Christmas in June

I'm finishing up this weekend's Smash*Holics Challenges today.  The last challenge for the weekend was "Christmas".  I'd recently found some old pictures of myself as a toddler and one just happened to have a Christmas tree in the photo.  I look to be around 18 months old or so.  I had pictures of my grandson, Sy, and my daughter, Caitlin, at the holidays, so I gathered them all up and smashed them in my book.  Tom put in a call to his folks and asked for a holiday picture for me to use in the book.  And, when Christmas 2012 rolls around, I'll snag a picture of my granddaughter, Charleen and put her sweet little picture on this page.

It was a pretty simple page to do....  everything was made on my Cricut machine.  (Yes, I'm pro-Cricut because it's what I happily have to work with at the moment.)   I love how the Santa face came out as paper piecing.  The ornaments were from a holiday cartridge.    The photos are inside the ornaments which open up.

Merry Christmas in June....

      Another weekend, another Smash challenge....  This weekend's challenges were to use a banner, pennant, flag (one, two or all three) and the color PINK.   This was a fun page to do, but it also really sentimental for me.   This page goes in the Smash book I'm creating for my grandkids so they will have some kind of way to look back on their grandparents some day. The whole book is massively sentimental to me. This page was really kind of hard to do since it's my childhood home when we moved in in 1966 and again 40 years later in 2006.  I haven't lived there since 1978.  The original photo was taken by me at age 6. It's blurry, but I didn't care. It was something I did as a kid and I wanted my grandkids to have that little piece of me. It's got all the challenge items and I loved making the little house in pinks!  There's a little bit of journaling on the backs of each photo... just kind of explains the pics with dates.

Trying something new tonight...  just a small project that I could do in a few minutes...  MailArt.  These are my first feeble attempts...  They are plain and simple, but still on the cute side, I guess.   Can you tell I'm really not sure what I think about these envelopes?   I will need to find a stamp pad with permanent ink so that when I stamp some images, they won't run.  The digital stamps came from a graphics site that has vector art.  They are just resizable .jpgs or .gifs... nothing real special, but I did kind of like the vintagey look to the stamps.

These were just done on the fly in about 20 minutes as an experiment...  I'll keep trying.

Lucking Out with New Challenges...

This past weekend there were three new challenges.   The first was to Smash something 'handmade'.  The second was to Smash a photo.  The third was a bit harder and was supposed to include all three Smashable items, which were something handmade, washi tape and a tag.  Luckily for me, when I finished my page, I'd done all three challenges at one time.  

The handmade item is a card by Sue B.  I love her cards and especially loved the colors in this card, so I used it because I wanted to keep it nice.  I figured it would be safe in my Smash book.  The photo is a recent picture of my daughter and grandchildren in a nifty little metal frame.  My friend, Lori W. sent me the really cool tag maker! It's from Making Memories!  Thanks, Lori!   There's green washi tape at the top and bottom of the page.

The card has been turned into a little book of sorts.  It's got three pages...one for Cait, one for Sy and one for baby Charleen.  Each page has a list of qualities that I love in each of them.

I absolutely adore how this page turned out!  LOVE IT!  I love the colors, the layout and how it all just kind of blended together to make a lovely, sentimental page.

What do you think?  Comments, thoughts or suggestions are welcome!  Thanks for reading!

Happy Smashing!

Keeping it Simple

Today was the third Smash*holics Challenge for the weekend.  Smash your favorite thing.  One of my favorite things in the entire world is my Yorkie, Ginger.  She will be 6 years old next week.  She is a smart, funny and just the best companion EVER!   I love this dog so much!

The pages are simple and clean.  After the Smashing overload from the first challenge where I smashed "someone special", my husband, and we did all of the elaborate wiring and lighting of his page, I just wanted something clean and simple for Gin's page.   Tom's page turned out to be 4 pages and parts one and two of this weekend's Smash*holics Challenges.

Happy Smashing!

Another weekend... Another Challenge!

The start of Summer brought a couple of challenges my way... one was the heat and humidity.  I freaking hate it.  I hate summer time.  I say it a million times every season.  I just hate it...  so to combat the muggies, I Smashed the weekend away for the most part.

Here's two challenges from the Smash*holics group on Facebook.

Challenge #4  was to smash someone special.  I chose my husband, Tom.  He doesn't get enough credit for what he does most of the time.  He's smart... really smart, funny and pretty darn creative.   He helped me smash to complete this challenge.

The GEEK sign actually lights up when the button is pushed.  It's pretty cool!  

I also completed the fifth challenge for the group which was to use washi tape, felt and a button.  I kept with the "Tom" theme and smashed a couple of photos of him with our adorable grandson, Syrus.  I also had a few photos of Tom doing things he loves and tied those photos with Tom's Top Ten list of things he likes.   The photos of Tom and Syrus flip up for some hidden journaling.  

It was a fun Smashing weekend so far.  There's one more challenge to take place tomorrow.  I'll probably end up doing that one, too.   I'm happy to Smash with my BFFs....  Tom and the AC!   

Happy Smashing!

Quick Update and goodies....

I'm still gathering supplies to do the third Smash*holics Challenge from last weekend.  I had this great idea to make a mini photo book to slide in a pocket... then I decided that I wanted 'yellowed' paper so it looked 'old'.  So I had to dye paper with coffee.  I also used some distress in on it, too.   I had to wait for it to dry before using it.

The pages are dry and I have a couple of old photos to put into it, but I'd like more.  There is an old suitcase with photos that is missing.   I don't look at the photos very often and I've put it away ...  somewhere.  It wasn't in the usual hiding places when we checked over the weekend, so I'll keep hunting.  I think that once I get all the photos I want and get them placed in the homemade mini book, I can use journal tags to make notes about the pics.   I downloaded a ton of free journal tags the other day.... They are great!

Closing today with a photo of some cute things I found at PeachyCheap.com.  They are perfect for my challenge book theme.

Enjoy the day....