will be featured on Day 2 of the hop (tomorrow), so be sure to come back for the second half.  I can’t wait for you to see the project I did for you.

Coming up later this week, I’ll have some changes and information about the 365 project and I’ll share some of my progress on my art journal!  Until then, go do something creative!

Guilty

Blog, blog, blog.  Some days that sounds to me like blah, blah, blah.  I’m writing to you in the wee hours of the night because writing a blog post was decidedly not how I wanted to spend my Mother’s Day.  As I mentioned in my last post, I had great plans to sit here with my craft supplies and make something cute.  Didn’t happen.  Well, it did, but not like I planned….

Work always seems to interfere with crafting for me.  It’s one reason I really like to go on crops and retreats; I just need to get away from the house and the office to get anything done.  I won’t bore you with the details of what I did do, but suffice it to say that I didn’t get to sit down to anything crafty until well after 10:00pm tonight, and that was just to do my LOAD 513 project.  So while I did do something crafty, I didn’t get to work on any of the projects I had planned to work on, and I can’t share with you the projects I planned to share.  That means I have no blog post ready to go, and I’ve got to start from scratch.

Today’s LOAD topic was “the usual suspects” and my take on that prompt is a perfect description of what always seems to happen to my day! 

The inspiration for this layout came from pagemap #69 by Susan Stringfellow on her SketchSavvy blog.  The papers are from October afternoon: “Daydream: Freshly Mown Lawn” and “Fly a Kite: Garden”.  These are both older papers, so I love getting to use up little bits of my stash.  The banner was made using the Stampin’ Up! pennant punch, but the layers didn’t go together the way I liked (too much of the aqua paper was visible), so I punched the scalloped triangle in the white and then trimmed off the scallops to make a slightly larger white layer with the scallop barely peeking out.  The title was cut on my Cricut using the Base Camp font.