Wednesday, June 20, 2012

i heart boston



an americorps VISTA friend is leaving boston for grad school in new york. it's always so sad to say farewell to a friend but i'm thankful that she'll still be on the east coast and just a bus ride away. as a good luck gift, i made her a little canvas to remind her of her years in boston. i used my cricut to cut the shape of massachusetts from a map showing her neighborhood. a little red heart marks boston and the edges i painted yellow which is her favorite color. the edges were a little rough so i'll have to experiment some more on future projects.

good luck and visit us soon ash!

Friday, June 15, 2012

colored doilies

i recently got a japanese scrapbooking book (that sounds odd) that showed how to tint paper doilies using dyes. i can't read the description because i can't read japanese so i went to blick and had a little brainstorming discussion with one of their associates. here's what i came up with!

supplies: old ink pads that you no longer use, shallow containers (these round take out containers work great!), water, white paper doilies and paper towels (lots of them).

pour a bit of water into the container. about half an inch of water should be enough.

take your ink pad and swirl the surface of it in the water. this is a great way to squeeze one last use out of old ink pads that are drying out.

once you get to a color that you like, place the doily into the water.

make sure it's fully submerged.

let's try it with blue too.

swirl swirl swirl

hm... this doily was a little too big for the container which made it hard to get it all under water. next time i'll use a bigger container since it's best if they lay flat.

after a few minutes, take out your doily to see how it's coming along. this looks about right to me.

place it on a paper towel to dry.

they're ready!

the pink one turned out pretty well and even colored. the blue had darker spots that looked like wrinkles but that might have been because i squished the doily into the container. be sure to lay down lots of paper towels since the dye water will (surprise) stain everything! my bookshelf now has pretty pink marks on it. i think next time i'll try experimenting with watercolor paints.

have fun playing with your new colorful doilies :) happy weekend!

Friday, June 1, 2012

scrapbooking... 2010 complete!

i can't express how satisfying it is to complete a scrapbook.


it takes ages for me to finish one of these and i love putting in the last page and then lugging it over to my bookcase (these babies are heavy).

i'm oddly very shy and secretive about my scrapbooking. it's almost more like a diary or journal than a photo album. a part of me cringes when someone flips though one of my albums ("will they think i'm crazy? will they think it's bad??") and i usually yell out, "don't read the journaling!" but i'm trying to be prouder about who i am and what i love to do so i thought i'd share a couple of pages here just to put myself out there a little and to try and get over my crafting shyness.

i usually don't do the one-photo-per-page thing but this deserved its own page. at the age of 27... i finally got my drivers license.

my scrapbooks were usually filled with photos from gatherings with friends or special events. i'm finding that i take less and less photos each year and i don't take as many when i'm out and about with friends. so for this album, i started making pages that sum up a season with daily life type of photos that normally wouldn't make it into the album or to document events that i have only one photo from.

washi tape detail. yay! shake shack shroom burger. double YAY!

this is terrifying for me so please be nice! especially since in this album, i branched out an tried out several new things. i've been scrapbooking since high school but for the first time, i'm actively looking to learn new techniques and to see what else is out there. and i'm finding so much inspiration! i'm really excited about how much i'm learning.

happy weekend and rabbit, rabbit, rabbit! 
how is it already june??