Outdoor Movie Party

I can't believe that I never posted my son's 5th birthday party. It was really fun... from start to finish, beginning with the invitations I hand made. I personalized the envelopes with each child's name and invited the whole family on the inside.I want to credit the paper and template designers but my laptop fried a few months ago and I lost all my stash and all my photos. :( 

I'm pretty sure the papers were from MScraps and the template was from Simply J Studios at ScrapMatters.

Here are the invitation 'ticket', envelope and a close-up of the insert.

And here are some shots of the actual night. The kids all came in their jammies with their blankets and chairs or sleeping bags. We had a Pikachu pinata filled with toys and candy. Each kid had their own bag to fill up - and all the bags were full!

 

Each kid had their own bag to fill up - and all the bags were full!

Each kid got a few flashlight rings (a huge hit!) and glow braclets

We served Pizzas and had two cakes with Ben 10 decoration on them.

For the main feature, we set up a large canvas and projected the movie Astro Boy.

School's over

...and that meansTeacher Thank you gifts. This year was easy (and hard) for me. My son graduated out of The Goddard School (sniff, sniff) so I took pictures of every kid on my son's class, contorted into the letters of the alphabet and made a poster for the school.
For the teachers and staff, I created Thank You cards. It was a practical and personal gift. Some of these teachers have known these kids since they were mearly a few months old. Here is what the card looks like.


and I did hang cards from the wine bottles we gave to the teaching staff. I was pretty thrilled with the idea because even if we just got them a fruit arrangement from Edible Arrangements, we would have spent about the same as 2 cases of wine - once we got the 'case' discounts.



I used paper from MScraps' June Collab: The Things You Do - a perfect kit for father's day. I don't recall where I got the stitching from.

Here is the poster that I made from the photos I took. I presented the school with the poster along with the teacher's gifts.

Challenges

While I was on my forced internet hiatus, I wasn't able to download any new kits or files, but I did manage to spend some time on some of the challenges they have at MScraps. Let me first explain why I love doing the challenges. Being new-ish to digi-scrapping, I have found that challenges on the scrapping sites were a great way to push myself and learn new techniques. What I love about the challenges on MScraps is that they have something for everyone, the newbie and the more seasoned scrapper.

Here are some pics from the last month's miscellaneous challenge by Jenny -which was to take one subject and photoshop 3 images onto one photo. I LOVED this challenge. LOVE, love, LOVE it.


Credits: Kit Playground by Jady Day Designs, Paper: The Things You Do/Mscraps June Collab

We all love getting comments on our posts. My favorite comment I got with this layout was one where someone said, Triplets, how cool!. LOL. Lordy, if I had triplets, I think I'd be in an asylum. lol

This page I did using Sherry Ferguson's Tropical Paradise kit (available at ScrapMatters) for MScraps' Miscellaneous Challenge for June. The assignment was to scrap a page with part of your image extruded out.


Credits: Kit: Tropical Paradise by Sherry Ferguson Designs, Paper: The Things You Do/MScraps June Collab

XOXO mini-card

St. Anthony is awesome. He always comes through when I lose something important. I lost my multi-digital card reader that I use to download my photos from all the different cameras. I love the thing but the last couple of days, its been MIA. I know I checked the side of the armchair like 3 times, but my digi-card reader was never there. After I said my little prayer to St. Anthony, I reached down and 'poof' it was there! Whew! Thank you. :)

Here is the mini-card files I made using my Silhouette and printer on card stock. In the background you can see the matching envelope I created to house this tiny little thing.

In my prior post, I gave away the template and all the supporting files for FREE. Here's thedownload link again now that I have the photos.

Papers: Generic Card stock printed with:  Forever Love papers by Sherry Ferguson Designs and Organic Collab by the designers at MScraps

Happy Valentines everyone!

Here is also a preview of the papers:
Sherry Ferguson's Forever Love

and MScraps Organic Collab

mScraps Oscars still going on!

For those of you who think its over, you can still nominate yourself with your best work. The sponsors' prizes are Awesome!

Post 9 - Friends

I mentioned this in the ScrapMatters forum but I'm clearly not doing these daily posts ON the day, so I've renamed mine to Posts #x instead of Day #x - that way I'm doing it on my terms and I don't have to self-flaggelate for not getting it done 'on time'. lol

So... friends. Wow. This post comes at a particularly appropos time in my life as I just lost a great friend, Bonnie. And that has caused me to reflect on my relationships - friendships. I spent the memorial service talking with my friend's sister telling her stories of how Bonnie was with us at work - a life her sister wasn't part of - and all the antics she would get up to. This led me to think ... I don't want to have these conversations with my friend's survivors - these conversations of how great they are, what fun they have, how much they mean to me. These are stories I need to share with them.

As a result, I have started writing short but genuinely heartfelt emails to those friends who knew both of us (mainly because they understand where my emails are coming from and they, too, are grieving). What I did not expect AT ALL - were the responses. Gee. I'm such a dope!! lol
I totally didn't expect responses. I have no clue why not - perhaps because I've had no sleep in days. Anyway... lol... they all reciprocated, which made me well up. Hmmmm...that wasn't my intent! Who the heck wants to make themselves cry?? I need to rethink this idea! ha ha

(Its still a good idea but now I tell people... no need to reply). lol

Here is my very first layout I ever did. It was for a template/mini-kit challenge at MScraps. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know if I HAD to use all of the elements, so I was left with this bow thing. I stuck it on my pal, Alana's head. She is soooo not a 'bow in my hair' kinda girl, so it cracks me up every time I see it. lol

Credit: EH Studios template/mini-kit challenge

Journaling (with link to recipes/blog) says:

A fun, food-filled weekend where we laughed more than I have in a long time. We cooked and ate a weird mish-mash of delectable food from pasta to dumplings to French onion soup, and topped it off with white wine Sangria.

After waking, we had a full day of Scrabble in our jammies, more laughing and leftovers -- oh yeah, and cupcakes with bacon on them. Surprisingly good!

Mscraps January collab...

I created a few projects with the January collab from Mscraps, Live Love Learn Grow

but I haven't posted them because I'm still not done. So, WTHeck.... I thought I'd post them here to remind me to

a) finish them

b) do something with them. lol

Here is the first of them... I wanted to create a fully integrated Blog site with backgrounds and separaters, blinkies - the whole nine yards. I even took a Jessica Sprague class. But I still can't figure out what the heck I am doing. So... here is the blog template design I made. who knows if I will ever do anything with it. lol

There was a LO I created but I couldn't find a pic I wanted to use with it. But I still need to convert it to a jpg so that will have to be edited in tomorrow.