More 5 Minute Cards

More 5 minute cards for my Grandma... We repeated the technique we used to make the girls night invitations and made a ladies note set. Super easy and fun. Here are a few of my favorites...

Cupcakes & Sweet Friends

I'm so stoked to share this find!!

A friend of mine posted a fabulous cupcake like this in one of my Yahoo Groups. It's a PINCUSHION.... perfect for my new (under construction) scrapping space! Linda Cummings makes these and sells them. I immediately emailed Linda and begged her to make me one and ziiiip it was on it's way to my house... wooo hoo! The cupcake is so darling and comes with a little plate. Linda included a cute little personalized card. I LOVE IT!

If you'd like to purchase a cupcake, feel free to email Linda. She doesn't have a blog or website, but if you shoot her an email she'll respond right away and take excellent care of you. They come in several 2 color combinations - pink/brown, pink/white, green/pink - depending on what colors you like. The cost is $15 and includes shipping and the plate.

Inky Smiles & Sweet Cupcakes!

Five Minute Cards

I am quickly becoming a fan of "semi homemade" cards!

My Grandma loves to send cards and so Mom and I made a zillion cards for my grandma when she was here and we needed some "quickies". I made these with DCWV's preprinted notecards... a quick stamp and a few embellishments later and we have fun five minute cards! When you're in a hurry for a hello or a thank you, this is the way to go.


Materials Used:
DCWV preprinted notecards
Stamps: For Every Occasion - CTMH
Inks: Versamark, Chocolate - CTMH
Fine Detail Embossing powder - CTMH
Threading Water border punch - Fiskars
Misc glue, ribbons, embellishments and additional papers

Bone Scan Update & Thoughts for Thursday

“There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.”

—George Burton Adams (1851-1925), educator, historian

I have received so many heartwarming emails and it would take ages to answer each and every one, so I am going to let everyone know...

THE BONE SCAN CAME BACK CLEAN!!!!

HALLELUJAH!!!

God is good and wonderful and the prayers and well wishes of others really helped me feel comforted and a heck of a lot less anxious when I went in for my scan. It is always scary when the word cancer is brought up by your doctor. The worst part was the mineral solution that they injected in the vein in my hand followed by a saline solution to push it through. Brent came with me and then we went and had lunch at the Olive Garden and waited for the solution to circulate. I swear I drank 5 full glasses of water over lunch and sloshed back to the hospital 2 hours later for the scan. I had a really hard time laying still for the 23 minutes of the first full body scan. (I'm such an antsy wiggle worm!) The scan was actually pretty neat to watch as the machine moved me out of the main scanner thingamajig. I've never seen my whole skeletal system and it was so neat. They did my lower back separately and then a scan of m y neck and head. (It was cool to see my neck scan because it turns out that a previous problem that I;d had with my neck has corrected itself!!!!) It was also neat to see that my brain is alive and kicking in it's cozy little home, too... LOL!

Anyway... we are still not sure what the problem is with the pain, but the dr now feels that it's something muscular and we'll try some manipulations and therapy to try to relieve the pain. I'd like to avoid pill therapy... .but something to ease the pain to allow sleeping would be mighty nice.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your well wishes, prayers, and positive thoughts. I firmly believe that God listens to our prayers and the prayers of others praying on our behalf.

With much love,

Inky Smiles!

Erin

“The crest and crowning of all good, Life's final star, is Brotherhood.”

—Edwin Markham (1852-1940); poet

Prayers, Please....

Hi Friends!

I'm going to be away a good chunk of this week, but I do have some art to share this week. It's back to crazy busy season at work, what with getting new contracts for snow and maintenance services at work for this snow season and next summer and end of the month billing prep. I get to work several days this week and then tomorrow I have a kinda scary appt at the UVRMC radiology clinic.

I have had a significant amount of pain in my lower back (sacrum/hips area) for the past year. It's finally come to a point where it's unbearable to lay flat and sit for long periods of time. Last week, my dr sent me for xrays and this morning he called with the results from the radiologist. I guess all of the films are fine except one that shows a white spot (lumency) on my sacrum. TOmorrow I go to work for the morning and then hit the medical center at noon (MST) for a dye injection and then back again at 2 for the scan. The dr SAYS it could be nothing, but if the radiologist is concerned, then we probably should rule out bone cancer and pray it's something like scar tissue from when I busted my tail bone and smacked my sacrum in college....

