It’s been awhile…

….a REALLY LONG while!  I'm glad to be back, I hope you'll welcome me and join me again!  I hope this time around I can keep up a little better with the blogging and not disappear for 10 months! … I can NOT believe it's been quite that long…. a lot has gone on in almost a year.

On the Stampin' Up front we have had some opportunity for travel.  Ryan and I enjoyed a trip to Alaska, I got to share convention in Sale Lake City with a group of my friends and downline and I was honored with a trip to St. George, Utah for Founders Circle!!  It was an absolutely amazing experience! With the help of pretty much the same group of friends and downline who attended convention (plus a few more), I ran a Fundraiser for Dreams Take Flight last September and I've kept up with offering clubs and classes here at home.  Speaking of home… home life has been busy (as it is for everyone) and over the past few months I've enjoyed having a little more time to share with my boys!  They sure are a lot of fun and they are definitely full of reasons to make me laugh.  

Lennon (my 4 yr old) had us laughing plenty this week with all of his talk about 'LOVE"! I do have a couple of 'love' themed pages to share with you, but first I'll share a bit about Lennon's love story.  One day this week on the way home from preschool, Lennon said to me about his 'girlfriend' at school, 'Raelynn, would be a wonderful wife for me'. I later asked him what would make her a wonderful wife.  He said, 'we'd marry' (that's what makes her his wife).  When I asked again what makes it wonderful his answer was, 'playing together'!  He also said that Ryan and I are a wonderful husband and wife because we play together and love each other.  I love his outlook on how simple things can be.  Maybe as adults we complicate things too much?!  I really think he's onto something with the simplicity of his idea on what makes things wonderful!  While he did say that he still needs me to take care of him for now, he seems to have his life all planned out!  Later that day when we picked Ethan up from school, he shared that he is going to be a teacher and a beautiful husband.  Even though his little love story is super sweet and made me laugh, I'm happy to tighten the reins a little and hold on to my little boy so we can snuggle up together, play lego or playmobil, and sing abc's! You've got a whole lifetime to grow up on me, my boy….let's just slow down a little.  🙂

With all this love in the air I wanted to devote some time to get back to my blog to share these pages with you! 

We created this first page at Scrapbook Club this month.  It was an intense one.  We had PLENTY of die-cutting to do on this page but overall most people loved it! This page was inspired by one I found on Pinterest! … one of my new favorite places to visit!  🙂  I simplified it a little and changed out the supplies to all Stampin' Up! product.  Although it was a case, it took me quite a long while to choose what products to use and to create the sample.  I do really like the end result and especially love those two boys on the page! I'll find the original creator of the page that inspired this and come back to share.  

Update: The original page was created by Nichol Magouirk.  Her work is stunning, I followed the links on Pinterest today (in my search to find her name) and ended up at her blog.  There are definitely more projects there that inspire me! 🙂 Thanks for sharing your talent NIchol!

I'll share some of the details. Here I attached the button to the heart by putting the brad right through the holes in the button and then into the heart.  It definitely won't fall off this way! 

I loved how Carrie Gaskin had used the negative space of the embosslit, Fashionable Hearts to create a 'Quilt Square' so I knew i wanted to add one to this page.  6 passes through the big shot later, I'm happy with how it turned out and I had plenty of hearts left over to decorate this page.  We also used an Early Espresso marker and the I Love Love wheel to stamp/roll love onto the tag. 

Hearts to adorn the page

I used a piece of Twitterpated Fabric and a Twitterpated button to add a little touch to this tag

Here is the second page we created.  It was definitely the much simpler of the two.  I cased a layout on the cover of a magazine as inspiration and used the Twitterpated line of products by Stampin' Up! as well as Letter It alphabet set and P.S. I Love You to come up with this page.  Enjoy!

I actually prefer it without the ribbon tails, but in attempt to take them off, I ripped the DSP underneath, so they are staying put for now! 🙂  Just a tip to save you a little time and cost though, it looks great without those little tails!  

With tokens and tickets being a popular trend in paper crafting I wanted to show them how I came up with creating customized tickets so we added this one to our page.  

I hope you've enjoyed the pages today and that some of you who followed me almost a full year ago will come back again! I'm looking forward to soon sharing a new blog design and with a 10 month hiatus I've got plenty of samples piled up to share!  Have a great Sunday!