Scrabble LOVE

I saw THIS on Ucreate the other day... And knew I must create it for my mom.

My mom is Scrabble Queen. I have never beat her. I don't think anyone in our family ever has. She gets super competitive about it. If you come close to beating her she gets a little ticked at you.  Not that she's a poor sport... she just doesn't know how to loose at Scrabble.
Anywho...

 I knew this would be the perfect gift to brighten her Valentine's day... and immediately went to work. Okay, I lied. I immediately put my dad to work. I have access to power tools... but no workshop-ish type place to use them, and my back porch is still frigid and snow covered. I know you can purchase wood at Home Depot and for a sweet smile and a good batting of the lashes you can get them to make a few cuts for you. But Daddy will do it for much less than that, and he'll pull the wood out of his stash for you... even though he doesn't understand the point of all these 'projects' you need his power tools mad skills and manliness for.
So he cut me up some little blocks and I took those puppies home and sanded them nice and smooth. Then I used my handy-dandy Silhouette machine to cut 2 inch letters out of black vinyl... slapped those on the blocks... then topped the whole thing of with about three coats of Krylon Clear Satin spray finish... and Voila!

Actually, they looked so cute sitting on this shelf in my kitchen (yes, with a cookie cutter) that I had a hard time sending them home with my mom. BUT after seeing them, my dad actually was very impressed with the project and offered to cut and sand as many blocks as I wanted. Heh heh.
Anyway... Happy Valentines Day. Celebrate by surrounding yourself with the people and things you love-- be it family, chocolates, fluffy white dogs, or games you just don't know how to lose. :)

Paper Crafter

My friend Erin is super crafty and really into scrapbooking and cardmaking and all those paper crafts that have terrified me for years. Paper crafting-- I don't know what it is about it, I am just not patient or skilled enough to complete a project. So I don't. Erin laughs at me each time I express my fear of paper crafting.

Reeeewind about a month to Christmas. Santa was extra nice to me. He put a Silhouette under my tree. Yay fun. I was expressing to my friends once again that I was not a paper crafter and Erin said-- well you've got a silhouette now, so you are about to be. 

And I have to be honest with you, while I was BEYOND tickled about my new crafty gadget... it sat untouched for about four weeks, because I was still pretty intimidated by it. And you know... there's that paper thing...

Anyway. I finally busted it out about a week or so ago, and OMG I will never go back. I have barely scratched the surface of what this thing can do, and I am so loving it. Yay.

The first thing I made was a Happy Birthday cupcake topper for my niece. Not really ambitious or exciting, but it turned out cute and I was happy. (didn't take a picture...)

Z was impressed and asked me if I would make him a bookmark. I was like yeah, sure... and put it at the end of my to do list. Then he asked about four more times that same day, so I relented, and designed him a bookmark. 

(I had to put the thing together with fabric glue because I had no regular glue... Not a paper crafter, remember???) He was very impressed. We went to the store to get appropriate glue. As I type this he is requesting 2 more bookmarks. Husbands are silly.

At the beginning of the year there was this little thing going around on facebook where people who responded to a status post would get a handmade gift in 2011... and I decided to play along. My gifts are done, and I was trying to decide how to wrap them and I thought of those little pillow box things... and wouldn't you know... My Silhouette can make one of those. Easy peasy. 

But it couldn't be easy peasy, could it? It needed to be pretty and personalized... and well...

It needed to have intricate paper flowers on it. 

I did have a lot of fun designing and putting these flowers together after my spiffy machine cut them all out. All these shapes are ones that come with the software already, so that's pretty awesome too!

And I figured out how to weld all my text together so I could easily personalize them without a million tiny pieces to glue down.

And they are just colorful and make me happy. Oh, and if you happen to be someone owed a gift, and you see your name on one of these boxes... well, your gift is ready!