Happy Halloween!

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Tales from the Weekend

I went out to California over the weekend to visit friends and go to my 5 year college reunion. It was a great weekend. Shannon picked me up on Thursday and after a 3 hour trip home in crazy traffic and an incident at In and Out we made it back to her place to hang out. Friday we saw a community college production of Rent. Shannon's sister had a friend in the show. It was great, I forgot how much I love the music in that show. It has been in my head ever since!



Saturday was the homecoming game at CLU. We won 38-7! After the game we went to the alumni event and said hi to a few people from our class. Not too many showed up but I am still glad we went.

Then we drove to Malibu and had dinner by the beach. I miss the beach a ton!

Sunday we met up with my friend Jen and her sister Melanie and Jen's beautiful baby girl. It was so good to see them. Shannon and I wandered around Ikea for a bit and planned out our dream places and played with puppets. Which brings me to my question, is this a crazy dolphin or a shark?

Layouts and Stitching, Oh My!

I have been having a ton of fun using the Studio Calico kit for September called Back 40. The colors are wonderful and everything works so well together. I wanted to share a few more layouts with you today!
The first one is from our trip to NYC earlier this year, love how every thing just came together on that page.

For this next layout I went crazy with the stitching! Totally inspired by taking Amy's class.

I am getting ready to head out of town this weekend, mini book and camera in hand. Will have lots to share next week!

Photos from the Weekend

Saturday we went to the Chicago Botanical Gardens. It was a perfect Fall day. I took over 300 photos, it was that beautiful out! Here are a few of my favorites.

How was your weekend?

What I am Working On

Happy Thursday! I have been busy this week taking a class from the lovely Amy and it has really inspired me to create.

I got on a roll and made a ton of these mini books and have been stitching up a storm!

This one is my favorite I think...

and here is what it looks like on the inside.

Now I just need to figure out what to put inside of them!

Out My Window

Currents

I love when Tina does this on her blog so I thought I would give it a try!


listening: Arctic Monkeys
eating: nothing
drinking: water
wearing: jeans, teal t-shirt and my favorite gray cardigan
feeling: sleepy but happy
weather: cloudy and cool, feels like fall
wanting:  to lay in bed all day and read
needing: to clean my bathroom
thinking: about what to eat for lunch
enjoying: looking at the leaves out my window
wondering: what's next


And here is a layout that I finished last week!

Enjoy your Wednesday!

Out My Window

For this week's Out My Window post, I got the urge to paint, with watercolors of all things. Please note, that I am not a painter, at all so this really stretched my creativity. It was also a lot of fun!

So I took this picture out my window today:

and ended up with this painting!

Will have to try this again sometime soon!

Cards, Classes and Questions

I wanted to share the rest of my class cards for the month and answer a question I got last week about classes. I started teaching classes almost a year ago and I love it. I love sharing with other people and teaching them how to do new things. I was asked how I come up with my classes, such a great question, thanks Keshet for that!

I have two card classes each month now, one that uses A Muse stamps and products so that one is fairly easy to come up with. Just pick some new stamps and paper that we haven't used and see what I can come up with. The other class, is Card Creations and it is a little more open.  For this month's class I wanted to do Halloween cards but didn't want to use any of the new papers that we have in the store. We didn't really have enough of anything for a class so I went wandering around the store on the hunt for black and orange paper.

I also knew that I wanted the cards to have a vintage/distressed look to them so that helped me to find some great papers that fit that category. I had seen a few pictures in magazines that gave me some ideas about this fence card. After the paper, I grabbed a few stamps that would fit my theme and took it all home to make the cards.

So that is my process each month, I start with a theme or a color combo and go from there in designing my cards. Let me know if you have any other questions!

Monday Wrap Up

Happy October! It is really starting to look and feel like Fall here. It was a little colder than I was prepared for over the weekend but overall not too bad! Here are a few things that I am working on/loving right now.


1. Teaching Card Creations class this week at Craft Fancy. I think these might be some of my favorite cards that I have done in a really long time. My first class was on Saturday with 2 lovely ladies and it was a lot of fun. If you are in the area, I would love to have you join us.

2. Last week I was busy making layouts and knitting and spinning yarn (really loving that right now). I will show off all of that later this week since I can't seem to get my act together and update as I make things.


3. I love that my friend Shannon is blogging more now, she is an amazing writer and I always love what she has to say, stop by her blog if you get a chance.


4. I love twitter and the random people you find. That is how I found out about this cool site Songs from the Howling Sea. If you are a fan of music, history and weekly type projects then this is the site for you. Each Friday he posts a new video and song about character or event from London's Old East End. I think my favorite song so far is Flowers of Fortune, just beautiful.


5. I don't really have a 5th thing, I just felt that this list needed one so I guess my 5th thing will be that I love seeing the leaves change colors but I am not really a fan of what happens after that.


What are you loving this week?