Video Tutorial - Nickel and Dime Style Bling Rings

Hey guys!

It’s been a LOOONG crazy summer!  I know I’ve been MIA entirely too long.  We have had so much going on around here and quite frankly, I decided to cut a few things out of my life for a little while and not stress about them.  It’s been a nice vacation from the blog, but I think I am ready to get back into some crafty action again!

We’re still in the process of remodeling our kitchen. We took a break from the finishing touches while we had family in and out for weeks and weeks and did some traveling for Brent’s job. And then I got sick the last big of Sept on our way home from a trip (some respiratory flu) and was sick until just last week when I finally went to the ol; doctor and became a walking pharmacy. haha.. feeling much better now, though.

Oh, and it’s been “that time of year” again…. CANNING SEASON… We did BUSHELS and BUSHELS of grapes and tomatoes, peaches, and 40 lbs of chicken again….  It’s been fun :)

And I made a working website for my Creative University Charm Swap Ladies … I’m hosting again this year and it is going to be FABULOUS!  There are still a few seats left for Creative University… hop on over and check it out!

So anyway…

One of the exciting things I am up to is teaching at the Junior High here in town.  I am now the 4H Afterschool Club Bling leader.  I’m teaching crafts and jewelry to a gaggle of 12-15 year old girls.  It’s LOADS of fun and loads of work.  The opportunity was something I sort of fell into, or rather it fell into my lap, unexpectedly.  A friend recommended me to the coordinator and a couple of emails later I was knee deep in the planning. I’m quite enjoying it, actually!

Today we made “Bling Rings” out of Nickels and Dimes, scrap paper, bling, and Glossy Accents.  ‘Cuz a girl just can’t get enough bling, right?

I threw this little quickie tutorial together tonight to show you how easy they are to make. 

 

 

Here are some photos from today’s 4H Club Bling adventure!

 

  

 

My Poor Neglected Little Blog & A Creative Escape

Hello friends!

I bet you thought you’d never hear from me again.  But alas, I’ve wandered back into Blog Land again. I haven’t really been very far away, though. I walk past this computer day in and day out, but I just haven’t sat down to write anything in aaaages.   I don’t even know where to start again. SOOOO much has been going on here at our house since I last left you with the pics of the start of the kitchen remodel. We’ve been remodeling, had family, went to  a fun card making class with Sue Neal, had more family (2 weeks worth), had friends come visit, did more projects, built a gazillion InkStaks, discovered a rather scary health issue, and I even had a mini retreat with some friends at my home at the first of August, with the help of my sweetie pie husband AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND we’re almost done with the kitchen. LOL! No time for blogging, but I have been alive on Facebook (cuz I can do it from my phone on the go).

 

A Creative Escape

I think  since it’s the freshest in my mind I will share with you some snapshots of our little mini retreat I did at my home with a few friends at the first of this month.  Many of us met at Creative University and a couple are local friends here in town.  We have been talking about getting together here in Utah for a fun little retreat getaway for some time now.  This summer went completely crazy on me and we decided not to a full blown “go away to a hotel for a few nights” craft retreat and instead I moved some furniture around at my house, set up some spare beds and we did an overnight retreat at my place.  We had so much fun!  A few of us put together some projects to teach the group and we also worked on some personal projects.  We even had delicious meals prepared especially for us by our personal chef, Chef Brent! He sure spoiled us!

Here’s the gang… well, most of us… Amanda and Jen had some crazy things going on that weekend so they were in and out.  Amanda missed our group shot.

Never fear,  the magic of Photoshop Elements can sneak her back in.  HA.. I’m a lousy extractor/editor, but this works….

That’s all of us.  Left to Right: Kim Garrett, Lisa Tafoya (pink shirt), Tahne Timmons (batik shirt), Jenalee Graves, Bobie Glassett, Amanda Bartholomew, and mE.

When I say we crammed in my front room, I mean we crammed…

Next time I will take the couch out and stash it somewhere.. {HAHA.. good luck with that, Erin.. it might have to go on the porch!}

 

Friday night dinner and treats were “FFY” – Fend For Yourself… we went to dinner at Mi Rancherito here in town and enjoyed some lovely Mexican treats.  We came home and had fun playing and creating for the evening.  I taught the group how to make altered domino pendants.  They all turned out just gorgeous!  Here are our pendants (and my art charms) on a tray just after being resin’d.  The no name pendants are some extras I made while playing around and practicing this technique the day before.  I like the technique so much that I just kept playing.  It’s addictive!

                         

       

Here’s my finished charm that I glued a bail onto and strung on a chain.

