Look What I Made

Currently: April

 

Eating freeze pops. They were $1 for a big box at Walgreens. I bought 5 boxes.

Drinking coffee with cream in the morning, huge glasses of ice water during the day and this red wine at night.

Making Turkey Meatballs for dinner.

Reading the Goldfinch. I just started...looks like it's 700 pages. Yikes.

Watching 'House of Cards' Season Two with Billy. We're obsessed.

Addicted to 2048.

Keeping myself busy with a few painting projects and spring cleaning.

Still looking for a new job.

Hoping the right one comes along. 

But for now, enjoying my time as a Real Housewife of Austin.

Project Life 2014 | Week 8

Week 8. I used a lot of pink and turquoise this week. I used Design K (back side of Week 7) and Design S.

Here is the left side. I spent some time outside enjoying the February sunshine. I also worked on a fun, random DIY project for the wall.

I had fun making this date card. I used a mix of embellishments I had on my desk at all times.

I used my Hot Mess stamp to caption this craft-project-in-progress photo. I'd like to think there's a method to my madness when I'm making stuff, but this project was not the case. I totally winged it.

Here is the right size – a mix of photos from the week. 

I took a photo of some of our little messes around the apartment and figured I should put it in the album. I usually try to make things look neat and tidy when taking photos. I did just the opposite here to capture some real-ness.

Oh! And this was the week I bought my new bike! The "New" card is from my 'Jumpstart' Printable set. I used some big, bold letters from Fancy Pants in the open white space. 

That's my week 8! I am sending a big photo order to Walgreens today so hopefully I can do some catching up this week.

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See all my Project Life posts here.

 

DIY Gold Puffy Paint Art

Today I'm sharing a super simple art project. I created some one-of-a-kind gold art for our dining room wall. All you need is a canvas (new or old!), puffy paint (any color) and a can of spray paint. Oh, and maybe a tarp if you don't want to get paint all over your work surface.

I started this project above over a year ago and clearly never finished it. I drew out a chevron pattern with white puffy paint and filled in the gaps with various colors of acrylic paint. It wasn't turning out quite like I had hoped and was very tedious. I decided to abandon the project altogether but never got around to throwing it away.

A few months ago, I picked up two cans of spray paint, metallic gold and metallic silver. They were $5 each and I've already gotten so much use out of them. We were thrifting a lot when we first moved so I became addicted to giving our finds a fresh coat of paint. It makes a world of difference. 

After looking at this old painting for a while, I decided to try giving it a fresh coat of paint as well. 

After one heavy handed coat of spraypaint, I was finished. So easy! The puffy paint added just enough dimension to make it interesting, and the gold covered the original project perfectly. 

Once the new painting hung, I decided to paint the edges black. It gave it a little bit more pop off the wall. I hung this piece in our dining room nook. You can kind of see in the mirror reflection how the metallic finish has different variations and shine, depending on where the light is hitting it. I love how this turned out and, of course, how simple it was.

Project Life 2014 | Week 7

Another colorful week is done in my album. It was a random week – they all seem to be these days – so I just chose a bunch of colors and photos I liked and tried to make them work together.

I used Design C (back side of week 6) and a new one, Design K. I do not love Design K. I thought I would, but I found it really difficult to work with.

I included some photos of my new stamp storage. It's a letterpress drawer that I picked up at Uncommon Objects here in Austin. I also included a photo about my Texas Key Holder... still love that thing.  

I think Design K works if everything on the page is one topic. Maybe it's just me but, as mentioned above, I found this layout difficult to work with. I did my best and am happy with how it turned out. I think the asymmetry was throwing me off. 

We went house hunting this week. It was more for information purposes, rather than looking for houses to actually buy. It was a good, long day.

I included photos from our Food Truck Date in this week's spread. I already had a few in our Austin Bucket List minibook but don't mind repeats.

Slowly but surely getting up to day. I have a big photo order ready to send to Walgreens. I've been printing my photos there ever since I fell behind. I don't love the super glossy-ness of the photos but the convenience factor trumps it.

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See all my Project Life posts here.

Simple Scrapper Layouts - April 2014

It's that time again to share my Simple Scrapper layouts for the month. The Story Starter theme for April is 'Right Now' which is right up my alley. I enjoyed all the prompts this month and would like to go back and create a few more layouts!

First up is my 'Day in the Life' layout. I documented this day, which was a randomly great day. One of those days where nothing happened but it was sunny and I was in a good mood.

I used a pretty simple grid template but purposely staggered some of the lines. I knew that the edges would never line up perfectly, so I will usually put things off center or staggered on purpose. That way, it doesn't look like a mistake. 

I snatched up a pack of screenprints from LifeLovePaper a few weeks ago. They've been hanging on my wall ever since and I decided to use the 'Adventure' print on this layout. I love the turquoise color and the bold type.

