A Copic Christmas

Good morning friends!

I have this friend who’s really super cool.  She teaches fabulous classes and has a spot on our local tv channel.  I try to make it to her classes whenever I can, it’s a fun night of crafting with the girls.   My friend is Sue Neal of My Eye Q.  One of the coolest things about Sue’s classes is that if you can’t make it to her local classes she will mail your kit to you!  Each kit comes with excellent instructions and her follow up emails contain extra goodies for creating more projects.

Here’s a pic of last week’s class.  SoooOoo much fun, and darling gift bags/boxes.

When my mom was here last month we took Sue’s Copic Marker class and created some fabulous Christmas cards.  We learned shading and basic coloring.  I’m hooked on Copic coloring – guess I better start saving for a bigger set of Copic Markers!  I think I even got Mom hooked on coloring.  She ordered a set of markers, too. 

Here are the cards we made in class.  We used Penny Black stamps, stamped with Memento Tuxedo Black ink.  (It’s the best ink for coloring with Copics.)

  

This card is my absolute favorite.  I bought the stamp to make more cards for next year, or maybe this year if I get around to it! I love religious themed cards.  Afterall, it IS the reason for the season.

Hope you’re getting all caught up with your Christmas preparations!  Get our your markers and make some cards!

Inky Smiles!

 

PS.. I also figured out a new photo lighting prop, thanks to Michelle Johns.  I love it! I love how the photos turn out with the reflection and muted background. 

Rather than try to tell you how, here is the link to the instructions:

Homemade Photo Lighting Prop

Adventures In Gingerbread Land

Wow, so for the last three weeks I have been off the radar again.  (We had my parents here for two full weeks over Thanksgiving and I was pretty much banned from the computer except for business schtuff.)

So anyway, at the beginning of Nov we had our date night group get together.  Each time we get together we choose some sort of theme for the activity.  This month Angie & Aaron were in charge and they chose “Traditions”.  Angie’s family had a tradition of building gingerbread houses every year so that’s what we did!

Angie and Aaron built the houses for each couple out of real gingerbread with candy stained glass windows, a front yard tree, and a light attached to the base.  They did an awesome job! 

We had a very quick and casual soup and scone dinner before decorating our houses. We wanted to get on to decorating Here’s a shot of our little group. (L-R: Aaron, Brent, Angie, Kaisa, Kelly, Jeremy & Kristin)

 

This photo shows all the sides of the houses.

I brought my Kitchen Aid mixer up, which is a good thing because Angie’s mixer died right before we all arrived.  We made TONS & TONS of royal icing and marshmallow icing.

And had TONS & TONS of candy on hand.

Once all the icings were made we went to town decorating.

   

 

Everyone’s houses turned out just amazing and fun! 

 

 

Here are some close ups of our little house…

 

I piped our initials on the heart window…. I couldn’t resist!

  

Our cute little house made it safely all the way home from Salt Lake City… It even looked so cute in our front room…. until we went shopping with Mom and Dad and left Sadie home alone with it.

I think we walked in on Sadie when she was at this point:
 

Yes, that would be the roof.  She was moving on to her second course following the devouring of the front yard and tree.  The little twerp even gobbled up a window box. She ate the entire tree, too.  I guess hot glue does pass, too.

  

We’ll build again next year.  But next time we’ll put the house up higher and out of Sadie’s reach.  So, if you build a gingy house this year, have fun with it and put high out of reach of little paws… both the furry and non furry kinds.

Inky Smiles!

An Inky BLACK FRIDAY Sale!

It's that time again!  This year I'm partnering with Linda at Craftaholics Anonymous for a Handmade Black Friday. 

All of our handmade InkStaks & RibbonStaks are on sale!

AND I've added a grundle of miscellaneous goodies to the Special Deals & Buys section to help you with your handmade adventures!

OoOoOh, AND the Original Scrapbox Big Boxes (WorkBox, CraftBox, MiniBox, SewingBox) are on sale, toO, SAVE $100.00 now with FREE SHIPPING in the continental US!!  Store your supplies for handmade goodies!

...ANNNNND...

We are debuting a NEW HANDMADE INKY PRODUCT!!  You can get yours FREE with any order over $50.00 during this sale...

Click on over to Stamper Storage and check out the sales!

Happy Shopping!

Pinterest.. Do you?

So for the past several months I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to a fabulous little website called Pinterest.

Do you   ?

If you do, you know the amount of time that gets lost while surfing the fabulous eye candy of recipes, jewelry, craft projects, style ideas…. if you don’t  well, you’re in for a major treat!  Just a click away, Pinterest can transport you to the wilds of imagination and help you crawl out of your creative funk/slump.

