Mother's Day Made Easy!

Hi there! I’m finally back to help this poor blog feel a little less neglected (it has been) and a little more loved (because it is!) For those of you curious about the Deeply Rooted house, remodeling is almost done, and we’ll be moving in next week! Anything not finished by D-Day will surely get put on “The List”, and I’m sure we’ll get around to doing it sometime in the next few years.


While I’ve been busy working away, either at the new job or at the house, I’ve spared some time for my little lovelies…Glue Dots! Let me just tell you, I love this company!! The folks at Glue Dots recently put together little care packages for each design team member, and each and every goodie was so appreciated!


Mother’s Day is fast approaching, and my friends at Glue Dots wanted to see how we could use their wonderful adhesives to make quick and easy presents to celebrate Mom. My first project is for all of you ‘greenies’ (aka up-cyclers, re-users or salvage Sallys!). Gift cards are a quick and easy way to give someone a gift you know they’ll love, but they can oftentimes feel impersonal. Show Mom you care by taking a few minutes to make a simple, thoughtful gift card holder out of (none other than) a toilet paper roll!

Prep Time Needed: A Few Days (or as long as it takes your family to use up a roll of toilet paper!)
Project Time Needed: less than 5 minutes


Trim the paper to fit your cardboard roll. I used a paper with a nice pattern on it so I wouldn’t have to worry about much extra time and material for decoration. Using your Continuous Glue Line®, apply glue to all four edges of your cut-to-fit paper. Line your paper up with the roll and adhere all the way around the cardboard tube. Fold each edge of the tube in on itself, making a pillow shape. Cut and attach ribbon (or any other decorations you’d prefer) using Craft Glue Dots®. 

Materials Used:
Toilet Paper Tube
My Mind's Eye Lost and Found - Market Street 6x6 Paper Pad
Stampin' Up! Fairy Tale Ribbon
Making Memories Sentiments Embossed Charms
Glue Dots Continuous Lines®
Craft Glue Dots®


For my second project, I solved a beautiful dilemma. I knew I wanted to get my mother a fun new baking pan, but, really…how ‘fun’ does a baking pan ever look?? Boring, grey, blah, right? I looked at the pan, looked at my stash of crafting fun, and (somewhat brilliantly, I might add) came up with the idea of using the pan just like the ever-so-popular crafting trays! You’ve seen them, right? They’re printing press-esque trays that you add paper, trinkets, and pictures to, but who said they had to be done in a tray?!?

I cut out some My Mind's Eye papers to fit the bottoms of the pan and used a packet of die cuts from Heidi Grace as my little embellies. I even found these cute little laser cut wooden kitchen utensils from Kaiser Crafts to add on! Most importantly, everything is adhered using Removable Glue Dots®, so there’ll be no stickiness left in the pan when Mom's ready to use it (for its intended purpose, that is), and EVEN MORE importantly, My Mom the Crafter can reuse all of the papers and pretties on the tray in her own crafting magical creations!
 

Materials Used:

Removable Glue Dots®
Pampered Chef Brownie Pan
My Mind's Eye Lost and Found - Market Street 6x6 Paper Pad
Heidi Grace Daydream Die Cut Accents
Making Memories Sentiments Embossed Charms
My Mind's Eye Stella Rose Trim
Stampin' Up! Fairy Tale Ribbon
Kaiser Crafts Wooden Flourish - Kitchen Utensils

{my momma!}

So, as this project is for my actual mother for Mother's Day (and she's seeing this before I've actually had a chance to give it to her), HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, MOM!!

Well, there you go, fellow crafters. Two quick and easy ideas to make your mother feel special, loved, and like she should bake something good for you to eat!!

My First Mixed Media Canvas and a HUGE Thank You!

Here it is!! My first mixed media canvas. I had a lot of fun making this. I did it in several steps, spanning over at least a week. I like to be able to do a layer, step back and take a second look at it, and come back to it with a fresh perspective (plus I needed a lot of drying time in between!). I have to admit that I got a lot of inspiration from a fabulously talented artist/designer/everything else named Mou Saha. Go check out her blog sometime. It's definitely worth linking up to! (and I'll just go ahead and admit now that attending one of her classes in Florida is on my bucket list!!)
This canvas was a Christmas present to a wonderful friend who is taking life by the horns and really proving and shaping themselves right now. I wanted to make something that would be an inspiration during the hard times and somewhat decent to look at during the good times :) Luckily, we exchanged gifts early this year, so I can finally post about this project!!!

I feel like I've crossed over from making projects to actually creating something with this piece. For the first time, I understand what artists feel when they are composing artwork. Each element, from the dress pattern layers to the color underneath, the images to the fibers, mean something to me. Every item added to this canvas has a meaning. And while someone might not 'get it', or even appreciate anything about it, to me, it means a lot (and hopefully to the recipient, too!!)

Babble, babble, babble, right?? Ok. On to the steps.

Step One: Prime canvas with gesso, let dry (overnight-ish). This particular canvas came pre-primed, but I'd rather play it safe.

Step Two: Get crazy with gelatos!! Faber Castell makes these amazing little color sticks called gelatos (more info about them here). They go on like a crayon, and once they're wet, they blend amazingly! I tried several different methods to blend my colors (wet paintbrush, baby wipes, fingers) and ended up liking using my hands the best. It was a lot easier to control how much got blended. Once you're happy with the coloring, let dry (doesn't take very long!)







Step Three: Next I decoupaged old dress patterns onto the entire canvas (they're in the bottom of that picture up there). No real rhyme or reason to this part, just overlapping a bit as a go. Drying time for this was a few days!

