Patriotic Scrapping

We'll be on vacation in Florida this year over the July 4th holiday. We're taking the girls to a Pirates Independence Day. They are SO obsessed with Pirates of the Caribbean; so this should be a blast for them! I've already started thinking about how I'll scrap all our pictures from the trip. I'll take my laptop so I can play on rainy days. Sometimes, if the weather gets really crazy, I even have the pictures scrapped before we even return home.

This year, my vacation scrap kit needs to be a patriotic-beachy-pirate theme. This should be a challenge! But I've already made some papers to get me started and thought I'd share a preview with you. I'll post the papers as freebies over the next week and will share the rest of the kit and some layouts when I return home. Want to see some of my papers thus far?



Check back later for the first download. I'll post the download link HERE sometime in the next 24 hours! :)

Another nice kit that would work well can be found HERE

It's the July monthly kit over at the Designs by J3 forum. Here's a preview of it:

Isn't this great?!? :)

Read the Instructions

New Instructions:

Please look to the left of your screen and scroll down.
Note the new blinkie in my side bar.
After noting the cute little blinkie, click it!
Now jump on in and talk with the newest moderator at Designs by J3 Scrapbook Forums! :)

YEP! That's ME!! :)

I'll be posting some of my layouts over there each week. So please drop by and leave me a comment or join me in the mornings for a cup of coffee and a chat.

My Latest Adventures

I'm finishing off the last sealant coats on the countertops. I'll apply the very last one on Friday. Then the countertops can sit and cure for a week without being bothered with spills and splatters while the girls are away. Even with teenagers, it's next to impossible to find a few hours when the countertops are without risk of teen abuse!

Now that I'm nearly finished with the counters, I have my sights set on the backdrop behind the stove/oven. I'm thinking that the Tuscan Red brick would be nice back there. DH nearly had a coronary when I mentioned the color red in the same sentence as the word kitchen. I tried to explain that it's not a "true red" but more of a brownish-wine color. But he continued to panic much in the same manner as he did when I mentioned the wine colored couch I had my eyes on. I don't know what it is about that man and the color red!?!

I picked out some stones and made a pattern on paper for what I want to put down on the floor in the entryway, in front of the door. I also want to pull out the carpet on the stairs....or at least the carpet on the risers of the stairs. I sat down this weekend with my handy PSP program and drafted out a scrolled design for some decorative stair riser covers that I want DH to cut for me. I thought about buying them from this company but the cost of doing just the entryway stairs would be bankrupting since the stairwell is 52" wide and would need special cuts for the stairs going around the corner. In other words, all specially cut :(

So I'd rather just do it ourselves, cutting a scrolled design from the center and backing that with a rusty variegated copper color. I haven't decided if I want plain wood on the steps themselves yet. But I'm leaning more towards the individual rug runners with some copper colors with green in them. (I know, more "red" again! ~sigh~)

I also worked on a new scrapbook kit this weekend. I need to scrap DH's promotion ceremony pictures and decided that I'd just make a kit to use on all his fire department pictures, articles, etc. Especially with Katelyn wanting to be a paramedic, I'm sure I'll find multiple uses for such a kit! I have the elements done; that was the easy part! But now it's a matter of background papers....that's the challenging part. I have a couple of blues and golds done. But I'm still not satisfied with them overall. I'll try to post a preview of what I have done so far tonight when I get home.

But for now, it's off to work again. Hope y'all had a great weekend! :)

New Pics of Bannisters

I'm hoping that the word "bannisters" is correct? I don't know what else to call the tops of the stair walls. Is there another name for these?

I added some brown squares and circles from the countertop paper to the granite coming up the entryway of the house. Here is a picture after adding these.
Close up without the flash:


What do you think? My friend Debbirai suggested adding some brown to these. I figured this would be the easiest way of doing so without painting over the previous work while still keeping the granite look. And no, I didn't sit and cut all these shapes out. I'm much too impatient for that! I took my handy-dandy scrapbook corner cutters, the one inch circle and the 2 inch square and just popped these babies out in a matter of seconds. So I guess I can officially say that I have truly "scrapbooked" parts of my house! *LOL*

Scrapping Update:
I've updated the Patriotic QPs with the download links. Please leave a comment if you download :)

Newly Tutorial Link:
I found the coolest tutorial link here. It's for Photoshop; but I played around with it last night and found the tutorials to work great with my PSP8 also! She does a great job of explaining and using examples and pictures.

Bannisters, Upcoming Freebies, & Fathers Day

I finally figured out what I could do with the bannisters coming up the entryway stairs. I added an inlay design that looks like brown marble, made from scraps left over from the kitchen countertops. It's looking much better. I'll try to post a picture this weekend :)

I've also been working on a Patriotic mini scrapkit between coats of the polycrylic. I'll be posting those this weekend also.