The first couple of months I was “on Pinterest”, affectionately referred to as PinHole by my sweet husband because of the black hole effect it has of sucking you in, I lost hours and hours of time… I had to find a solution.  I loved the ideas that I was gathering, AND, using… (Yes, Brent has loved the new recipes we’ve been trying out… it means he actually gets to eat, haha!")… but I have needed to set some limits on myself so that the rest of the house doesn’t appear to have been sucked into a black hole as well.

So I started setting a timer – and I tell everyone I can who “does Pinterest” to set a timer.  It is your pathway to FREEDOM.

30 mins per day , but not every day for Pinterest. 

It has been working great!  I have regained MY TIME but still gathering ideas… and since I’ve limited my time spent browsing, I actually have time to DO/MAKE/CREATE the ideas I’ve gathered.

My timer was a plain ol’ WalMart $3 something timer and I decided it needed a little bling….  I mean , since I was timing creative central, why shouldn’t my timer be pretty, too?

So I pulled out some bling gems & E6000 glue and went to town.
  

Lots of fun and loads of color!  Happy Pinteresting!

PS… Christmas Festivities have begun at the Grotegut house… tune in later this week for a fun post of this weekend’s festivities. See what these turned into on Saturday night!

Witches Night Out – Happy Halloween!

 

 

Happy Halloween friends!

Hope this post finds you getting ready to go out a-spookin’ tonight with your kids or friends! Tonight Brent and I will be chillin at home with some movies, caramel apples and cider and answering the door for trick or treaters… when we run out of candy we will hide out in the basement. :)

A couple of weeks ago I went out “witching” with some girlfriends in Salt Lake City.  There’s a shopping center called Gardner’s Village that holds an annual “Witch Fest” &“Witches Night Out” for the public.  I’ve always wanted to go, so I was thrilled when Angie invited me to go with her.  Angie had the day prior to WF off work so she came over to do some crafting… we ended up spending most of the day shopping for and working on our costume stuff.

{Note – all pics taken with my cell phone, sorry for the poor quality of photos.}

Snacks, glitter, tulle, glue, all kinds of fun goodies for crafting! Even my lovely Sadie got in on the action… She made herself right at home amongst my huge pile of hot pink tulle!

 

Sadie just LOVES her Auntie Angie and wouldn’t leave her alone… I think it had something to do with the purple tulle bow that Angie tied around Sadie’s neck…

  
Angie made a “grown up” purple and black tutu to wear over a fabulous thrift skirt she found and made into a ragged edge skirt and I worked on my hat and a pile of flowers for it and the tulle ruffle for my skirt.

Tulle ruffle in progress.  I gathered the tulle in sections by hand, then  stitched it to some pink satin and then stitched it to the bottom of an existing skirt using long basting stitches so I could remove it for later. I love how the pink just puffs out from under my skirt :)

To make my flower piles I cut strips of pink satin and hot glued it while rolling and scrunching to create flowers.  I made tulle flowers by gathering small strips and then using my heat gun to melt-scrunch the petals.   I used the heat gun on the satin, too, and it helped create some more scrunching.  Loooove how they turned out.  I stitched the flowers individually to the hat.  I added little dots of stickles glue to the main big flower for some more sparkle.

I WAS going to wear these FABULUSH false lashes, but I got them on and it was like I was a horse wearing blinders… I could not see ANYTHING periferally and since I was going to be driving and trying to walk around in a big crowd that was not a good idea so I opted for a shorter, more reasonable, yet still lucious pair from my stash.

I needed a fru fru top to go with the costume, so I bought a roll of “boa” and stitched it to the neckline of one of my existing shirts.  I love how it turned out! 

I think we turned to be quite the cute witchy pair!

Here are a couple of snapshots of some crazy witches on the train with us. I don’t think you can see how FABULOUS some of the hats are. It was hard to be “inconspicuous” while snapping pics on the train…  I think the lady in the cream sweater/scarf knew I was taking her pic. LOL!

       

It was a giant costume party… seas of hats everywhere… there were even some Pilgrims that showed up!

We had so much fun!  Next year we are going to have a hat party prior to the event so we can work on making some FABULOUS hats!  We were UNDERDRESSED and UNDERHATTED compared to some of the guests! 

                 

        

Here’s the group of us waiting at the Trax station,  We decided to take the train to avoid the crazy parking lot situation.  Witches Night Out is a HUGE event.

 

Hope you have a FABULOUS Halloween celebration tonight!  Be safe and stay warm!

Inky Smiles!