I wasn't freaking out until a few hours ago... now I'm just more anxious and nervous than anything. When I was 12 or 13 I had a CT scan and was pumped full of radioactive dye, so I've had something similar done before, but it's still scary... Any prayers, positive thoughts, etc, would be appreciated :)

Inky Smiles!

Thoughts for Thursday: Experience

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers.
But you learn, my God do you learn.”

—C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), author, scholar, theologian

Awesome quote! It's so true, some experiences drive us to our wit's end and sometimes we feel that we just can't take it anymore. I am sure that we've all had these kinds of experiences. For me, that brutal learning experience has been the years of infertility that we've gone through. As ugly as the experience has been, in reality, I have learned a lot and grown a lot. I have learned that I have the most wonderful and supportive husband and have been blessed with extra time with just me and him and time to really know each other and strengthen our relationship. I have learned that having children does not define who I am as a person, nor does it define my worth as a human being. I can fill my life with different meaningful experiences. I have learned that I can handle some pretty hard realities and can look forward in life with a positive attitude, etcetera, and so on and so forth...

Contrary to that ugly experience, today I had a most interesting, muggy, sticky, learning experience. The other morning at o'dark thirty, my sweet friend, Tammy Murri, dropped off a 5 gallon (yes, FIVE gallon) bucket chock full of grapes from her dad's garden. Yummy, delicious, white concord grapes...

FIVE GALLONS

oh.my.

So this morning, I straightened up my kitchen and went to town processing 5 gallons of grapes. LOL! I plucked them off the clusters, washed them and prepared them for their smoooshy journey into grape juice. There were some purple concords mixed in with the greens and a couple of them snuck into the green jars so I have a couple of pinkish beverages, LOL! Tis ok, when we're ready to drink the grape juice, we will strain out the grapes, chill the juice and enjoy!

About halfway through the bucket, I realized I should be taking photos of this adventure, so I washed the sticky off my hands and grabbed the camera.

So what does grape juice have to do with today's thought? Well, sometimes God plucks us out of our comfort zones, tosses us into sticky situations and heats us up, but in the end we learn and usually find something sweet waiting for us.

Feel free to leave a comment and share something you've learned from... who knows.. it might just touch someone's heart.

Marchin' In To 2009!

I spent yesterday working on some 6 x 6" calendar pages for a swap. I haven't swapped in ages and ages and Karyn talked me into this one with her Yahoo Group.... so I signed up for the March spot (since March is my bday month, tee hee).

Materials Used:
CTMH Cardstock (Pink Carnation or Bubble Gum, Blush, Garden Green, Desert Sand, White Daisy)
SU Designer Paper (not sure what the pack is, it's from last catalog)
CTMH Chocolate ink
CTMH Stamps - Sept SOTM "Treasure Life" & "Decorative Dainties"
Fiskars Threading Water Border Punch
American Crafts Foam Squares
Nestabilities Large Circle and Scalloped Circle
Stampendous Clear Detail Embossing Powder

I mapped out the card to see where I wanted everything to go and then I stamped the Decorative Dainties in Versamark, sprinkled with clear embossing powder and then heated it with a heat gun and added all the elements. The top 1/2" is left open for binding purposes. I believe that the swap hostess is going to bind the top edges with the cover pages for those who want this to be a flip style calendar. I think I am going to put mine in a mini album... not sure yet.



I really like how the embossed flowers look like a "grunge brush" that we use in digital stamping... kind of peeking out from behind everything. It adds a nice bit of bling without being overwhelming.

Inky Smiles!

PS - can anyone tell me where I can pick up BULK clear detail embossing powder? Those little jars I have from CTMH and Stampendous are getting used up very quickly!!! Please help me with my clear detail ep addiction! (pretty please.... with sugar on top)

Happy Birthday Liz Batty!

Today is my sweet friend, Liz Batty's, birthday!

