My cute little girl...

I have not bought wood mounted stamps in forever. I love to be able to see where I am putting my image. When I saw this sweet little girl and her kitty in the new SU catalog I put a tab on her page and tried to talk myself out of it. I asked all of my friends if they were going to buy her.

Nope...not even one was interested.

I knew I had to haver her she reminded me of my youth. Look at how sweet she is with her basket of flowers and the little kitty by her side.

I was also excited because I knew I wanted to use my Copics, my long lost Copics. I love them and yet I have been ignoring them for so long. Partly because I really need more. I don't have a lot of colors even though I have over 20 markers.

That is why you see the other markers sitting here too. I can't wait to color the girl on the swing but I want to get some of that cute flower stuff that you stick to the card with glue and it looks like real flowers. I also really need to get some skin colors and some browns.

I will just add them to my list of things I need...can we say nestabilities? I really need those! Seriously...

Here is the full card. I used mostly SU supplies. I had some Rose Red patterned paper. So I mounted that on Rose Red to off set it. Then took Always Artichoke and put Mello Moss on top of that.

Double mounted my little friend in greens and the sayings in the Rose.

The cute little flower is from Close to my Heart and the leaves are made from green twill. I also added a sparkly brad to the inside of the flower.

You can see that here with the detail.

I love the way the leaves turned out.

I thought myself so cleaver. Haha...I don't know why I had never thought of that before.

Here is the inside of the card. Enjoy. This is for the Splitcoast Stampers Sketch Challenge 199.

Has it really been two weeks?

Wow I am so sorry life has been a little crazy around these parts. I have not gotten a whole lot of scrapping or card making done. I did a cute card for my hubby for Valentine's Day and didn't take a photo...opps! I have been working on catching up on some old photo's of the kids. I did a sweet 16 page so look for more on that later. Today I wanted to at least give you something so I decided to share with you something from several years ago!

Several years ago my friend Linda invited me to go on a fabulous spa weekend retreat that involved a lot of scrapbooking. We were so excited no kids...lots of room...lots of scrapbooking...right on Lake Michigan...and spa treatments.

We followed the instructions and after we got off the interstate and weaved our way through this cute little town we had to find Alice Road. We sure were supprised when this is the first thing we saw. It should have been our first indication that perhapse we were not going to quite get what we paid for! We seriously could not stop laughing. Who has the street sign painted on a telephone poll. Freinds I don't think we are in Chicago anymore! We just laughed and laughed and tried to wipe the tears out of our eyes so we could find the spa. This was a bad thing since we had already drank our 32 oz of diet pepsi.

A side not on the scrapbook page itself....I made these serindipity squares and typed up my story over the faded photo.

Once we found our desitnation and pulled up ehem in front of a garbage pile. We decided to go in before we took all our stuff in. We wanted to see our space...We got out of the car without making a mess on ourselves and approached the house. We climbed up the railroad ties that were the stairs (I am not making this up people) and then we discoved we would have not a lot of room to scrap. It turned out to be abotu 3 foot by 3 foot. WOW how much was this weekend?

We got the grand tour and then were told we slept next door. As we went over we noticed the nice railings made out of a barn gate and the row of old fashion iron rocking chairs.

We walked through the back porch that was pretty much a storage shed and had appliances all over the place and was told that someone lived in the basement. We had a beautful view of...no not a lake but of a garage.

Here is our fabulous retreat you can see the first two photo's are of the back porch and then the kitchen the living room the front porch. The house was actually super cute. Oh did I mention that first thing that we saw rocks in a crock pot in our kitchen. Our bedroom was actually the living room. The girls that come every year, yes people actually go back, got to stay in the real bedrooms.

The best thing yet our "room" doubled as the spa.

Uh...what? Yep ladies and gentlemen we are on a scrapbooking retreat, a relaxing spa weekend. Scrapbookers as you know stay up late and sleep in...yep us scrapbookers had to be up and out of our rooms by 9 am. So the spa can be set up. Uh...what?

My friend and I made the best of it as what other

choice did we have. The whole weekend involved a whole lot of laughter.

Here are some highlights of our first and second night. We played cards and laughed. We read a little and laughed. We scrapbooked and laughed. We ate and laughed.

Laughing cures anything.

Still no sign of that lake though.

