Inspired by words

Hi everyone!!

Can I wish you all a very happy New Year?! :)
Looking back, I had an awesome year. I already made a round up in my Thanksgiving post so I won't start over again, but yes, it was a nice year for me and I am glad that you are here to follow along with me where my creative endeavors bring me. :)

I wish you, and me, for 2014, success, health, love, joy and happiness and maybe some more sleep…. :) May you all have the time of your life. Every Week. Life is short and we have to make the most of it. All the time.

ok, today, on this last day of 2013, I'd like to show you a page that I made for Get it Scrapped for an assignment called: inspired by words.

Where do you go when you need good words? I turn to my board on Pinterest. :)
And the quote that spoke to me the day I decided to make a page was:

Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen.

And when I read it, I associated it with when we left Switzerland. Maybe you heard me say that on the Paperclipping roundtable, but when I was living there, I wasn't happy so when Patrick told me that we were leaving, oh my gosh, it should have been the best feeling ever, right?! Well, I was rather afraid of what we were getting us into. I had people telling me we were crazy to leave, some other who were saying we had everything we needed in Switzerland…. and all the thoughts of what would and could happen with the move, and while abroad, and starting over again, and, all that with a 3 months old baby and a 2,5 year old. It was scary. But at that time, I repeated to myself "it will be great!" and really, THAT'S THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO ME (US). Even with all the difficulties it brought us. So anyway, I think it was about time that I make a page about that very moment where we were at the airport and when we left….. bitter sweet moment….

The background paper is a memory file from Heidi Swapp, mounted on a color magic piece of card stock that I left white.

The title was cut with my Silhouette and stitched.

Lots of layering of fabric frame, washi tape, papers, flair, color shine splatters. :)

Layering. :)

There you go guys!! :) Now, go have a nice day and a great evening!!! Don't party too hard, but do take advantage of this special evening!!
And I'll see you again in the New Year!!!!

Happy New Year!!!! :)

Marie-Pierre

Hi everyone!

I hope you had a marvelous Christmas celebration!?

I would like to show you today some more of the Christmas cards I sent to my family and best friends. It took me about one hours per card so I made about 15. I had to pick and choose who was going to get one. 

To have a little more technical explanations of my cards, head over to the art Impressions blog where i detailed pretty much what I did and the products I used. :)

I wish you a Happy New year. 

May ALL your wishes come TRUE!!

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Marie

More ways to use the Try-Fold stamps

Hi everyone!
Hello Ai fans!

Today I'd like to share another way to use the Try-Fold stamps.
The fun thing about these stamps is that they coordinate, either way you use them, they will!! You could also use them on their own. :)

Here's what I mean:

For this card, I first stamped my Christmas tree. I then masked it (I stamped the image on a post-it note, fussy cut it and placed it on my card, over the stamped image) and stamped the chimney over it so that it looks like the tree is in front of the chimney, rather than on it's side.

I made the coloring with Copic markers. I'm not an expert at that, but I find that even with little practice, if you have 2 markers of one color (2 red, one paler than the other), you can get away with good results fairly easily. I stitched around my image to add some punch and a luxurious feel. :)

For this second card, I used only one of the 3 images. This Christmas tree is so pretty by itself!!!! I did add some snowflakes though. I stamped them with glue and sprinkled glitters over it. It's very elegant. I colored everything with watercolors. It's soft and beautiful. :)

There you go, I hope you enjoy my creations! Next Saturday I won't be posting for Art Impressions because of Christmas, so I'll see you again right after Christmas! :)

Merry Christmas to you and your family!!
And Happy Stamping!!

Marie

For a list of the supplies I used, go to the Art Impressions blog.

Geographic pride

Hi everyone!!

Christmas is right around the corner, how are you doing?? :)

I'd like to show you a page I made for Get it Scrapped today.
The challenge was to make a page about a place and represent the place with some way, maybe with a map, or an emblem, a sign that screams the place we were representing. Not easy. What would you do if you had to do something like that? You know, sometimes the challenges are such a good way to push me to create awesome pages. When I "only" create, I usually stick to what I know. When I have a purpose (other than my story and photos) in mind, I surprise myself. :)

So here's my page. I made it about the last trip I took with my husband before we had kids. I was 7 months pregnant and we went to Andalucia, Spain, for 4 days. It was an awesome trip and I don't know why I took so long to document it. Probably I was waiting for the perfect challenge. ;)

The symbols I decided to use: the bull (and I used a silhouette since I'm all about silhouettes!!), the flag (that I mounted on a black inked toothpick),

the hands of the flamenco dancer which impressed me so much(!),

and the map on which I stitched our road trip. I used my Silhouette to die cut the title and I used the image I found online, on the Andalucia tourist information website. With Photoshop, it's easy. :)

I used the puffy geotags to highlight the 4 cities where we stopped.

