New Release Today - Fizzle Pop from The Urban Fairy and Fan Freebie!

Today The Urban Fairy released her newest Little Kit, Fizzle Pop.  It is a contrast kit with a few beautiful and elegant black papers and some very cute elements.

"Fizzle pop is a lovely little kit with a pop of color on dark backgrounds! I've made sure to include a light colored paper as well! The 20 elements are perfect for layering and this is an ideal kit for some white space or elegance!"

Here is the kit preview. It can be found at the Digital Scrapbooking Studio here for only $1.75 right now.

And as a bonus, she has designed a coordinating set of colored papers available as a March 2013 Fan Freebie on her facebook site.

You can find them here and make sure to LIKE her page in order to access the fan freebie!!

Ok on to my layouts. Unfortunately I used elements from both the kit and the fan freebie so none of my layouts appear in the advertisting for the kit. Live and learn!!

Here is a cute layout of my husband's niece Lily. Isn't she a doll?

TUF Fizzle Pop and March2013 Fan Freebie

And here is a cute pict of my friend Tami's twins dressed as fairies.  Tami actually has TWO sets of twin girls. Can you imagine?  I am sure I will be featuring more picts of them in the future.  Thanks, Tami, for sharing all your great pictures with me!

TUF Fizzle Pop and March2013 Fan Freebie

The next layout featured our friend Ray's daughter.  We had her over for a playdate recently and she started hoarding all the balls we had out.  It was too cute not to take a picture of. I love her expression and I just knew I had to scrap it with the title MINE!!

TUF Fizzle Pop and March2013 Fan Freebie

And the LAST layout is a bit unexpected: It's a Banana Slug!  SO elegant! lol.  We met this interesting creature in the Muir Woods on a trip to San Fran a few years ago.  These are some big slugs (and the only real thing I knew about banana slugs was that they are the mascot for UC Santa Cruz. Thank you, Pulp Fiction) but they are really cool.  I was able to get a couple really nice shots and you can even see his vasculature.

TUF Fizzle Pop and March2013 Fan Freebie

Well that's it for this release. I hope you enjoyed the layouts.  Please leave me a comment or GFC me if you like my work!!  I'd really appreciate it.

Eggsceptional Craftiness - Egg planters

If you read my last post you know that I have been boiling hardboiled eggs for various food and craft purposes.  Well the inspiration for the egg craftiness was this Pinterest post about making little planters from egg shells.  OMG, how cute are these??  I really tried to get the original pin on this one, but I went back like 10 degrees of separation and I still hadn't located the original.

And these from Craftionary.net's Easter EGGS pinterest board

So I broke out the pan and boiled me up some eggs just for this purpose!  

Then I got to the task of hollowing out the eggs. In retrospect I could have blown out the raw eggs using the pinhole method.  But here is what I did to the boiled eggs:

boiled egg, sharp knife, small spoon

insert sharp tip carefully and cut the top off the egg

Hollow out.  If you are lucky the egg will just pop out. If not, you'll have to scrape it out

empty egg shells. I let them dry outside for a day or two

Then fill with potting soil and add plants. I have tons of succulents here in SoCal

Oh I poked a small hole in the bottom of each eggshell (with a very sharp corn holder) before filling in order to provide drainage. I also placed them on a bed of potting soil to allow them to drain. I hope these cuttings will grow and then they can be transplanted. I am wondering how long the eggshells will remain intact.  These would also be cute using dyed eggs from easter (using natural dyes of course....I hope to have a crafty post about this in the nearish future!)

What do you think??  Cute, right??

A post about a sandwich

OMG. I just made the BEST egg salad sandwich. As we gear up for Easter and all the egg-related fun projects I have planned in my head, I happened to have a bunch of hard boiled eggs at the ready for consumption. And while the feeding-hard-boiled-eggs-to-toddlers "eggsperiment" backfired (literally - wow- that was HEINOUS. I am not going to elaborate as this is a food post), the adults are today enjoying some fab-u-lous Egg salad.  Here it is:

3 hard boiled eggs
2 tablespoons (or more) mayo
1 tbsp (or more) yellow mustard
2 small sweet yellow peppers, coursely chopped
1/4 cup french onions.
ground pepper to taste

OMG - I know - french onions? you are saying. Ick.  But I had them leftover from some recipe that entailed breading chicken with them and thought I would throw them in. Best Idea Ever. Seriously - try it.

New Layouts from this week - "Artful Love" and "In Bloom"

This week I am featuring several layouts that I created with The Urban Fairy's "Artful Love" kit.  This is a HUGE bundle of beautiful purple, blue and pink elements. Here is the preview:

 And here are the creative team's pages that we created with the bundle:

I wanted to try a few new things on this kit including using hexagon elements and some very dramatic shading. Here are some cute pictures of Sarah and Noelle that I took at the park the other day after our music class.  I also did a cool thing where I "threaded" the charm through the thread stitching. Take a look at the close up.

Charm Close-up

For the second layout, I used some picts from a friend of her daughter's 1st birthday.  She is a real cutie and had on the most adorable colorful tutu. One neat thing I did with this layout is to use one of the butterfly cutouts as a clipping mask to show the paper underneath. Thanks to Kelly for letting me use these pictures!

And for the third layout I just had fun with a picture of the doggies that my mother-in-law took in front of our hydrangeas a few summers back.  

I also made up a cute layout for The Urban Fairy's "In Bloom" minis, which is part of a huge March Coordinated Collection with a lot of the designers at the Digital Scrapbooking Studio.  This are very colorful kits with these neat multicolored leaves and twists and branches that I love!

Each one of these minis is available for 1$ right now!

Brush Blooms

Card Stock

Leaves

Shabby Stock

Stamps

Twists

Now here is my layout. It's a cute pict that my hubby took of me and the boys last Mother's day, as well as a pict of one of the beautiful and exotic purple jacaranda trees that we have here in SoCal.  

Oh I should mention that I used one element (the frame) from Artful Love and some washi tape from the Washi Lover Volume 1, also from The Urban Fairy!