A Birthday Surprise!

I am SO excited that today is finally here. I started working on this project almost 2 months ago. Shortly after I started my blog I got a message from someone named Melanie, who just happens to also be friends with my friend Delia. She told me of a plot to surprise Delia for her 40th birthday (which happens to be tomorrow). She asked me to make a 2 page 12x12 layout as part of the surprise. Delia is the best scrapper that I personally know and let me tell you, I was NERVOUS! I spent many nights laying in bed trying to think of themes/layouts/colors/etc...
When I finally decided on layout and colors I nervously started getting my stuff together.
As my ideas started to flow, I got pretty excited about these pages. I searched this entire town on multiple occasions looking for exactly the perfect pieces and I think in the end it turned out terrific. Those of you who know me well, know that I seldom think anything I make is terrific but I LOVED these pages when they were done. I honestly think they are the best pages I have ever scrapped...EVER. I am so thrilled that they turned out so well, especially since they were going to such a special person. To go along with this surprise I so wanted to make the drive to New York for her surprise party (which is scheduled to start in less than 10 minutes from now), but Tom was too nervous about me making a 15 hour drive by myself (I think he was really just nervous about fending for himself with the kids for a few days). As a consolation I will hopefully be getting a call from Melanie (from the party scene) so I at least get to wish Delia a Happy Birthday from Wisconsin.
So without further ado...

Here is a close-up of the flowers I added.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DELIA!!!!!!

I've been tagged!

Earlier in the week I was tagged by my good friend Jen from Glitter In My Hair.
Here are the deets:

P.S. - You've been tagged!

The rules of the game:

• Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
• Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog, we all want to know them.
• Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
• Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Random Facts About Me:

1. My middle name is Renee (so with my hyphenated last name I have a total of 9 E's in my name)
2. I've broken my right arm twice in my life, once when I was 4 years old (falling off our swing set) and once when I was 26 (falling off my mountain bike).
3. In my mid 20's I did several off-road mountain bike races.
4. In high school I played fast pitch softball and I was a varsity basketball and football cheerleader.
5. I love singing. I'm hoping dh will buy me a good karaoke machine for our anniversary (but I'm not holding my breath). My dream is to be in a band (and also to be about 10 years younger than I am).
6. My first music concert I ever attended was MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice for my 16th birthday. I have since bettered my music/concert tastes to the likes of Prince, REM, U2, John Mellencamp, Harry Connick Jr., Indigo Girls, Bare Naked Ladies, Sheryl Crow and lots more. During our pre-marriage/dating years (all 5 of them) dh and I went to A LOT of concerts.
7. I love HS Musical and Zac Efron (you ladies knew I couldn't post facts without this obvious one)

Boy this was a challenge. After trying to figure out something interesting about myself, I realized that I am totally boring. I'm going to have to spice up my life so next time I get tagged I have something good to write!

According to the rules I need to tag 7 people so we can learn all their secrets too. I know it says to tag 7 other bloggers but I'm going to bend the rules and tag a few bloggers and a few non-bloggers. All of you non-bloggers please post your info in the comments for this post.

Here we go:

Kisa

Delia

Mary Webb

April (my sis)

Nessy (Nessy's Notes)

Lynn (Just Monkin' Around)

Jo (Only Joking)

New Banner Info

I have had several people ask me about my new banner. When I said I was totally NOT techno savvy, I was not kidding. The banner was completely simple to do. I downloaded this months free digi-scrapping kit from Shabby Princess and used one of the border components for my banner (used the shrink to fit option). That is all! I know nothing about digital scrapping so I am not able to do anything more than this. There are several other blogs (Thinking Inking and Inky Doodles are two that I can think of) that I have seen in the past few days that used several compenents from the kit, but because of my lack of photo editing software I think I will just be happy with my basic banner. Thank you for all of the wonderful comments about my new look.

Christmas in March???

I got some much deserved stamping time on Sunday afternoon but couldn't decide what I wanted to stamp. When I get in a stamping funk I tend to go to my stash of "favorite cards" (mostly made by my former monthly swap friends) for inspiration. As I looked through my cards on Sunday I kept coming back to a poinsettia card made by my friend Kisa. I loved the card when she sent it to me and even bought the TAC stamp she used solely because I loved her card. SO....even though it isn't Christmas, I decided to make a holiday card, if for no other reason than to get my stamping mojo going.
This card took me a LONG time. I think I had about 6 different renditions (including an exact CASE of Kisa's card) before I finally settled on this one. In fact I originally stamped the poinsettia, colored it with gamsol/pencils, added glitter, added Prima poinsettias and then sponged the white cardstock with real red (almost exactly what Kisa did, except I used different colors), but the real red sponging just wasn't working for me so I cut just the flower portion (without the leaves) off of this first attempt, re-stamped the whole image, re-colored, added glitter again and then I layered the first flower with dimensionals over the new image. I liked this look much better. Because the poinsettia image is pretty big I had a hard time fitting a sentiment onto the card. I didn't want to cover up the leaves because I had just spent a lot of time coloring them so I ended up cutting the lower corner out and layering the leaves over the sentiment. The background is a piece from the DCWV glitter mat pack that I ran through the Cuttlebug. The glitter on the poinsettia leaves is "Lions Mane" ultrafine from Art Institute.
In the end, I really liked how this one turned out....simple, but elegant (IMO).
Hope you all have a wonderful day!

New Look

So what do you guys think of my new look? I have to say, I'm not very techno savvy so trying to make my blog look half-way ok is a major challenge for me, especially since I don't have any photo editing software except for the iphoto. Let me know what you think of it so far and if there is anything you would like to see changed.

AWESOME tutorial!

Good morning! I have ANOTHER busy day today (swimming lessons and preschool) so I'm not sure if I will get to my stamp room today or not. Even though I don't have any cards or pages to post this morning I wanted to share this ABSOLUTELY AWESOME tutorial with you from the blog of Jody Morrow (Confessions of a Ribbon Addict): Drunken Watercolor
I can't wait to try this out!
Hope you all have a great day and if I find some time this afternoon I will try and post again.

Busy Day

I have a busy day ahead of me and probably won't find any time to create anything except for maybe a headache. I thought I would share a scrapbook page I made a couple months ago. Some of you have already seen this as it is in my ASB gallery, but I thought I would share it here too. I was doing one of the sb layout challenges from ASB and came up with this page. The picture is Annabelle's school picture from last year. The page is nothing too fancy but I really liked how it turned out with the exception of the fact that I cropped the picture a little shorter than I wanted.
I hope you all have a terrific day!

Scrap Mania Project

Blogger has finally decided to cooperate this morning. Here are some pictures of the project I made at scrap mania last week...I finally got around to finishing it this weekend. I saw a project made with the Bo Bunny chipboard book on Jody Morrow's blog a few weeks ago and it reminded me that I had one of these bare chipboard books stashed somewhere in my stamp room. After a lot of searching and re-organizing I finally found it just in time to take to scrap mania to work on. The chipboard letters are covered in Basic Gray paper and then embellished with rub-ons and Primas. I used the SU! SAB rub-ons and I have to say that they TOTALLY ROCK! I put a friendship themed quote on each page of the book.
I'm not exactly great with covering chipboard with paper so there are definitely a few areas that could have been better, but overall I think it turned out ok.

Hope everyone had a great weekend! I wanted to add some pics of a project I finished this weekend but Blogger is not cooperating with me tonight. I will try again tomorrow!

Blog Candy for a GREAT cause

If you haven't already heard about or checked out Wendi's blog Kaput Krafts, I definitely recommend heading over there. She has some awesome blog candy that she is giving away for a great cause!