Egg Dyeing

During this first week in November:

• Trevor and I have made Thanksgiving decorations. 
• I've been making Christmas and winter crafts to publish at Fun Family Crafts.
• I'm working on spring-themed Scrapbook.com assignments that go live in March.
• I finished the first of two layouts from last Easter.

 

Fall, winter, spring... I feel like I'm constantly living in at least three seasons at once.  It's a weird feeling to go from making turkey decorations to researching daffodil crafts to Christmas crafting and then scrapping Easter egg dyeing all in one day.    

Our "Coat of Many Colors" Card

One of my best friends (Trevor's godmother, Jonna) just celebrated her birthday.  As a gift, we bought tickets for her to join us for an upcoming production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."  Since there wasn't anything to wrap (the tickets are at will-call), we wanted the card to help reveal the present.  So Trevor and I made a very colorful coat-shaped birthday card.

In case some of you are not familiar with the plot, "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" tells the story from the book of Genesis of Joseph and his coat of many colors. Joseph is the youngest of 12 brothers and his father Jacob's favorite son.  Jacob gave Joseph a beautiful and colorful coat, which made his brothers extremely jealous.  When Joseph mentioned his dreams that show he was destined to rule over them, his brothers' hatred of him intensified to the point that 10 of them plotted to kill him.  Their oldest brother convinced them instead to sell Joseph into slavery and make Jacob believe Joseph was dead.  It's a great musical and we're all excited to see it.

To make our card, we started by folding a piece of white cardstock in half and cutting out a coat shape (keeping the fold intact).  We heated up the warming tray and got out the broken crayons.  

 

We used a ruler and pencil to draw two lines that would look like the opening of a coat on the front of the card.  Then we opened up the card and each started using the crayons to create a colorful patchwork.  Trevor worked on what would be the front of the card and I did the back.

 

When the card was covered, we folded it back up and added our message inside.  Here is what the front looked like:

 

And here is the back:

 

It only took Jonna about 10 seconds to figure out that the card was supposed to be a technicolor dreamcoat!  I was really impressed.  It was such a fun way to reveal what the gift would be. Fingers crossed that the production is as fabulous as the other shows we've seen from this theater company!

Manufacturer Spotlights

As most of you know, I started work as a Contributing Writer for Scrapjazz.com in January 2012. My first-ever paid article was published (coincidentally) on my 40th birthday in March 2012.  I was recruited for the job through Scrapbook.com, who own Scrapjazz.  It's been a great job.

A few months ago, the folks at Scrapbook.com decided to make some changes at Scrapjazz. They closed the Scrapjazz store and moved the writing team to Scrapbook.com.  I'm thrilled about this.  Scrapbook.com has always been my 'scrapbook home' and its membership is huge, meaning my articles have been reaching far more people than they did at Scrapjazz.

Along with the new structure, we are now being assigned spotlight articles for the major manufacturers that Scrapbook.com carries.  These articles have been such a blast to write.  I have thoroughly enjoyed doing research and interviewing manufacturers to learn about how they got started and how their companies have developed into powerhouses in the scrapbook industry. As always, my articles are due about two months before they are published.  So while I have actually written seven spotlight articles, four haven't gone live yet.  The three that have been published include:

Click on the links below to read my articles and learn which company started with two handpainted pieces of paper, which company began with a system to scrap a year of memories, and which company was founded as a book bindery over 90 years ago!

• We R Memory Keepers
• BoBunny
• Simple Stories

(I apologize in advance for any wonky formatting in my articles.  I'm not the one who formats them and it drives me crazy that I can't fix it either.)

I'll share my next set of Manufacturer Spotlights once they go live.  In the meantime, you can check out the ones the rest of the team has written (along with all our other articles) by selecting the Resources tab at Scrapbook.com and selecting Articles & Tutorials.

More Coffee Filter Turkey Art

My all-time favorite Thanksgiving craft is the awesome Coffee Filter Turkey.  I used to make them every year with my students and now I make them every year with Trevor.  I've always used watered down paint and construction paper, as I described in the linked tutorial.  This year, Trevor and I skipped the paint and the construction paper to make coffee filter turkeys using scrapbook supplies.

The first step was coloring the coffee filters.  We tried Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists and Adirondack Alcohol Inks.    

They turned out beautifully!  The one on the left was made with three colors of alcohol ink and the one on the right was made with three colors of Glimmer Mist.  

 

While those were drying, we gathered blue, brown, yellow, and red cardstock.  We cut turkey bodies and wings from the brown, a beak and legs from the yellow, and a wattle from the red.  We left the blue whole to use as a background.  

 

The last step was gluing them together.  Here's mine, using a Glimmer Mist coffee filter. 

 

This one of mine features an alcohol ink coffee filter.

 

This is Trevor's Glimmer Mist coffee filter.

 

He chose not to make a turkey from his alcohol ink coffee filter... yet.  He was very clear that I was NOT to throw it away, as he would be using for either a turkey or something else soon. We'll see.  In the meantime, I'm really enjoying having these turkeys up on display.  

Name Madala

Things may have seemed normal here on the blog for the past four weeks, but that is only because I am able to schedule posts in advance. In reality, almost every post that ran during October (and a few that will run in November) was written in September. During the first part of October, I spent pretty much every minute working ahead in my three jobs and preparing for an epic trip.

Each year, my parents take our family and my sister's family on a vacation, usually in the fall and usually to Disneyland. For years, my nephew has been hoping to visit Disney World someday. So for his 13th birthday, they not only took all of us to Florida for a week at Disney World, but then treated us all to a Disney cruise. Thanks Mom and Dad!

As always, I packed along some art supplies on vacation: plain paper, a drawing pencil, a Sharpie, colored pencils, and a pencil sharpener. I had high hopes that I'd be able to spend some time drawing and relaxing, especially on the cruise. That turned out not to be the case. In fact, the only creative project I did was to make a Name Mandala on the second leg of our flight, Phoenix to Orlando. I've seen this project many places. I like the step-by-step directions you can find at Art Lessons From Belgium.  

I cut and folded my paper ahead of time so that TSA wouldn't steal my scissors. Then I sketched my name into the first wedge.

 

I used the airplane window to trace my name into all of the other wedges. Not easy with the tiny window, limited space, and airplane movement. 

 

Then I started coloring.  

 

I had to keep stopping to supervise the Language Arts homework going on to my left.

 

Here's the view to my right.

 

And here is my finished Name Mandala. I don't think anyone would know it says Cindy just by looking at it, which is part of what I love about this and all other name art.  

 

About 5 minutes after I finished the mandala, the captain announced that we were entering 'some weather.' Oh my gosh. We spent the next three hours bouncing and pitching with me clutching my airsickness bag. It was absolute torture. I have never been so glad to be on the ground as I was when we landed in Orlando. That flight was so rough that I spent the next two weeks thinking of ways to get back from Orlando to Sacramento that did not involve ever getting on an airplane again. Unfortunately, none of them were feasible and I did board that airplane home. Barely. I was so anxious and so upset. Fortunately, both that leg and the next were ok and we were back in Sacramento about 11 hours after arriving at the Orlando airport. It's going to be a long time before I voluntarily board an airplane again.

Anyway, other than the flight, we had a wonderful trip. The time with my parents, sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew was great and I feel so blessed to have had such quality family time. Now I'm struggling to get caught up with everything post-vacation. I'd love to drop everything and have some quality time in the scraproom. I've really missed my creative time.