White/Color Core Cardstock Challenge at Practical Scrappers

This week at Practical Scrappers, our challenge was to use white or color core cardstock. I used some white core cardstock on this little fishing themed birthday card. We are also featuring some digital stamps this month from Robyn's Nest Digital Stamps. This one is called Dad's Fishing Hole. I actually used it on a layout of my nephew and his friend fishing. Here are both the card and layout. Thanks for looking.

Practical Scrappers White Pen Challenge

This weeks challenge for Practical Scrappers was to use a white pen. I used my white Sakura Gelly Roll Pen to doodle on this layout. Here in St. Louis, we have an outdoor theater called the Muny. They have 7 shows a season during the summer. We went to 5 out of the 7 this year. This layout is of the last show we saw this season, Footloose. I used my MTC software and cricut for the title and boots. Thanks for looking!!

Crop this past weekend at Church.

Once a month, we have a crop at my church. The crop for the month of Aug. was this past weekend. I didn't get nearly as much done as I would have liked, but I had fun, so thats whats most important. :-) Here are just a few layouts that I finished up. A couple I finished are for Practical Scrappers Challenges, and you'll be able to see those in the next couple weeks. Here are the few I can show you now. Enjoy, and thanks for looking.

This is a double layout of our Smith Family Picnic. I used the Everyday Paper Dolls Cartridge for the little BBQ grills, my MTC software for the title and I used some black brads to make the little ants. I cut the little hotdogs out for the grills by hand. :-)

A close up of page 1

Close up of page 2

This is a layout of my nephew playing with some bubble wrap that my husband brought him from work. We go to my parent's house most every Friday night for dinner. So my husband, who works for a packing supply company, brought some samples of bubble wrap over for my nephew Landon to play with. He had a lot of fun with it.

This is a layout I made using pictures from Fathers Day 2010 at our house. They are of my Papa Reg, my Dad and my nephew Landon sleeping/watching t.v. and my two uncles.

The Lucky One

Last week I finished, "The Lucky One", by Nicholas Sparks. It was such a great book. I really, really loved it. So now I've read "Dear John", "The Last Song" and "The Lucky One" and they've all been great. Though I have to say "The Last Song" has been my favorite so far, followed closely by "The Lucky One" and then "Dear John".  Now, moving along with my Nicholas Sparks book reading, I picked up two more of his books last week. The first one is "True Believer", and then "True Believer's" sequel "At First Sight". So I've started "True Believer", but have only read a few short pages. I'll let you all know what I think.

Practical Scrappers Lace Cardstock Challenge

For this weeks Lace Cardstock Challenge I used my Cricut and Storybook cartridge for the green leaf background. I used my Wedding Cartridge for the flowers and the Pagoda cartridge for the hummingbird. For the title I used the MTC software and the font is called Brody. Its one of my favorite fonts. These pictures were taken in my backyard at my hummingbird feeder. They are of the same hummingbird. He stayed there for a long time, drinking the sugar water. I was able to get pretty close and take these pictures.

Thanks for looking!!

Our House ~ Basement

So last but not least... our basement. The basement of this house was a huge selling point. Half the basement is finished and half is storage/laundry. It has a section of the finished part that was sectioned off  (perfect for a scrapbooking room!!). They used it more for a weight lifting area, but its now my wonderful scrapbooking room. The other portion of the finished part is our family room. We love this part of our house and spend a lot of time down there. The previous owners finished it, but didn't do a great job. The walls were just painted white and the trim was mismatched and stained different colors. It looked pretty bad. However it was carpeted on the one section and had hard wood on the other, which was perfect. I love this carpet because its really stain resisitant. So all we had to do was paint the walls and put up new white trim all around. The white six panel door was already there, but we took it down and repainted it. My husband is a HUGE K.C. Chiefs fan, so thats why we decided to decorate the family room the way we did. He spends countless hours on Sundays in front of the big screen watching football. :-) Thanks for looking...

The stairs before we did any work in the basement. The previous owners had carpeted the stairs, which is really nice. But the walls are still white here.

The basement stairs now after painting. I painted the walls in the basement a gray color, but it ended up being more of a bluish gray.

When you walk down the stairs (from the upper left hand corner of this picture), you walk into whats now my scrapbook room, but this is what it looked like while the previous owners lived there. They built a little half wall to separate this section of he basement from the family room, which we had to repaint and replace the trim.

And here is that space now!! My dad built the table and put the counter and cabinets in for me. He was able to get the cabinets for free when he was tearing out a basement for a client of his. The previous owners had this piece of countertop in the unfinished part, so we used it to go over the cabinets. So I got both things for free!!! He also built my cricut cartridge shelf for me and put in a couple new electrical outlets over the counter. I absolutely love this room!!!

And this is our family room side while the previous owners lived there.

And here it is now...

This is the other table that we got from Quiznos for free. The red top went with the decor down here, but I re-covered the cushions.

The mini fridge with the picture of Arrowhead stadium above it.

The fuzeball table.

My parents got new furniture the same year we moved here so they gave us their old furniture for our basement. I also had this futon, so we used it all to give plenty of seating for our super bowl parties. :-)

This is the couch my parents gave us. The colors didn't totally go, but I added in the red pillows and throw to bring more of the red in. I did the same thing with the loveseat and chair. The frames above the couch are of scrapbook pages I made involving our 3 different chiefs games we've been to.

This picture is from the wall with the t.v. on it.

The 61 inch bigscreen. Jake just had to have this t.v. and it is nice for watching football and movies. The two black shelves I had in my old room at home, so they worked out great for in here.

The door in this picture leads to the unfinished part where the storage and laundry are.

Our House ~ The Office

This is the third bedroom in the house, but we turned it into an office. My husband is really into history, especially the civil war. His room was decorated with civil war stuff when he lived at home, so we used a lot of the same decorations for the office. This room belonged to the previous owners' daughter. They had pink plaid wallpaper on the walls, which came down pretty easily. They had also put white shelves in all around the top of the room, which we really liked because Jake has a pretty big collection of model Corvettes that we were able to put up there where no little hands could get to them. We painted 2 walls white, one wall blue and one wall red. We put in new white trim and a new white six panel door. The closet doors were already white six panel doors so we left those the same. I had the desk at my house and Jake had the two shelves, that we use for movies, in his old room, so this room came together very easily. My sister made the valance and I used the left over fabric to frame the documents on the one wall. They are replicas of old American documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburgh Address and so on. Jake had had them for a long time and had never done anything with them, so I bought frames and fixed them right up. He was very happy with them. Thanks for looking.

The room when the previous owners lived there.

The room now.

This is a picture of the framed documents and some of Jake's corvettes.

The closet.

The computer desk. The stars on the box above the window are vinyl and I cut them out with my Cricut.