A Recipe

Hi everyone! I hope your Thanksgiving was as wonderful as mine, and for those who live in other parts of our world, someday you'll just have to come visit and celebrate with us! I ate too much, and have had lots of leftovers since Thursday, but that's about over now and time to move on to some non-Thanksgiving foods.

In that vein, our weekly Saturday Paper a la Mode Challenge over at The Outlawz uses a "recipe" for designing our projects. I decided to go with a Christmas card as the result of my use of the recipe:

I dug into my healthy stash of Christmas themed papers and embellishments for this one - I love this time of year, because I get to play with all my "stuff"!

I also made another card this week. It uses a gorgeous digi from A Day for Daisies and some little scraps of paper and ribbon that I had in my scrap pile. I colored the image with Copic markers and Prismacolor pencils:

Thanks for stopping by this week. Stay tuned because we have a couple of great challenges coming up that will hopefully inspire you to get creative! Big hugs!

Christmas is just around the corner!

Oh, where does the time go??? Thanksgiving is this week and Christmas is just around the corner. Time to get all my Christmas cards made and sent out pretty soon!

In that regard, our Saturday Paper a la Mode challenge over at The Outlawz is to make a holiday related project (doesn't have to be Christmas, because not everyone celebrates the same) based on your own family traditions.

As far as traditions go, we don't have a lot of specific traditions - I guess mostly we tend toward the traditional colors and images and designs, but occasionally throw a curve ball into the mix.

So, I have a few cards I want to share. This first one I made for the card front swap at Crafters Digital Art Center. The vintage image is from the Etsy shop iralamijashop. I threw some colors into the card that are perhaps a little non-traditional, but then I guess that's how new traditions are made - sometimes you've got to step out of the box.

This next card uses a digital stamp from A Day for Daisies. I just adore this cute little sweetie!

Now I'm off to work some more on a special Christmas tree I am making. Hopefully it will turn out nice and I will be able to share it with everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving to you, and big hugs too!

Thank You to All Our Veterans!

I am a Veteran! I served almost 9 years on active duty in the U.S. Army as an officer, and another 5 years in the Reserves, before resigning my commission altogether so I would be assured of being around to raise my son. Since leaving the military, I have continued to work with the military in some capacity, either as an employee of a defense contractor or as a business owner. A huge majority of my friends and acquaintances are either in the military, retired from the military, or are family members of military. It's been my life and that of my children for a very long time - it's what I know and love. It's my family!

Today I wanted to create a project that honors veterans. Over at The Outlawz, our Saturday Paper a la Mode Challenge is to make a project that honors veterans in some way. After a lot of thought and a million ideas - too many to actually make - I decided to create a scrapbook layout to honor my dad. My dad served in the U.S. Air Force as a young man during the Korean War, and he was very proud of his service, and even more proud of mine. This is one of my favorite photos of my dad - it's old and a little fuzzy, but still precious to me!

Much love and thanks to everyone who has served our country, and to their families and loved ones. Hugs to you all, and thanks for stopping by!

Time to Give Thanks!

I love Thanksgiving! Nothing better than family, friends, and food all meshed together at one time! But sometimes it's hard to actually enjoy it! Everybody is rushing toward Christmas before Halloween is even over. So I have promised myself this year that I will make a concerted effort to focus the month of November on being grateful and giving thanks to God for all the wonderful blessings in my life! And try to mostly put off any Christmas preparations until after Thanksgiving is over and we have given God his due, at least for a short time.

I got that cute graphic from Facebook - thought it was appropriate to share it here!

Over at The Outlawz this week, we are doing Thanksgiving projects for our Saturday Paper a la Mode Challenge. I have two projects to share - the first is a CD holder that I made. This one is for storing away my fall photo CDs of football games, Halloween, Thanksgiving, back to school, and all those other Autumn events. You could give these to family and friends as gifts, or try decorating it a bit different and put music CDs in it as a gift.

Then this next one is strictly for Thanksgiving - a pretty little card where I applied some leaf-shaped brads and sewed on some pretty golden beads.

I hope everyone can find more reasons to be thankful than they can even list! Hugs to you!

Update: I decided to put a series of photos together with some brief instructions about how to make the CD cover - if you can't read the words, just let me know and I'll send it to you in an email or something. I apologize for the lighting in these photos - it was hard to get in a good spot for lighting in my craft room.