Step Four: Play!! Once your canvas background is all ready, you get to create and play! I inked up some Grungeboard letters and used some Grungepaper through the Cricut to cut out the bird house (from the Serenade cartridge). The bird was cut from the Serenade cartridge from cardstock, traced onto a piece of plain muslin, and decoupaged onto the canvas.

added some curled wire for detail

popped this off the canvas slightly

inspirational phrase

I can't wait for inspiration and a few extra days to work on my next one. I think I'm hooked!! (plus my canvas came in a two pack!)

This will definitely be my last post before I'm off on a holiday for a bit. Thanks, everyone, for a GREAT 2011! A huge thank you to Glue Dots and Becky at Friendship's Garden for taking me on as a designer this term. This blog was started because of you all, and it's turning out to be such an amazing journey!! 

I'm looking forward to all 2012 has in store. It's going to be a great year!! Merry Christmas!!

A Christmas Inspiration!

Sorry I've been out of posting lately! What can I say...it's the Christmas season, and things always get a little crazy around here this time of year.
Today's challenge for Friendship's Garden was a color challenge from a Pinterest photo (here's a link to my Pinterest boards!):

And here's my project:

 I stuck with Stampin' Up!'s Jolly Holly Designer Series Paper for all of my patterned paper. This line went perfectly with the inspiration piece!

I singed a piece of my lace doily (couldn't resist!) for a bit of texture, added a distressed, pre-fab dimensional sentiment embellishment (Me and My Big Ideas) and a bit of green fuzzy yarn.

I can't wait to see you take on this week's project!! Make sure to link it back here!

I'll be back soon with more Christmas (and beyond!) projects to inspire you this Christmas season!!

Thanksgiving Recipe

Welcome to another challenge from Friendship's Garden!!

Before I get to my project for this week, I wanted to let you know that we're planting a few more flowers at Friendship's Garden!! Our design team will be growing beginning in January. If you're interested in joining our Garden Girl team, please check out this post for more information!



This week we have another 'recipe' challenge: Thanksgiving Theme project using:

1 Die Cut, 

2 Patterned Papers, and 

3 Trims (ribbon, lace, etc.)

I did a Halloween project last month using this awesome Owl Punch from Stampin' Up!:

The dressed up little guys looked like this:

http://deeplyrootedlife.blogspot.com/2011/10/ghoultide-blog-hop.html

I thought I'd take a new season's twist on this punch and see what I could come up with for Thanksgiving! I thought about doing the expected 'turkey', but decided to get a bit more creative and make my little guy a Pilgrim!

I used the punch to cut most of the pieces, but I hand cut his hat and his collar.

My recipe was: 

1 Die Cut = Pilgrim Owl

2 Patterned papers: Stampin' Up! Patterned Paper Pack

and 3 Trims: brown felt trim, yellow cording and orange baker's twine

Hope you enjoyed this recipe challenge. Can't wait to see what YOU come up with!! Make sure you post your projects back to Friendship's Garden here. 

A Quick Card for Frienship's Garden

Isn't this how it always works?? You spend hours (and knowing me, DAYS) working on a project, only to never have it turn out the way it is in your head. I don't know how many frustrating moments I've had in my craft lair pulling my hair out trying to fix a doomed project.


Aaaaaaand then you have a challenge. A 15 minute challenge.


And in 12:55.9 minutes,

you create one of your favorite cards. 

 
Ever.

I don't know. Maybe it's the unexpected black, red and green combo, or maybe it's the big, gaudy bow (along the lines of my Thanksgiving layout, too), but I really love this card! 

It was very quick to throw together (obviously). I used the front and reverse of my Stampin' Up! cardstock, and the trim, circle and Santa embellishments were all pre-made. I inked the edges of {everything} - of course - and used Glue Dots to adhere everything to my card base. The bow was made from a remnant package I bought at Hobby Lobby (the whole package was on sale for $2!)

Now some of you out there know me well enough to expect a Christmas card in the mail in the coming weeks...when you open it, just pretend it's the first time you've seen it!!

Hop back over to Friendship's Garden to post your 15 minute creation!!

used in this project:

InLinkz.com

Friendship's Garden Halloween Tag

Hello again! I had a great time this last weekend at my friend Holly's all-day crop. It was a great time to relax, catch up with some friends and get some work done! The first thing I got to work on was our next in between weeks challenge with Friendship's Garden!!
This week's challenge with Friendship's Garden is to create a Halloween tag with the following formula: 3 bling, 2 ric rac, and 1 image. Here's what I came up with:

I had a lot of fun with this little recipe of a project. Hope you enjoyed it, too!









Can't wait to see your 3-2-1 creations!!
You can post them here

used in this project:

InLinkz.com

Thanks for such a blessing!

I've been in card haven recently with blog hops and such, and during my last visit to the craft lair I saw some 12x12 calling my name!!
I started by picking out a photo mat from Me & My Big Ideas - Cornucopia. It has wonderful pinks, greens, browns, blues and oranges wonderfully juxtaposed together and makes it really easy finding colors that work together. From these colors, I picked my green background page, blue burlap accent (yard sale find!!), earthy brown paper, brown and pink ribbons, and Fall leaves.

I used a lot of walnut ink for distressing and crumpled my two photo mat pages before adhering them to add a bit more variation and interest. All of my elements were adhered using (none other than) Glue Dots®!!

Take advantage of free photo editing: I typed this journaling onto my picture before it was printed! (I use Picasa)

I think I need to take the idea of this page and mull it over a bit more...there is so much I have to be thankful for right now, and that is what I want future generations to see in my scrapbooks.

InLinkz.com

I wrote this blog post while participating on the Glue Dots® design team