News and Events June 30, 2013

Here’s a bit of news and information for North Texas and the surrounding areas:

LinkedIn Blog Hop

http://craftyneighbor.blogspot.com/2013/06/june-blog-hop.html

Don’t forget!  Today is your last day to stop by the Crafty Neighbor blog to check out our June Blog Hop!  Each blog in the hop will be giving away a prize to one random person who comments on the blog and offers a suggestion for next month’s hop.  Here’s a little peek of my entry:

Registrations are now open for the following events:

Scrapbooking Garage Sale

http://www.craftyneighbor.com/events/garagesale2013.html

Join us Saturday, August 3^rd from 9AM- 3PM for a scrapbooking garage sale at the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas, Joann Fogg Service Center, 6001 Summerside Drive, Dallas, Texas 75252. 

Dallas Crafters Marathon

http://www.dallascraftersmarathon.com/

Crop for the day, or crop for the weekend.  This event is open to Paper Crafts, Needle & Yarn Crafts, Fiber Artist, Altered Arts, Art Journaling & Book Arts, Jewelry Making, Stamping, Quilting, etc!  Most crafts are welcome!  Friday, July 26 through Sunday, July 28th.  See website for more information.

Here’s a few events outside the DFW area:

Creating Keepsakes Conventions

http://www.ckscrapbookevents.com/CKScrapbookConventions.aspx

Work on projects, catch up with friends, and have tons of fun at one of the many CK conventions throughout the country.  Here’s a few within an easy drive of DFW:

CKC-Tulsa

Tulsa, OK

August 23-24

•

CKC-Shreveport

Shreveport, LA

September 13-14

•

CKC-San Marcos

San Marcos, TX

September 20-21

6^th Annual Scrapbooking Cruise

http://www.craftyneighbor.com/retreats/2013/cruise13/cruise2013.html

Join us on our 6^th annual cruise of the Caribbean departing Galveston, Texas on December 1, 2013 aboard the Royal Caribbean Mariner of the Seas!  We’ll have 7 days of cropping, crafting, cardmaking, and cruising while we visit the ports of Roatan, Honduras, Belize City, Belize, and Cozumel, Mexico.  Pricing starts at about $100 per day and includes all food, cruise fare, and crafting fees.  Payment plans available.  See our website for more details.

Watch for these events, coming soon:

Think Pink Crop for the Cure

http://www.craftyneighbor.com/retreats/pamspals.html

That’s right!  Our annual breast cancer fundraiser is back with a new name!  Our annual event will now be called Think Pink Crop for the Cure!  Mark your calendars now for October 5, 2013, and let’s kick off Breast Cancer Awareness Month with a bang!  More details to be announced!

2014 Cruise!

Boy do we have some great news for you!  Royal Caribbean is coming to Gavleston Year-ROUND!  We’re cruising again in 2014 so look for a date announcement very soon!  We are tentatively looking at September or October with a destination of Jamaica and Grand Cayman.  We can’t wait!

  

Kits and Layouts:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/craftyneighbor

Coming soon to Etsy.com!  We are in the process of transitioning some of our online shop to an ETSY shop for easier maintenance!  As we do this, we will be adding new items, including kits and ready-made layouts.  Watch here and on our Facebook  page for the announcement!

That's it for now!  For all the latest information, please be sure to "Like" our facebook page at 

http://www.facebook.com/craftyneighbor

Picturesque

It’s all your fault!  If you would just remind me that I haven’t posted to my blog in a week, I would jump in there and get one uploaded!  Okay, it’s my fault, but still…you should smack me around a little, and I wouldn’t be so lax about uploading new content!  So here is one I did back in May for LOAD. 

This is, of course, my lovely daughter Christen.  The papers are more of the “Down by the Shore” from Fancy Pants Design.  The flowers were made using the Tim Holtz “Tattered Florals” die.  There is also a bit of Stampin’ Up glitter paper thrown in for good measure.

Don’t forget, if you haven’t completed the blog hop yet, head on over to my June Blog Hop post and enter to win prizes on each of the seven participating blogs!  Check back on Monday for an announcement of the winner, and check back tomorrow for some news and events coming up in North Texas and surrounding areas.

Stamping with Dry Embossing

I’m finally back from my anniversary trip to New Orleans.  Oh my gosh, we had so much fun and I saw so many things that inspired me.  I can’t wait to try out a few techniques I saw on some Mardi Gras masks!.  I took lots of pictures of them, so if they turned out, I’ll share some of them here!

