Spring Fling Winners!

Hey Neighbors! Thanks for participating in our Busy Chicks Spring Fling Blog Hop last week!  As you may recall, we had some awesome prizes being offered up by our participating blogs, including one from yours truly!  So without any further adieu, please congratulate 

Vicki Townley

Vicki is the winner of a $150 voucher towards scrapbooking and group fees on any Crafty Neighbor Scrapbooking Cruise!  Vicki, please contact me to claim your prize!  You will find my email address on my website here.

If you would like to see the entire list of winners, please revisit all of our participating blogs or "Like" the Busy Chicks networking group on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Busychicks

Now, if you visited my blog yesterday, you know that I've started in on a new hop this month, hosted by The Craft Squad.  This month’s theme is “Brought to You by the Color Green” and you'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.  Feel free to comment on what you see!  We'd love to hear from you!

As promised, in celebration of my March birthday boys, here is a somewhat masculine birthday card.  I made this one a while back for a family friend.  The balloon was a Quickutz die cut.  I used some scrap paper left over from a page layout, and the distressed edging on the sentiment was from some roll-on rub-ons I bought a long time ago and never use.  I think what makes this card more masculine is the colors and the simplicity.  By using darker, muted colors, it has a more quiet and subdued feel.  The balloon gives it a little celebratory kick, but since that's all there is, it's not over the top or loud.  This same card can be "quietly feminine" by using soft pastels or other muted colors.

If you're wondering why I've done so many projects using old supplies lately, you should know that I'm a "waste-not-want-not" kind of gal.  I've been on a kick lately to try and use all this stuff I've bought.  I can't just keep buying new stuff without doing something with the old.  So with each project, I'm trying to incorporate at least one thing that I've had for a while, and eventually it will all get used up.  It's become especially apparent that I need to do this as I've gone through this renovation of my work room.  I know a lot of crafters would just toss this old stuff or put it in a garage sale, but I spent good money on it, so I need to use it, right?  

That's all for today.  Don't forget to jump into The Craft Squad blog hop!  The beginning is on Stamp-Patty's page at http://www.stamppattys.com.

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.