The photo says it all :)

Credits: Yummers by Lauren Reid

Squeee!

Here's dress 2! The chiffon has sparkles in it, which you can't really see in the photo but my princess loves!

I did it!

First, I should tell you that I am NOT a seamstress. I can do straight stitches, pretty much - I'm good for hemming, mending and my short foray into quilting, when I did machine piecing. But I was reading one of my favorite blogs - Make It and Love It - and came across this tutorial for repurposing a t shirt into a dress. HAD to try it - Alexa has a bunch of these in her closet and I wanted to see if I could make one for cheapy cheapy.

It WAS cheapy cheapy! I found junior fit t shirts at AC Moore 2/$7 - these are terrific and the small fits my size 6x daughter. Alexa picked out the fabric, which was on clearance at Joann's for $4 a yard - I needed 3/4 of a yard - so the dress cost me a grand total of $6.50.

Because of the length of the shirt, I didn't need the fabric tube described in the tutorial - I just sewed the ruffles right onto the shirt. This means of course that the ruffles show over the top, rather than being under the shirt. I think the finished product is cute either way!

It's not 100% perfect - the ruffles on the top layer are a little uneven and the stitching isn't perfectly straight - but all in all, I think it turned out great. The layers are nice and even, even though you can't see it super well in the photo. Go me!!! :)

It's beginning to look a lot like

winter! I have tons and tons of Christmas decorations, but I never know what to do with my house after the Christmas decorations have been put away and there are still a few months until spring and spring decorating. I decided to make a winter themed banner to hang above my fireplace. To create it, I used the easy-peasy template from Build a Banner: Rectangle by iKari Designs and gorgeous new papers (releasing at jessicasprague.com on Monday) by Splendid Fiins - Winter Wonderland Patterned Paper Pack. I added some transparent embossing powder over the letters, some stickles over the circle of dots, and some glittery dimensional snowflake stickers by Jolees. I wish you could see how glittery and sparkly the banner is in real life! Hopefully the closeup gives you at least a little idea. Enjoy!

Can you hear me screaming?

First things first :) - it's new release day at The Digichick!! Since I've been out of scrapping commission for a while, it feels REALLY good to have a bunch of stuff for you to look at!

And the big news - BasicGrey digital products are now available at The Digichick!!!!! If you were at any point a paper scrapper, you know what huge news that is, and I am so thrilled to be able to work with their gorgeous digital yumminess.

So here's what I've been up to - credits under each!
Credits: Le Chayim by ViVa Artistry, Sweet Starts Vol 11 by Nikki Epperson

Credits: A Happy Place by A Joyful Heart and Designs by Jen Yurko

Credits: Urban Coutre by BasicGrey

Credits: Lollipop Shoppe by Basic Grey

We're back from Florida and some good stuff!

Well, it's been an eventful couple weeks! Have I mentioned that the cat pulled a full glass of water over on my laptop and drying it out for two weeks did not work? Limping along with Gimp has been awful (especially on my tiny little netbook screen) and I'm still mostly laptopless. A new one is coming with a very long delivery wait (thank you, Dell), so I loaded PSE on Adam's computer yesterday and I'll be scrapping some over the next couple weeks, when I can squeeze time in between his poker tournaments! And I learned something really cool - did you know you can buy a "hard drive enclosure" for your internal hard drive, effectively making it an external drive? I can't tell you how comforting it is to have my hard drive accessible - even though I back up my files obsessively (I've posted about that a lot), I still have favorites and application preferences and all my PSE presets that are in application data folders that AREN'T backed up. But now I still have them!

In other news, we were in Florida last week visiting The Mouse, Adam's family (mom, grandma, aunt & uncle) and my parents. It was a really fun and relaxing week - except for the frantic call we received from the petsitter on Monday saying Archie would not or could not get up. He's 11 1/2, which is old for a German shepherd, so I had some not so nice thoughts about what that might mean. Thoughts I definitely DID NOT want to be facing while on vacation 1000 miles from home. Adam flew home Tuesday morning and thankfully my old guy (Archie, not Adam) has Lyme disease, which is treatable. He's much better but still wobbly. And Adam got a nice vacation away from the kids while I stayed with them at my mom and dad's. He ended up flying back down on Saturday, just in time for me to pick him up at the airport and continue the long drive home to Pennsylvania.

OOOOkkkay then. So that's the personal news. On the creative team front, I haven't been doing much (you know, no scrapping computer), but I definitely wanted to make sure you're aware of the upcoming FREE class at Jessica Sprague:

And, I was actually able to get another hybrid project done! I hate that I can't effectively edit images and the quality of the photo is so poor, but there you have it. This little bag was so much fun to make and would be perfect for little Christmas gifts. I used Perfect Packaging: Boxy Bag Curved by iKari Designs and the soon-to-be-released Dashes Through the Snow paper and elements packs by Echo Park.

And yes, Christmas is coming!!!

Grateful

Credits: Season of Thankfulness by The Digichick Designers

A great gift for book lovers!

I have a lot of book lovers in my life, so when I saw these brand new create-your-own bookplates by LivE (releasing at jessicasprague.com on Monday 11/8) I shouted out loud! What a super easy peasy gift idea! I coupled the bookplates with Perfect Packaging: Stationary Box Template by iKari Designs and Coquette: Damsel papers by Carina Gardner and made a super cute gift set. *NOTE: You will need to resize the box template to make it the appropriate size for your bookplates! :)

Hope this gives you some inspiration!

(Sorry about the photo quality. My cat pulled a glass of water over onto my scrapping laptop and I'm limping along on my netbook using Gimp rather than PSE.)