As you can see from the next page here are all the fabulous spa treatments available. You can also see how much room we had to scrapbook, it is a good thing we liked each other! Yes we were that close the whole weekend!

I decided that I was not going to do any fancy spa treatments.

They were extra money and I felt that I already spend way to much at the shack.

We also had no real customer service while we were there. Aparently their was a group that always goes up and not only did they get the good rooms but all the attention too. When the hostess came in...very late mind you. She didn't even say hi or welcome to us for a good half an hour or so.

We did manage to sit across the table from a really nice gal not to far from where we live.

The shopping area that was there was so unappealing that we decided to go to the local store which was super fabulous! I cannot remember the name of it but it was one of the best scrapbooking stores I have ever been to.

We didn't really get to know the other women in the room as they really talked just to thier friends. One girl didn't even finish one page! I think I managed to do about 20 pages.

Remember how I talked about a fabulous weekend of scrapping involving spa treatments and not kids. Well guess what? The hostess decided to bring her kid. Wow...have you ever been around a bunch of women? Women late at night scrapbooking? The conversation is not always kid worthy. I mean it was nothing bad but come on...we all paid to get away and now here is a kid. One that I don't even know.

Oh and the lake...there it is. We saw it on our way out. It was a few miles away and took us a while to find it. I beleive the ad said it was right on the lake...meaning we could see the lake from our room. Wowzer. What a weekend. We really did have so much fun but you better beleive the next time either of us go away for a scrapbooking retreat and spa we will make sure we are getting what we pay for. We want testimonies and photos!

Meet me in St. Louis...

I have been negleting my little ole bloggy blog and I must appologize!

I have just been running here and running there and then running back again. It is basketball season at my house and there is no time for papercrafting :(.

Here are a few pages that I did a while back and as you can see they are all about St. Louis. My oldest daughter bowls and made it to the state finals right across from St. Louis so we decided to make the trip a combo trip of bowling and fun family weekend.

She did fabulous by the way...made it to 13th in the state! We were so proud of her.


We found the best hotel right across the way from the arch. The view from our room was amazing!!! The room was only a little over $100 a nigth and it was a corner suite to boot. We splurged durring the trip and ordered room service (the first time I ever did that) It was so fun...I am not so sure if it was worth it but we had a blast!

It was even more beautiful at night. You could see all the lights over the river.


I really like how I used the buttons on these first few pages and the chip board with the buttons inside...I never know what to do with those frames. I thought it to be so very brilliant. ;)

Here we are on a boat tour. This was a ton of fun because we got to just enjoy the different things along the river and we learned a ton about how they made the bridge that goes across the river.



It was a sad story too as many men lost their lives.
We of course could not go to St. Louis without going inside the arch and so that is what these photos reflect.

I don't remember ever being in the arch, though my parents swear they took me as a child. uh..hu. Anyway it was cool we rode up in the Egg shaped elevator cart. I kept expecting to see Mork from Orrk pop up. That would have been fine as I know the and shake pretty well.

Fun little Valentines

Here is what I worked on over the weekend. I had grand plans to get tons of scrapbooking and cardmaking done but life got in the way.


I enjoyed lots of baby time on Saturday and then watch a few movies and then Sunday we all went to church and when I came home I got busy on cute little Sofia. Sofia was a RAK from my friend Theresa who has a gathering at her house for me last week. She had mentioned how she just got some new goodies and was showing me these and I ohhed and ahhed and wala. Now I have a few Sofia's from Paper Pretties. I was originally working on a nother card but I just couldn't get it to come together. I decided to move on. I found the best little card sketch blog over the weekend called 2 sketches 4 you. I was hoping to have this card in time to enter the contest but I didn't make it since it closed on Saturday and I worked on this on Sunday...so close. The paper is from the February 2008 PersonalScrapper Kit featuring Scenic Route's Loveland paper. I loved this paper and was so glad to have had a little left to make up a few cards.


I colored the card with markers from CTMH and SU and then used pop dots to bump up one of the hearts. I added some Liquid Glass and some glitter via the Spica Glitter Pen by Copic. I also added a little hand detail around the little girl mimicing the black and white stripes from Scenic Route. I love how it turned out.

Here is another view of Sofia close up. I am sorry she looks a little blury.