I typed up the journaling from this post real small and printed on a Dear Lizzy PL card. It was one of the 4x6" cards and I trimmed it down to a square-ish size. 

I worked in layers on this layout. I chose the main elements first; photo, background paper, screenprint. Then I just added in various paper scraps and simple embellishments until it felt finished.

Next up was this layout. Billy and I rarely take photos together these days. When his parents were in town this weekend, they took some good photos of us that I really liked.

I really wanted to use this yellow patterned paper by Crate Paper that I've been hoarding for a while. It's very bold, so I had to choose my photo and other products wisely. I converted my photo to black and white so the colors wouldn't clash.

I hardly even noticed the random blue letters scattered amongst the background paper at first. I decided to pair the blue polka dot paper with the yellow since the colors matched but the dot pattern was simple enough to blend in. After that, I chose various black, gray, navy and other neutral products to add.

I used a set of simple letter stickers by Fancy Pants and my ampersand stamp (with this navy ink) for the title. I wanted it to be a pretty simple yet bold title because of the background paper. 

The tag is also from the LifeLovePaper screen print pack. I really love this layout. I had to be very aware of my product choices so I spent a lot of time deciding what to use and where. 

I'm linking my post up at the Simple Scrapper Community Show & Tell today. Over there, you'll find a ton more inspiration!

The Premium Membership at Simple Scrapper provides skills and shortcuts to help you simplify and find more meaning in your memory keeping.

Paper Bakery Project!

Eek! I've seemed to have forgotten about my blog (again!). Sorry, friends. I have a project up on the Paper Bakery Kits blog today. You can check it out here. 

Documenting a Good Day.

TOMS (like the shoes) just launched a new line of coffee. Super cool!

Yesterday was a really good day. Nothing super special happened, I just had a good day and wanted to document it. Yesterday I...

• Woke up early (ish)
• Drank coffee with my husband
• (Re)designed one of my best friend's wedding invitations and finally finished them! Now we print/assemble.
• Rode my bike down to South Congress to check out the new TOMS Roasting shop. It's adorable and I want to live there. I sat out in the sun for about an hour and people watched.
• I saw a couple horse backriding down the street. As in, they were commuting on horseback. If you've never been, South Congress is a pretty busy street and seeing horses on it was very surreal. Texas never lets you forget you're in Texas.
• Bought some new workout clothes from the GAP for a steal. They were 50% off plus I had some rewards coupons. Now I can workout in purple pants!
• Talked to my mom multiple for a total of probably 2 hours.
• Got asked for a phone interview for a really cool, exciting job opportunity.
• Went to the Party Barn on my bike. It's a drive-thru liquor store shaped like a barn. Getting home was rough but so worth it for the experience.

Today, I'll clean my apartment and get ready for some visitors this weekend! Love showing people our new town.

Project Life 2014 | Week 6

Week 6! I spent most of my week in Chicago. It was cold and busy so I didn't have too many great photos. I struggled putting this week together. Not sure why, maybe the lack of photos, but it took me several attempts to finish this week up. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

This week, I'm using Design S (back side of week 5) and Design C.

Here is the left side. Since I spent so much time on this spread, I also spent a ton of time digging through my stash. I was probably hoping it would spark some inspiration but not so much. That being said, I found a bunch of cool stuff and tried to use it this week.

I've been wanting to go to this pizza place for several weeks now. We decided to try it out before I spent a week in Chicago. It was super good and now I want to go back. I love when restuarants have cool stickers or cards for me to take home. 

I took this photo of my closet while I was packing and used my Hot Mess stamp. Truth be told, my closet has been much messier before but didn't want to miss an opportunity to use my one of favorite stamps.

The orange/coral pattern on the right is from my Sugar Rush printable set. It says 'It's a Beautiful Life.' but I decided to cover that up in this case to create a custom journaling card. I like to get as much use out of things as possible. 

I always save my plane ticket stubs but don't always use them. In this case, I needed "stuff" so here it is. The 'Let's Fly Away' is from this Dear Lizzy roller phrase stamp and is pretty perfect here.

Here is the right side and more randomness. Design C is a really good one to use if you're running low on photos.

I never thought I'd miss public transportation so much! It was soooooooo (ooooooooo) cold when I was in Chicago so I tried to spend as little time outside as possible. 

I have, like, a million labels in a mini loaf tin on my desk. I used a bunch here to journal about my night out in a different format.

I was happy to be done with this spread and move on. The others since have come together much easier for me. 

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See all my Project Life posts here.

Paper Bakery Kits Layout

I've got a layout up on the Paper Bakery blog today. Check it out!

A Day at the LBJ Library

Billy's parents were visiting last week. We crammed (what felt like) two weeks worth of things to do into three days. We visited the LBJ Library on University of Texas' campus on Friday afternoon. It was really cool. I loved the building and loved seeing all the campaign posters and buttons from the 60's. For only $8 and free parking, it's definitely worth checking out.