Dollar Tree visit

Riley stayed over night at my mom's house last night. I called this morning thinking she would want to stay all day but she wanted to come home. There went my day to craft all by myself. On the way home we stopped off at Dollar Tree to pick up another box of crayons. Anyways, $58 later. . . yeah I bought quite a few bunches of tropical flowers and these wood plagues. There seems to be a huge Hawaiian theme going on at the store and I had a big light bulb going off since Riley takes hula and Tahitian classes. So here's the first of the wall hangings. They have them painted and unpainted. I plan on using water colors, Glimmer Mist and acrylic paints on the unpainted ones.Outside of the Creative Imaginations paper pack and rubons I already owned, this cost me less than $2 to make.

I generally would use a canvas backing but wanted this to be light. Last month we got another tv and the best part of getting a new tv is the box. Michael cuts them into 12" squares for me. So I punched through it with the Cropodile. The Cropodile also punched very nicely through the wood. I was hesitant whether the paint or the wood would crack but it didn't. Oh and the hula girl. . . she was cheap too at a sale we went to in December  Meri Meri. It was like $0.25 for three. And if you know me well, you'd know that I sprayed the flowers with Glimmer Mist. The Hukilau letters are Crate Paper chipboard. 

You have to keep in mind that these flowers have the base stem things. I cut them or in some cases take them out completely. Here I wanted the stamen. So I cut them and placed Ultimate glue between each layer so the flowers wouldn't come apart over time. I was tempted to use the glue gun but again we have a love/hate relationship where it's more hate and I think it's good for nothing.

Let's use up the brad and eyelet stash!

I am taking the Something for Almost Nothing class which started yesterday at Shimelle.com in an attempt to use up that old stash that keeps getting buried underneath all the new stuff. So the prompt yesterday was to use metal in a layout. I think I do best when there's some sort of challenge issued to me (like at work) than to just pull something out of the air. 

For this I stitched on a piece of wide ribbon (should have been longer) but we all know I don't measure anything. Then I used one sheet of Sassafras Bungle Jungle and a scrap of K&Co.  from the Valentine's collection I had laying on my table from making those little mailboxes. Then from there I used brads from BoBunny and eyelets from Oriental Trading and Making Memories. The metal letters are from We R Memory Keepers and the little "chick" is Meri Meri accents.

As for the SEI challenge this month, so far I made a simple bracelet out of twill and an acrylic heart from Prima. The line from SEI is Doodle Girl and I used Zip Dry glue and the iron ons from SEI as well that belong to the same collection.

And now for giant cupcakes. . . my favorite gluten free HoHos with lots of butter! Secret to my taking over the world, is that I feed them one cupcake but it's actually the size of two! Bwhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha!

Chalk board paint shadow box and a layout

I've been meaning to try chalk board paints for a few years now. . .not that I've been scrapping long. My main intention was to use the colored paints but the pink and pretty colors come by the quart. So I had bought a can of the spray paint (Rustoleum)  in boring black instead. So last night yet again I could not sleep. Sorry you can't see the chalks that well in the photo.

I took a $1 frame I got at Big Lots and removed the glass. The backing of the the frame is wood pressboard. It took two coats to make the pressboard black like a chalk board. I used the heat gun in between the layers since the directions say it takes 20 minutes to dry each layer. I was really between whether I was going to put a photo in there but saw that I had a Hero Arts stamp which was perfect. So I dug out the white Stazon pad and stamped the image. Then I heat set that as well since it wasn't drying fast enough. I could tell because the ink was glossy. Next I dug deep into the drawers and grabbed the Pebbles shimmery chalks. Note: the darker colors show up better. The lighter colors tend to just shimmer and look white.

After that was done, I sprayed the chalk surface with a workable fixative. I shouldn't have done it all inside my scrapbook room but it was 4am and I didn't want to turn off the alarm to go into the garage.  Oh yes, and once you spray the fixative, you might need to either add more chalk and do it again or be happy with it because it dulled it out a bit because I used matte and the colors were muted a lot. The rest is pretty self explanatory. Hope you take this one for a whirl. Let me know how yours comes out.

Before I made the frame I completed a layout. I used mostly different pieces from Creative Imaginations, Dew Drops, Blue Moon elements and the tree is Meri Meri (they make retail cards --from a sale we went to before Christmas that had super cheap embellishments, ribbons, etc).