Breaking into card-making

I made my first card! Several of the people who do scrapbooking blogs I love also make cards, so I've been seeing others' beautiful designs for months now and contemplating throwing my hat into the card-making ring. As of this morning, my hat is in the ring, and here's the proof:

A graduation card for a friend made with a plain white card, some scrapbooking paper, an my cricut. I do love my cricut. And it was refreshing to have a small project that I can start, complete, and hand off to my friend, all in one day. Scrapbooking is a bit more of a long-term, involved process. In fact, I'm working on one now, I suppose I'll post about that next time.

What do you do with a one-year-old?

Continued.
Yes, I'm still wondering what to do with my one-year-(and-three-months)-old. Paper dolls always seems like a fun activity, but she's far too destructive for paper products to last long.

Then, I remembered that my friend had given me magnet dolls - genius! And Cora did love taking them off the filing cabinet, putting them in a different place, and watching as they still stick. She doesn't really get that the outfits go on top of the little people, but I let her organize the world as she sees fit. Here's what the set of 8 people and 8 outfits looks like:

This inspired me to make another spin on the paper doll - the felt doll. Normal felt does stick to itself/other felt, but Cora really loves velcro. So, I thought why not stick velcro on the back of stiff felt? Works like a charm! I got the patterns to cut out from the smile and wave blog, and after a little tracing, cutting, and applying self-adhesive velcro dots, here was the finished product:
Well, not quite. The doll actually had a blue wig, but Cora put in her "secret stash" somewhere, so for this picture, I just stuck on one of the shapes I'd cut out.

Truthfully, Cora could care less that this is a cute doll with a fashionable little dress on. So, I'll have to weigh the pros and cons for future cut-outs. Do I painstakingly carve out flattering dresses, skirts, pants, and shoes for our little doll? Or do I just cut out your basic triangle, square, pentagon shapes and slap some velcro on them, let the kid entertain herself with the mere "scrrnch" of ripping velcro over and over and over again? Probably some of both. I think I'll do a board, like the smile and wave blog did, and have a couple dolls with some outfits, along with quite a few random shapes.

Bottom line: success! One-year-ish-old entertained by both magnet and felt dolls for 15 minutes!

Etsy

The Etsy lab is in Brooklyn, a mere hour and fifteen minutes by bus and subway from Hoboken! They offer classes/workshops every Monday night in different crafty things. Yesterday, there was a drawing class, geared especially for people who don't draw. That would definitely be me. So, I took my bus to my subway, and popped up in DUMBO, "Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass," a previously-industrial-renovated-gentrified-and-polished-up-for-wealthy-hipsters area. The Etsy lab is on the 7th floor of these cool warehouse buildings.

The drawing class was surprisingly fun. The artist, Carol, started us off with a left-handed portrait of the person sitting across from us, great because it reduced expectations and introduced us to someone. I lucked out that the guy sitting across from me had lots of easy-to-draw facial hair. The second set of exercises was drawing objects without lifting the pen from the paper. That was hard and I refuse to show any of those, ha.

The third involved taking something we'd drawn in the one-liner exercise, redrawing it, and detailing it with thicker/thinner lines and color. She did a demo of this. After 15 minutes of concentrated effort, I had a rather cute pink elephant to show. All-in-all, pretty fun, and I hope to go back for another Monday craft night at Etsy.

Entertainment Attempt #1

Crayons are classic, right? Even better than classic crayons are these baby-fied crayons, which have a little sponge at the end and liquid in the tube part. You have to smush the spnge several times to make the (washable!) colored liquid flow. The benefits are no lid, no wax to eat, no paper to tear off, and it dries up. I was fascinated by these nifty baby crayons. Cora was more interested in dropping them on the floor. Most of the marks on the page are mine. She made a few dots before she decided to drop the crayons and pull at the pages in the sketchbook.

Mild success. I was entertained. Cora was intrigued for about 3 1/2 minutes, but she stayed in the chair without fussing for at least 10 minutes.

Cora's First Birthday: Travel Theme

Why do people always say children grow fast? They don't! Cora's first year has been the longest year of my life, and she has seemed to grow remarkably slowly. I guess, though, looking back, time always seems to pass faster than when you're in the moment. No matter how quickly or slowly the year seems to have passed, however, every 365 days (roughly) demands a birthday party! And we delivered.