Once we all had our pendants covered in resin and placed out in the warm garage to cure we crafted some more and giggled and giggled until the wee hours of the morning.  The night is a blur to me. LOL!

Saturday morning-ish we slowly hauled our tired bootays out of bed and enjoyed a delightful breakfast that Brent prepared for us… on of my favorites, Overnight French Toast with an orange maple syrup, fruit, breakfast sausages, yogurt, and juice. YUM!

 

Saturday was filled with lots of crafting and more yummy food prepared by Chef Brent.   Tahne taught us how to make an “inverted round chain maille” bracelet that surrounded a string of Swarovski crystals.  I chose a really pretty green crystal called Erinite.  For real. Not kidding. I love it.

Tahne created little kits for us in these darling little personalized tins!

For the most part, this bracelet wasn’t that hard to do.  The part that was most troublesome was getting the first set of rings started properly.

Somewhere in here we took a break and enjoyed a yummy lunch – my famous chicken salad sandwiches. I made salsa the night before and it was almost perfect the next day.  I think it could have used the other half of the jalapeno…

 

Sleep deprived chicas making funny faces at the photographer…

 

Bobie taught us a really darling post it note holder that you can make with a couple of scraps of paper, some ribbon, and a daaarling little teeny tiny pen from Staples.  Complete directions can be found in August 2010 on her blog-www.scrappyandcrafty.blogspot.com 

 

 

Amanda put together kits for a 2 page layout for us using CTMH’s retired Cocoa Cafe paper and loads of buttons and chipboard goodies.  Here’s her layout.  I haven’t finished mine, still need to stitch around the edges and add photos, but I will share it soon.

Saturday night we enjoyed a delightful dinner that Chef Brent cooked for us in the dutch ovens outside.  He’s a seriously good chef and makes the best Italian food, too!   He made homemade garlic bread, a big green salad, and dutch oven Chicken Parmesan.   For dessert I made an ooey gooey yummilicious apple crisp.  I totally spaced vanilla ice cream so we just drizzled some fresh cream over it.  YUM!

 

 

We also did a charm swap with an Oldies Rock N Roll theme.  Kim turned her charms into a jumble/junklace necklace charm and I loved her idea so I blatantly copied her.  Here’s my jumble:

Lots of loveliness and sparkles! I love it!  I didn’t take pics of all the charms, but you can see most of them in these pics. Guitar pics, records, music notes, Elvis, guitars, all sorts of beads n baubles.  I made a couple of extras out of shrinky dink material – a jukebox and a diner girl. My art charms were scrabble tiles with an image of Elvis crooning into the microphone to which I attached a fun guitar charm and a bead charm.  Each girl got one with her first initial on the back.

I hope you enjoyed a peek at a recent fun weekend here at my place.  We had so much fun and I can not wait until we get together next time!

Thanks for sticking with me – I’m sorry I haven’t been around as much this past month.  We’re working on finishing up house projects and I will try (but not promise) to be more active on my blog. 

Inky Smiles!

The Stamper Storage Becky Higgins Giveaway Sneak Peek!

Here’s our prize package.  It is going live on Becky Higgins’ blog tomorrow and you gotta make sure you hop on over and enter to win!  Click on the photo to automatically go to Becky’s blog.  Becky will not be sending emails to let you know you’ve won.  You will need to check her blog when she announces all the winners on Monday 7/11.

Good luck & Inky Smiles!

Not Quite Dead Yet… and Something AWESOME!

Hey friends!!   Just popping in to let you know we’re “not quite dead yet”… The kitchen is coming along NICELY and we’re nearly done.  The cabinets are up (but need to change the door color) and loaded up, the floor is in and we’re waiting for the coutertop guys to cut and install the granite.  Hopefully that happens next week! YAY!  I am so stoked to get this kitchen done.  It’s so much bigger than it was and it’s still surreal that we finally tackled this project.   I have some lighting to switch out and last night Brent changed his mind on the paint color and thinks the red is too dark with the cabinets, so guess what we’ll be doing this weekend? Haha!

I will be updating the blog with some photos of the progress in the next couple of days when I finally have some down time.  (We have had company come throughout this mess and more coming tonight.)  I haven’t spend much time on my computer in the studio in weeks.  I’ve been facebooking from my new phone because it’s fast and easy and I can do it from wherever I am.

