Today I was more left-brained than right. I didn’t do much creative work, other than try to find a home for a very interesting man I interviewed. Anyway, I received some beautiful decorative chopsticks and I have been wanting to create an Asian themed scrapbook. I spent the ride into work looking for an interesting binding (no, I don’t drive and read, hubby chaffeured me) in some of my older altered book magazines. I didn’t find my chopstick album, but I ran across a technique using the insides of security envelopes. I love using recycled things in my scrapbooks.

A few months ago I collected HUGE amounts of security envelopes. I especially love the ones that come from my paycheck at Royal, they have a little crown & anchor (super cute!). So I created this Scrapblog of the little project I did with my security envelopes. Hope you enjoy. As always, click on the photo to see the whole Scrapblog.

This past week, it seemed I was too busy to blog! Too busy to blog, but NOT too busy to craft or create things. September is always busy around here because so many people at work have September birthdays. Since I spend so much money and time crafting, there is no way I could ever bring myself to buy a Hallmark card. Last Sunday was my Stampin’ Up meeting. To prepare, I worked on these chipboard pieces. I knew I wanted to use this color palette because I bought the “In-Colors” from Stampin’ Up. The first color I got was the soft sky. I thought it was perfect to use with the Outlaw papers. I made 6 or 7 cute cards that I will hopefully post this week.

Here is the first card I made. Of course I added my signature envelope. Unfortuntately, I spelled poor Brigette’s name wrong!

The other projects I worked on this week were two frames for some friends at the office. I found these acrylic frames in the clearance bin at Michaels for fifty-cents! They looked pretty shabby before I covered them with these beautiful papers. I wasn’t sure if the magnets would hold through the paper, but they were very strong, so it was fine. I Love, Love, Love these papers from Stampin’ Up. They had the patterns in Chocolate too, but now it’s discontinued! Bummer! I made a card with the Chocolate paper, it’s in a previous post.

The last project I did this week was a card for my buddy Rodney. Last year he turned 40 while we were on a business trip to Springfield, Oregon. That was a crazy night! Poor thing had to sleep at a sleezy hotel because they lost his reservation. A night to remember. So this year, I wanted to make him something nice. The Old Olive color from Stampin’ Up went perfectly with the pattern paper from DCWV’s Far East Collection. I should have taken a photo of the envelope too, it was very cool!

Hopefully this will be another creative and productive week!

Today was a very crafty day. We started out by heading to Viscaya to shoot some pictures. My goodness it’s hard to imagine that it’s September. It’s still really hot in Miami, we could only stay out in the sun for a few hours. I was shooting with the Holga and Chris was using the Nikon. I can’t wait to see how they turn out.

Spent the rest of the day preparing for my Stamping Up group meeting. I have been totally obsessed with chipboard, so I worked on a few things to create. I’ll post the photos tomorrow.

I used to bead all the time. I had forgotten how relaxing it can be. My sister has recently beading like crazy, so when my buddy at work wanted to go to the bead shop I happily tagged along. Here’s what I created.

When I think of artists, I don’t immediately think of my work. But I do think of other scrapbook and paper artists that I have seen on the web and in the scrapbook and stamping world. I think everyone has a creative side. My husband, for example, went to school to be a chemist and now works as a internet developer and analyst. He spends his day in a very left brained, technical and analytical role. On the weekends, however, we shoot photographs and draw and think of creative ways to spend our time together. I love the duality of his personality. We are both Geminis, so maybe that’s part of it. For me, creativity is all that I live for. I want to be the best and stretch my creativity beyond what I did last year, last week or yesterday. I find the internet an amazing place to expand my creative horizons. Showing off my work is as important to me as creating it. Using Scrapblog for me is perfect. I know I will never be a famous artist with my work hanging in a museum, but I certainly love creating it. There is another page to this scrapblog, so please click the picture to see the other slide.

I bought these Basic Grey papers on sale at my lss. I was in love with the graphic design aspect of these papers. They reminded me of my high school days for some reason. I thought they were the perfect papers to use with my altered flowers. I inked the flowers and then stamped them with versamark so that I could add the gold pearl ex powder.

At Lucky Strike, I found several business cards with various graphic designs. They were the perfect design elements to add to the Scrapblog. To see all the pages, click on the pictures.

The Refresh Miami guys seemed to have a great time. Not only did we have an awesome night of bowling, it was a great opportunity for me to practice my photography skills. I think several of the images were over exposed. It’s difficult to manage low light situations with a digital point and shoot, because the camera automatically corrects itself. I had to correct several photos in iphoto.

Last month at my Stampin’ Up club meeting, one of the girls had purchased the Pretties set of flowers and she handed it to me. She said “Rebecca you can do something cool with these.” I was wondering why she spent $39.95 on something that she wasn’t sure about. The white flowers floated in and out of my brain over the next week or so until I ran across an interesting post on Scraplovers forums titled “8 ways to Alter Your Scrapbooking Flowers” posted by Lesley. Lesley is obviously very creative and went a little crazy creating some way cool altered flowers. Ok, so now altered flowers will not leave my brain! So instead of investing immediately in the Stamping Up Pretties, I headed to my LSS and bought the Heidi Swapp white flowers for $3. Below are the results. If you want to see the entire Scrapblog, click the pictures. I also posted some of the layouts and crafts I created with the finished flowers.

In the second photo, I started out by pressing the flowers onto ink pads to color them. Be sure to start with the lightest color first and leave some white to fill in with the darker colors. This gives the flowers a “tie-die” effect. I dried them with the embossing heat gun and used Stickles glitter glue to add sparkle. I really feel everything looks better with a little glitter! The peach colored flower looks perfect with the Outlaw paper from Stamping Up and I am working on the pages now. Hopefully I will post them this week.

In the third photo, the top left flowers were made using the marble technique and adding some glitter. The bottom flowers were first stamped with Versamark, then embossed with clear embossing powder, then inked on top. The embossed images pop out if you wipe off the excess ink. The teal colored flower was colored first and then embossed with gold embossing powder.

In the last photo, these flowers are my favorite! I think creating these brought out the biker chick in me, I don’t know. Anyway, these ROCKIN flowers were made by first inking the flowers with black ink and drying them. I then stamped hearts and star images with versamark on the dry flowers. Finally, I used gold and red pearl ex powders over the stamped images. These flowers caused me to go buy the new DCWV Rock Queen papers and chipboard pieces. I can’t wait to create some ROCK Queen cards with these flowers.

I hope you enjoyed these techniques and create some altered flowers of your own. Please send photos of your creations to Rebecca at Scraplog dot com. I am without a doubt getting the Stampin Up Pretties set now. My mind is racing just thinking about it!

I thought a lot about my home photo studio before I put it together. I needed several things:
1. Easy to tear down and assemble
2. Inexpensive
3. Hold 12×12 layouts
4. Add any color backdrop I desired

I’ve seen some really great home studios on the web, but most were WAY too expensive for my budget. So what I have is $6 lamps from Home depot, $10 mic stands from Radio Shack and a $4 Rubbermaid tub from Target. This set up gives me the best lighting and backdrop options to photograph my projects and layouts. I tried scanning and stiching the pages together, but it took so long for each page. I don’t have that kind of time, unfortunately

If you click the pics, you can see the entire Scrapblog about my studio. If you have any home studio ideas, I would love to see them!