The second half of Acts of Love

I had a very busy day! I spent it with my 2 year old grandson and he is a ball of energy.  I am very tired grandma as I write this for all of you tomorrow.  I had a ball with Chaz and am so grateful to have this little boy in my life.  I wouldn’t trade the day we had today for anything.  He is very special. 

So here are the last pages of my Acts of Love tag book.  First I want to back up and take a look at the cover.  After I finished it yesterday, I thought the ring looked awfully bare and added some ribbons and fibers. It did help. 

That’s it for this project, but I’ll be back tomorrow with something new and I hope inspiring! 

Acts of Love—a tag book for 14 days

When I showed you all my Valentine’s Box, I told you that I do something nice for my husband every day for the 14 day leading up to and including Valentines Day.  This year I am upping the ante and trying to add acts of service and love besides my little gifts.  I’ve created this little tag book to set on our family room coffee table to remind me to serve him in love. 

We’ve been married for 38 years, and it’s so easy to forget to treat my husband as special as I did when I was trying to win his love.  I feel pretty confident in his love, but I want to keep putting love deposits in his love bank and treating him like a king will do that. 

I’m going to show half of the book today and half tomorrow simply because I don’t have the time to post all the pictures. 

It’s a very simple little book.  I used a tag from Tags, Boxes and Bags and custom size to about 6” long and 4 1/2” wide.  I cut lots of swirls, hearts, butterflies and birds to use while embellishing it.  I used Gypsy Font for the title of the book and some rhinestone swirls as well as a Prima flower from my stash on the cover. 

The paper was a package I bought on clearance at Archivers last spring when my husband and I took a little trip to Chicago.  It’s a Cosmo Cricket pack called Everafter and really is a wedding collection, but I don’t have any wedding pictures I wanted to scrap with it and thought I could adapt it to Valentine’s Day.  It worked out nicely.  I really love Cosmo Cricket.

I used I Corinthians 13 as a basis for the book and have put part of the chapter on each page.  I wrote some act of service for each day on the tags, and I will share those with you tomorrow. 

Right now I’m just going to show you pictures for the first 7 days. 

OK, so really simple, right! More tomorrow! 

Giving Thanks

Today is Veteran's Day, and I for one am grateful for all those families who make the sacrifices that come when a family member joins one of our armed forces and serves our country.  It is a huge sacrifice and one without which we couldn’t enjoy the freedoms we now have.  Thank you, all of you, who served and those who endure long periods of time without your loved ones and who sometimes endure the loss of that loved one.  Thanks YOU!

What are you thankful for?  That’s the question I asked myself when I started this project. I wanted to create a project that put all those things I hold dear together and expressed my feelings.  My husband jumped in when he saw what I was doing and added his own thoughts.  It turned out great except for the couple of words that I got crooked and I didn’t catch it until it was too late to change it. 

For this project you’ll need:

One sheet of solid colored card stock

One sheet of background paper

one small scrap of contrasting paper

One 12x12 artist canvas

Paint to cover the edges of the canvas

Mod Podge

Glue

Tools:

Gypsy

Several Cricut Font Cartridges.

paint brush

craft knife

This project started with my Gypsy and really was pretty easy because of the Gypsy.  I used just about every font I have, and I threw in a few graphics in to fill some holes and to add interest to the canvas. 

Before I cut the words out, I took my 12x12 canvas and painted the edges with black paint.  It took at 3 coats to sufficiently cover the canvas.  Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of this process as well as all the other steps.  After the sides dried, I liberally painted the canvas with Mod Podge and added a sheet of paper on top of the canvas from the Old World stack from DCWV and then liberally spread a coat of Mod Podge over the paper. 

I cut the words from a sheet of black Core’dinations paper and then left them on the mat until I was ready to glue them on.

When the canvas and paper was dry, I trimmed the edges of the paper that over lapped the edges of the canvas, and sanded off the rough edges.  This meant that I had to go back and touch up the black paint on the edges, but I didn’t do that at this point. I began gluing the words on the canvas using the negative images left in the paper as a guide.  I actually laid the 12x12 negative image of the words on the canvas and began gluing the words on according to the outlines of the words.  I did cut one of the graphics in a deep autumn orange to give a little pop of color and to add interest.

Once all the words and graphics were glued on and dry, I went back and repainted the edges pulling some of the paint onto the edges of the paper.  I like the look this added to the canvas.  Sorry for the glare on this picture.  Pulling the black paint onto the top of the canvas covered the edges of the paper which has a white core. 

At this point it was time for a top coat of Mod Podge, and I was careful to make paint brush strokes as though there were actual paint strokes on the canvas. 

And I was done.  I hung it on my family room wall to show you my work. 

One more look:

That crooked “friends” is really bugging me!  Oh, well!  I like how it turned over all. 

My final words for you all today are be thankful for the freedoms we have and the people who have made it possible.!

Remembering an Aunt and Uncle

As you’ve seen in my previous posts, I have a very large extended family.  But you’ve only seen my maternal side.  Today I am scrapping about my father’s side of the family.  My aunt died last Friday morning and her death is really what brought on this week of Heritage scrapping.  When I got home from work that afternoon, I pulled out a couple of boxes of old photos because I knew I had the photo I used for today’s blog and I wanted to look at it again.

I never knew my aunt and uncle as they are in this photo. In this photo they are newly wed, very young and you can see how happy they are.  By the time I came along they already had three boys and were knee deep in their farming and feeding their cattle. 

I can remember going out to my aunt and uncle’s farm, the smell of manure thick in my nose while I tried to keep up with my cousins who never wanted to play Barbies or house!  No, it was soldiers with their little green army men or cowboys and indians.  If we were outside, we tramped over haystacks and around the the cattle pens which always stirred the cows up and often caused my uncle to check out what we were up to. 

I remember standing on a stool while I watched her make dumplings for the chicken and dumplings we were having for supper.  I remember her telling me that “once you put those dumplings in the pot, you put the lid on and don’t ever take the lid off and NEVER,NEVER stir it.”  Her tacos were incredible!

She had an infectious belly laugh that was a delight to hear.  

My uncle lost his arm to a corn harvester about 45 years before he passed away.  He was lucky to have survived.  When I decided to get married, there was no question that my dad would perform the ceremony.  So with my dad doing the ceremony, I asked my uncle to give me away.  I proudly walked down the aisle on his hook arm.  He was pretty proud too. 

With my aunt gone, its seems to have marked the end of my Dad’s family for me even though there is a younger brother who still is still living.  Her death made me miss my Dad and grieve all the years we’ve lost. 

If you’ve read all the way to here, bless you.  Now for the LO

This is only a 1 page LO.  I don’t do 1 page LOs very often, but with old photos, sometimes you may only have one photo. 

I left the picture uncropped after I scanned it and printed it off.  The background is part of the story..  We came from southeastern Colorado and it is dry and often there’s not much green to see unless it’s yucca plants, cactus, or tumble weeds.  You can see this in the picture. 

The paper is once again from my stash and is old, old, old.  The flower border is from Gypsy Wandering and is cut at 11” long.  I cut two of them.  I cut extra flowers and I curled the petals of the extra flowers to give more dimension and attached them on top of the original flowers in the border.  I put three dashes down the middle of each petal because I thought it looked good. The jewels are from Paper Studio.  Oh, and the font is Gypsy Font. 

I love the way this turned out. 

What I am learning about scrapping old photos is that the most important part of the work that I do putting these photos in a scrapbook is the journaling.  Make plenty of room for it. 

Here are some close ups:

Thanks for stopping by!  Please leave a comment.  I love to read them.