Please rush over to her blog and leave her a note to wish her

a super marvelous, extra special, scrapalicious

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

Love ya Liz!!!!!

RePost: Mr. Mummy

After 20+ hours in the car (thanks be to the snow storm that bumped us off our regular and SHORTER planned route) I'm back from Iowa and slowly unpacking, doing laundry and recovering from a severe case of numb bum. We got in WAY late last night or early this morning... I guess it depends on your perspective. Either way, we left on Saturday at 5:30 am Iowa time and arrived EXHAUSTED on Sunday in Utah.

So while Brent is snoring and I unpack, do laundry, find a shower and some breakfast, here's a fun little guy to enjoy. I posted MrMummy last Halloween, so he's a refresher for my long time readers and a newbie for my new readers. I hope to have some time to work on a calendar page for a swap that I am in tonight or tomorrow morning and will share it with you when it's finished.

Studio Update: Fabric + Thread + Mom = Curtains

Greetings from Sunny Des Moines, Iowa! I'm here with Brent and Sadie visiting my family for the week. Brent was finally able to connect his laptop (with my pics on it) to Mom and Dad's internet connection so I can finally post! YAY!

Last week, Mom and I pulled out my Bernina and fabric and began making curtains for the studio. They turned out a little different than I had planned on, but I still like them a lot! I've got to find a different trim than the one I'd originally picked out and hand stitch it on sometime this next month.

Here's mom deciphering the destructions....


... which we blatantly disregarded and started laying out the pieces and cutting them out. The hardest part was deciding which pieces to put on which fabrics (I had bits and pieces that I'd picked up from various places).


Then Mom took a break to call home and tell Dad she loved him. :)


I stitched and stitched and stitched..... and stitched some more. Thank goodness fora GOOD machine that sews so smooothly! Ignore my scariness... keeping it real here. We woke up and just started creating.



2 DAYS later we had curtains.... The package stated it was a 2 hour project, but for some reason (perhaps the blatantly ignoring the destructions pages and using several fabrics instead of just two) the project stretched out over two days. These curtains are basically the same pattern that hangs in my front room (with only two fabrics).... somewhere during the stitching and stitching I remembered why the top seam of my front room curtains is not done.... AND why I swore 7 years ago that I would never make that pattern again.... When it's all stretched out, the stitched fabric measures over 10 feet long. Crazy!!


All in all it was loads of fun and I think they turned out great! They look even more vibrant and are much prettier in person. I can't wait to get the rest of the studio together.... it's finally feeling like we've made a lot of progress! YAY!

Inky Smiles,
mE

Thoughts for Thursday: Friendship

“Friends broaden our horizons. They serve as new models with whom we can identify. They allow us to be ourselves--and accept us that way. They enhance our self-esteem because they think we're okay, because we matter to them. And because they matter to us-for various reasons, at various levels of intensity-they enrich the quality of our emotional life.”

—Judith Viorst (b. 1931), novelist, U.S. newspaper columnist

“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery,
by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.”

—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Roman statesman, orator, philosopher

(I made these last week, but I could not share them yet because they had not gone out in the mail and I wanted them to be a surprise in people's mail boxes.)

I am having a party at my home in a few weeks with some family.... it's a Girls Night Out of sorts. I thought it would be fun to get together and just hang out and play some games and enjoy some yummy treats together. When I saw these cards on Jeanne's blog that she saw on this blog, I HAD to try them out! Talk about easy schmeasy!!! I went to bed after checking out her cards and literally dreamt about the colors and what I wanted to "tie on" the knots. I knew I had to get some invitations out to the girls a.s.a.p. and these would be perfect invites.

The technique is called Partial Embossing with a Cuttlebug folder. It's super easy to do:

1.) Click here to read the tutorial so I don't have to re type it in my own words and take and edit photographs when Adela has already done such a nice job for us :)

After picking Mom up at the airport we ran a few errands, mainly finding the right ribbon and flowers @ Robert's Crafts and then rushed home, gobbled down some dinner, showed Mom the progress on the house remodel and then scurried down to the studio to get workin on the invitations - assembly line style. We finished them up the next day and I addressed them and popped them in the mail. Sixteen elegant and simple invites were done in a flash!