Brought to You by the Color Green

Welcome to the Crafty Neighbor blog – Neighborhood Gossip. Thanks for participating in our Busy Chicks Spring Fling Blog Hop last week!  Now it’s time to start the next hop with The Craft Squad.  This month’s theme is “Brought to You by the Color Green” and I’m sure we’ll see several different takes on that theme as we hop through the participating blogs.  If you want to start at the beginning, please visit Stamp-Patty at http://www.stamppattys.com.

March and the color green actually have a couple of different meanings for me.  I know most people think about Saint Patrick’s Day, and being Irish myself, you’d think I would celebrate it, too, but it also happens to be the birthday of one of my most favorite people in the world…my dear husband, Mark.  So we don’t celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with the traditional green beer and pinching.  Instead, we prefer to find a nice quiet restaurant for a family dinner.  So what that means is that I don’t have a cute St. Patrick’s Day project to share on my blog today.

I do, however, have another green, shamrock-themed page to share with you, and I suppose you could use it for your Saint Patrick’s Day photos.  As it so happens, my son Steven’s birthday is also very close to St. Patrick’s Day.  In fact, we used to celebrate Mark and Steven’s birthdays together, incorporating a shamrock theme in our decorations – after all, my maiden name is O’Neal, and I married a Murray – you can’t get much more Irish than that!  So the page layout I’m sharing with you today is of Steven’s 1^st Birthday, for which I used a green shamrock theme.

As you can see, this is a very simple page.  I know that it is very popular these days to have very layered and busy pages, but sometimes, I think it’s nice to keep the pages simple and let the pictures shine through.  I just adore these cute pictures of my son and his incredibly blue eyes, and I didn’t want anything to take away from that.  For embellishments, I used some cute little shamrock eyelets (you can find similar ones online at EyeletOutle, Amazon, and Etsy) to tie all the mats together, and I tucked the journaling behind one of the pictures.  That’s it. Easy peasy.  And this is one of my favorite layouts…not because of the layout, but because of the pictures themselves. 

Another big event in the Murray household about this time of year is spring housecleaning.  If you’ve been following us on Facebook, you’ll know that we’ve been undergoing some changes at the Crafty Neighbor Studios (aka, my crop room).  I’ve taught classes here for many years, but over time I have just accumulated so many supplies that the old storage system wasn’t working.  So after several weeks of shuffling boxes and bins around, I finally broke down and installed some cabinets in the studio, and now I can’t wait to finish putting everything away so we can have some crops and classes here.  Sadly, all this mess has put a damper on my blog posts and my ability to get in here and do some crafting.  I’m hoping that will change soon.  Here’s some pictures of my progress so far.

That’s it for today.  I’ll have more pictures of the crop room as soon as I get the rest of the supplies sorted out.  I am the last blog in the hop, so if you started with Patty, you are done.  If you started somewhere in the middle, then Stamp-Patty is your next stop! I hope you enjoyed your time with us and will come back to visit real soon!

Cindy

P. S.  My little guy is turning 21 this month!  I’ll be celebrating my two best guys all month with lots of birthday pages and card projects.