Cora's first birthday party was travel themed. Here was the invitation:

Now, I did not design these lovely invitations. Jennifer of Nounces on Etsy.com (plug: http://www.etsy.com/transaction/40790734) customized her design for me for a mere $15, then I could print as many as I wanted. Genius. I did have the paper cutter, corner rounder, and perforated-line cutter to add those realistic touches.

For decor, we had a map with pins showing all the places Cora had been this year, a sign saying, "Thank you for flying CM Airlines" with a bowl of peanut/pretzel baggies, and plastic cups with the CM Airlines logo, most of which was handled by my awesome sister, Darcy.

The big hit of it all was the cake made by Lauren, my talented sister-in-law, who flew in that night and stayed up till all hours of the night, finishing this masterpiece: a partial globe with a cute fondant airplane and a trailing streamer reading, "Happy Birthday Cora!"

For the remainder of the decorations, my wonderful mom handled flowers and balloons in the blue, pink, and green colors of the party. So, yes, team effort was the key word here! Cora conveniently woke up at 12:45 from her nap, almost as if she knew her cue. She was happy as a clam for nearly three hours of BBQ lunch, bubbles, candles, singing, cake-eating, and assisted present unwrapping. Cora made out like the baby bandit that she is with a plane full of toys and was proud of it.

Lastly, I did actually make the party favors, pocket-sized passport photo albums. The first page has her actual passport photo, and each of the rest of the pages has a picture of Cora traveling (in a carrier, baby bjorn, gift sack, rolling bag, cannon, backpack, etc.).

If you would like to DIY, here's the gist: I ordered these little passports from JoAnn's. (http://www.joann.com/joann/catalog/productdetail.jsp?CATID=cat2607&PRODID=prd27727)
Then, I picked out 13 photos, resized them in iPhoto (crop to iPhone 2x3 size), printed the photos out on sticker paper (available at Staples and such), and peeled and stuck! Well, it was pretty tricky to cut them all out and peel them all, so I got help from my very large family. We had a passport-making evening. 4-6 hours of work split up among 4-6 people worked very well. And now everyone has a pocket-sized photobook of Cora's travels.

Happy birthday, baby!

A weekend to myself

That's right. This weekend, Chad and Cora are in Texas, and by some fluke, I was not scheduled to work at Starbucks. I had many plans to spend the full 48 hours scrapbooking, but when I went to look at the desk that was heaped with mail, cords for who knows what sort of electronics, and, yes, scrapbook paper, I realized that I could do nothing creative until I'd cleaned the house.

Lame, yes, husband and baby gone, no work, and I clean the house. Well, first I went for a jaunt on the elliptical machine at the Y - since I never have time for that anymore - then, I felt energized for an afternoon of intense cleaning. A mere four hours of vacuuming, washing, drying, Lysoling, scrubbing, and mopping later, and I sat on my couch, beer in hand, admiring my clean handiwork. Okay, I was ready to scrapbook. Oh, wait, I need a little inspiration first. I pulled out my new copy of "clean & simple scrapbooking" by Cathy Zielske and immediately felt the rays of creative energy seeping from the pages.

One paragraph in particular really stopped me: "It seems there is an underground travel agency that preys on new scrapbookers. They sell them advance tickets to a place called Caught Up. Geographically speaking, I have no idea where Caught Up is, but here's what I've managed to piece together. Most scrapbookers who buy their tickets never actually take the trip. And the few who do manage to board that plane to this imaginary land of milk and Hermafix discover the following: a sterile hotel with rooms of completed albums carefully lined up on numerous shelves - and that's it...It's very quiet there. And from what I hear, insanely boring...So if you've already bough that ticket, return it. Be a person who never stops exploring the process. Finish pages and be proud of what you've created. Don't lose joy to the notion that you should be somewhere called Caught Up, and that lots of other people are there, having the time of there lives. Remember these two words - insanely boring. Or at least that's what I've heard."

I'm not really the type of person who takes advice merely because it's handed to me, but I do think this advice is worthwhile, and likely not only for scrapbookers. Many people are looking for the land of Caught Up. Well, I'm attempting to let go of this fantasy land. I'm going to enjoy a quiet moment of scrapbook inspiration with Miss Cathy Zielske and Shiner Bock, then I'm going out to dinner with friends, and maybe later tonight, I'll spend some time just enjoying the presence of my mountain of beautiful scrapbook paper, not rushed to cut it all up and cover it with paste, but eager to begin another journey with it, a journey of Munich and Prague and Krakow. We'll take it a bit at a time.