Father's Day is always a challenge for us. DH gives no hints of things he might like that is at the same time doable for us. I think that's why he does it! He'll only give very vague hints, like this one:
"Well, I'd like to have that one camera, can't remember the model number, but it has to be that specific one, and only if it has the blah, blah lens with the such and such attachment that will only work with the this & that software." See what I mean?!?

We always make him special pictures for his locker at work or a Daddy scrapbook or something along those lines, with a gift card to Home Depot, his favorite shopping locale. But this year we've done something different. Instead of giving him pictures to post in his locker, we posted HIS picture for the rest of the world to see. Using Mrs. Miles Superhero Kit, we made a scrapbook page. Then the girls wrote a nomination for a local radio station's Heroes list and submitted both. So far, DH hasn't seen it nor did he hear it on the radio since he's the only one in the house who won't listen to country music. BUT, some of the other guys at the station have seen it and are teasing him about being "bigger than Superman" and calling him Superhero. The girls, too, have started throwing in comments about Superman and Heroes from time to time. He still doesn't have a clue! So we've decided to print the radio station's webpage on Father's Day and put it on his dinner plate! I'll try to post a copy of the nomination letter later; it's really sweet.

Hope y'all have a great weekend :)

Now need to change entire house?!?!

Ok, here is the stair bannister going up into the loft area:


This looks ok to me at the moment. But here is the bannister going into the hallway from the front corridor:


(There really are no black dots going up the left side of the bannister! Those popped up when I shrank the pic for the blog!~sigh~)

I'm not so sure I like this one after putting all that time into that aggravating orb finial :( The light colored raw wood beneath it just doesn't work for me! So should I paint it? Also that wood upright beam that the orb sits on...should I paper it to match the bannisters?

DH says he likes it just fine the way it is; but then again, he likes the "rustic country" look in the house. I'm not sure that wallpaper, the granite effect and that wood work together. I am just not sure I like it now and not sure what to do to make it look better to me.

HELP!!

OK, NOW I'm aggravated!

Putting this Paper Illusions onto a countertop is fairly easy, even over the corners and curves of the counter. But then I had the bright idea to make all the stair bannisters granite instead of the previously bright, dirty white. The bannisters themselves aren't too complicated and are coming along quite nicely. But at the top of the stairs, there is a giant orb finial, similar to this that must match the bannisters. I've worked on this thing off and on for 2 days now and still can't get it done! Because of all the curves, I have to tear the paper into tiny little pieces so that they lie down smoothly. And just about the time I think I've got it, I hit a square corner or connection between the round and the square parts, and paper starts popping up!

On the bannisters, where the paper wraps around the sides, I've just been laying a book on top of the bannister for about 30 minutes, and VOILA, everything sticks nice and snug. But I haven't found anything that will work on a round top! And standing there holding the darn thing between every little piece of paper about the size of a dime is really getting old!

I started on it again after work today and had this bright idea to attach those thick, fat rubber bands around it to hold the wet paper. Looked like it would work. Seemed to be working. But then poor Bubba (our black lab) went running through the hall, hit the orb with his tail. Rubber bands and paper went flying down the hall, making a huge mess and traumatizing the poor dog who will now probably need a doggie psychiatrist for his PTSD!

I'm ready to pull the darned thing out of the base and hurl it through the bay window that I want to replace this summer! Why not kill two birds with one stone, as the old saying goes?!?

Sunday News

I didn't get as much done on the countertops and bannisters as I would have liked yesterday. The "stop and start" of running the girls around, attending my niece's dance recital, having family in from out of town, and laundry took a big dent out of the hours of my day. I'll try to get back on it later today and will try to post some pics from yesterday.

DH wasn't home yesterday. He spent most of the day at the funeral of a fellow firefighter. Please keep this family in your prayers.

Please also keep a fellow scrapper's family in your prayers. Sweet Carla passed away yesterday after a brain aneurysm.

Countertops continued

The countertop that makes up the dining room bar is now done. I took a picture with and without flash; neither of them do it justice. But here are the pics anyways:



Here is the little counter by the stove that I started tonight:


You can really see the difference in the counter tops in this one.
One of the best things about all this is that DH stood in there last night and said, "Wow! These counters are really turning out well. But now they make these old cabinets look even worse! We really gotta do something with the rest of this kitchen!"

YESSIRRREEE!!! Maybe he'll get a hair up his butt and pull down all the cabinets doors for me?!? Then I can repaint the entire kitchen and refinish the cabinet doors. Those things alone would help tremendously!

Have I mentioned how much I really hate that golden kitchen?!? *LOL*