I hope you enjoyed my anniversary post while I was gone!  I worked really hard on that layout because I wanted it to look just right. I’m working on some better pictures.  Unfortunately, I finished that layout at the very last minute before we left town and I took a bunch of pictures, but didn’t get to check them until we got to our hotel room in the Big Easy.  I’m working on getting some more pictures, and I’ll replace those terrible ones when I do.

For today, I have two lovely cards for you that were designed by Stampin’ Up demonstrator, Sharon Armstrong.  We created these at one of our 3^rd Wednesday Stamp Club meetings.  The reason I wanted to show them to you was because of the technique we used on them that I also used on my wedding layout here:

You old pros already know how to do this, I’m sure, but some of our new stampers may not know how to use stamps along with embossing folders.  I’ve demonstrated this technique a few times, and for some reason people always want to run the paper through the embossing folder first, which you just can’t do.  Well…I guess you could but it won’t have the same cleanly stamped effect at this.

For this first card, we stamped the white paper several times with the brown and/or blue, then we stamped it with the white and embossed it. A sponge tip was used to ink the blue around the white embossed flourish, which wipes right off the white embossed portion with a Kleenex or paper towel.  Running the paper through the embossing folder is actually the last step before adhering all the parts.

I just love the way the stamping looks on the dry embossed paper, don’t you?

On the Calendar:

If you are in the DFW area, head on over to Every Last Scrap in McKinney for the scrapbook garage sale.  You'll be sure to find lots of great new and used products at fantastic prices!  I'll have a couple of tables there, including our breast cancer fundraiser items.  Purchase any of my sale items marked with a pink ribbon and 100% of my profits will be donated to the Susan G. Komen 3-Day.

Mark your calendars now for August 3.  I just got word that we are a “GO” for our summer scrapbook garage sale at the Dallas Girl Scout office.  Stay tuned to our Facebook page and this blog for details.

Happy Anniversary, Honey!

I hope you enjoyed our June Blog Hop.  If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, do click on over to my June 15 blog entry, “What June Means to Me” for the start of our monthly hop.  You’ll see some great projects from each of our Team LinkedIn crew and you can enter for a chance to win a fun little prize on each of the blogs!

If you did stop by this blog on the 15^th, then I’m sure you saw my hop project, which was a very special 25^th Wedding Anniversary card for my dear husband, Mark.    In case you were wondering, our anniversary is today (the 19^th),  and we are currently enjoying a fabulous vacation in the city of New Orleans.  And since I’m out of town, it means I won’t be doing any projects for the next few days, so I did a very special one for you in advance of this day, and I hope it will be special enough to tide you over until I can squeeze in more time to post a few more blog articles when I get back.

As I mentioned on Saturday, June, for me, means brides, and after making that card for Mark (which as of this writing, he has not seen), I was inspired to do my very first page in my own wedding album.  Yes.  You read that right.  The first page in my wedding album.  You see, I purchased an album and papers years ago, and I even bought a few embellishments, but until now, I had not been inspired to work on it.  In fact, you might say I was afraid to work on it.  A wedding is a very precious thing, and I didn't want to create just any old scrapbook page, so I just didn’t do one at all.  But when I made that card, I started imagining what a page might look like, and I decided it was high time I made one!

Here’s my first wedding page:

As you can see, it is a very layered page.  I worked on it for about a week, laying out the pieces, moving them around, looking at it for a while and then moving them around again.  I had a sketch, and a general idea in my head, but sometimes when I laid out a piece, I decided I didn’t like it.  I finally finished it about 4:00 AM Tuesday morning, which gave me just enough time to take a few pictures and get two hours of sleep before we hit the road for our trip.  So I apologize for the terrible photo quality, and I will replace the photos with better ones just as soon as I can.

Since many of the papers and supplies were purchased a long time ago, I couldn't begin to tell you where they came from.  I’m pretty sure the ring embellishment was from Lil’ Davis Designs.  The embossing folder, banner punch, label die cut, stamp, and inks are all Stampin’ Up.  The bling and pearls came from Hobby Lobby’s bridal department.  The crocheted pieces were purchased from Paper Wings Productions and the flowers are by Prima.  The paper roses were cut using my brand new Art Philosophy cartridge.  I had a lot of fun playing with the different combinations of size and shape.

This page may have taken me a long time, and some people would say I spent too much time on it, but I really did want to make a page that I could fall in love with, and I think I accomplished that.  I would venture to bet that you have a similar project that you’ve either put off or spent way too much time on or obsessed about.  I’d love to hear about it!  And if you’d like to share, hop on over to our facebook page and post a picture of it!