I do have some AWESOME news to share with you all!  This week we are participating in Becky Higgins’ BIG WEEK OF GIVEAWAYS… Check it out:Our give away day is Wednesday, July 6th!  Make sure you stop by her blog @ www.BeckyHiggins.com to see all the giveaways!  I will post our giveaway late Tuesday night here on the blog and then it will be live on Wednesday on Becky’s blog.  There are 10 sponsors per day… make sure you leave a comment with:

1) Your name (first & last)
2) Where you live
3) The Item You want (with it’s item #)

Becky said she doesn’t want any extra fluff in your comments… just provide these three items of info or they will skip over your comment (too much to read). You can read more about this and watch her little video HERE.

PLUS!!!  We’re having a sale at Stamper Storage 
to celebrate this fun week of giveaways!

Hop on over to our store to see the sales!

 

Hope to see you playing along next week!

Inky Smiles!

A Birthday Bunch!

{This was supposed to post on Monday but I had some troubles with Blogger and uploading from WLW. }

We’re still in full construction mode here at our house.. all of the destruction is done (minus the removal of some old floor tiles) but for the most part we’re gearing up for the “put-it-back-together” phase.  The kitchen is mostly gutted (pics to come soon) and we have an inspection tomorrow PASSED our inspection YESTERDAY for our 4 way (electrical, plumbing, framing, etc) and then we can move forward… YAY!

I did take a break to create some birthday cards.  There were six, but one met an untimely death by gruesome mangling when I was moving things around down here in the studio so Brent could move the gas line (in the ceiling)… card #6 is now resting piecefully (misspelling intended) in the city landfill.  It was a third “banner” card and was so cute.  I will have to make another soon.

These cards were super duper easy to make.  I employed Mr Cuttlebug and raided the scrap bags for some coordinating colored cardstocks. The stamps are from PTI and are waaaaaay old.  I love this set because it’s got so many sentiments and small images.  There’s a lot of glittery bits (around the stars, on the cupcakes and banner pieces, etc – they look grayish) on these cards that was difficult to photograph, but you can see them a bit in some of the single pics.  I popped up the banner pieces with foam tape. I love the 3D effect!

 

Thanks for popping by!  Hope you are having a fantastic week!

Inky Smiles!

Kitchen Remodel Part I

We’ve been in our house now for over 10 years and we’ve made maaaaany changes to it.  We’ve finished the basement from the concrete up ourselves (only hired out the carpet), ripped out carpet and linoleum and replaced them with wood floors and tile, ripped out our master bathroom and completely remodeled it and have painted gallons upon gallons of paint and added trim and other fun detail pieces to our home.

We’ve been gearing up for the biggest change ever in the history of “Brent & Erin Remodel Something” for the last little bit and have already been busing going gung-ho on Project Kitchen.

My kitchen is not too teeny, but it’s only got one small section of countertop (we refer to it as “spot 'o’ counter top) space and the layout is kinda wonky for what we need in a kitchen. We’re pushing the kitchen wall 3 feet out into the garage (into “extra” space) and doing some reconfiguring and purchasing new custom built cabinets for our kitchen.  The dream prior to this was to add a whole new kitchen on to the garage but that is way bigger and more costly of a project than what we were willing to do.

Here’s a “before” of our kitchen when we very first moved in. 

   

It was nice, but VERY anemic…. So then 5 years later we decided paint would be a good thing… ok, well *I* finally figured out what I wanted to paint.. haha… Brent chose the colors.

 

We also added some trim (4” crown moulding and a plant shelf) to the top of the 8’ wall that divides the kitchen and front room.  The trim really popped and made the walls look awesome and gave the house  a more finished feel.

A few years later we had the “Giant Poo Flood” (aka sewer back up in the basement) and so we went to work on redoing floors in the house… you know, “while we were at it”.. .haha!

We replaced the old, icky, holey linoleum in the kitchen and dining room with 18” tiles.  Minus the old ratty oval rug this is how my kitchen has been for the past 2.5-3 years.

And then a little over a month ago we discovered a leak in the water line to the fridge/ice maker…. it slowly dripped and flowed under the tiles in the kitchen and we had to remove about 18 tiles (we removed them until we found dry concrete backerboard) from the floor.  We cut out all the concrete backer board and let the floor sit open for several weeks to dry and while we thought about what to do…

 

Then we had this bright idea to do some reconfiguring… move the fridge to where the current pantry is and some other “tweaking”… And this is where I’ve been all week and what we’ve been doing around here. 

Here are some snapshots of the work in progress. You can click the image to view larger.

We’ve made some crazy huge progress since this last photo of Brent putting up the new kitchen/garage wall.  I will be back soon with more progress reports.  I’ve gotta go help Brent move the water line.

Constructiony Smiles!