On the second page, the 4 cities we visited are highlighted with photos and special stories. I used a paper that had spot for journaling and pictures and I printed the photos so that they would fit in the designated spots.

I used stamps and different colors of ink to make stories pop up.

And I used letter stickers to make the city names pop up. :)

It's incredible. When I make the pages, they are just "one more page" but when I prepare them for my blog posts, weeks later, I revisit them and that's when I decide if I like them or not. If they talk to me, I do like them. This one was just another page, but I discover now that I like it SO MUCH!!! I realize that the pages that are more precious to me are not the most artistic ones, and are not the most beautiful ones, they are not the ones which will make me earn a place on a design team. They are the ones with real stories, and lots of details, and tons of photos, even if they are small. I like pages that tell a story. And I am lucky to be able to make these pages as part of Debbie's team at Get it Scrapped. I am happy to be able to make genuine pages that are really ME. :)

Thank you Debbie! :)

Thanks for visiting everyone!!

I'll have some December Daily's updates real soon. :)

Marie

Christmas card With Art impressions stamp

Hi everyone!
Hello Ai fans!!

This year again, I made some handmade cards. Not a ton. Maybe 15? They were very long to make because of all the coloring so I decided to limit myself to this amount and select the friends who will receive them carefully. :) They are not all the same but I do have about 4 kinds that I repeated. Today I would like to show you one of them:

It's a try-fold card, which means that I had to arrange 3 stamps on my card in a certain way so that the card can open and reveal the sentiment like so….

The stamped I used is call Sleepy Santa. I stamped it on watercolor paper and colored it with my beloved watercolors. :) Fussy cutting, as you know, is totally my thing, so it sure took some time, but it,s ok. I like it. :)

I love this stamp and I used it on some other cards I made, but in different ways. On my next post over at Art impressions, I'll show you the other card(s?) made by this exact same stamp set, but used in a totally different way.

For your information, during my time as a part of the Ai design team, I'll always post on Saturdays. I hope you'll be able to join me and create some AWESOME Christmas cards!! :)

Marie-Pierre

PS: head over to the art impression blog for my supplies list.

A page with gold.

Hi everyone!

Yesterday I was taking to you about a page I lost in water in my basement 2 years ago. Well, ironically, I went down to the basement today and there was water again! Fortunately, there wasn't nearly as much as last time and I could salvage everything. Not without a little work though.

Anyway, here's the page I lost in the water last time….

Do you see the small angel that i repurposed in my December album? :)

I loved this page and this photo of Arielle and I've been thinking about redoing it for 2 years. I kept everything that was on the page, but because it was soaked, the only thing I could reuse was the shrink plastic embellishment.

Whe Michelle over at Get it Scrapped gave me an opportunity to make a page for an article of hers about using gold foil on a page, I thought of this photo and redid a page. In a very different way. This is my scrapbooking style, 5 years later…. enjoy ;)

To get some tips and tricks on how to make the golden stars, head over to Michelle's article. :)

Marie

December Daily Day 6 - 7 - 8 and another FREE DIE CUT!

Hi everyone!

I'm very happy about all the feedback i get for my December album.
Making a December Daily album is sure fun, and a wonderful thing, but it has to be made, day by day, and that's not an easy task, especially when one have small children at home, or when one has a life, which we all do!! So, kudos to everyone who hang on and who are still in the game!! GOOD JOB! :D

So I added some details to my Christmas calendar and I'll show you the updated photo. :)

Here is day 6, once again :)

So, here is my calendar. I little more dressed up. As I was digging in my kit box, I found these 4 cute flairs and I thought you know what, If you don't use them now, you'll forget about them and you will never use them, so, let's go, put them on the page! :) I encourage you to do the same. There's really only a certain amount of things the brain can remember that you have and so many pretty things get forgotten in the many drawers of our scrap rooms and it's true that 2-3 years later, these little flairs in the bottom of the drawer will not be as cute. :)

I also added some sequins and rhine stones.

And a small tab with glitter letters. It's simple but a great way of adding interesting little details.

Day 7

For day 7 I decided I needed a pocket to store all these cards that aren't cards and that I can't put anywhere in my house, because they won't stand. My refrigerator isn't magnetic, and frankly, I'm happy about that. ;) lol

So anyway, I decided to back my calendar with a pocket made of patterned paper from the kit. I stitched the pocket, but I didn't stitched it onto the page, because I didn't want the stitch to show on the other side, right?! :) If you want something new, try stitching with a gold, or with a silver thread. The effect is gorgeous. It adds so much to a page.

To decorate my pocket, I pulled out some tags from the kit which I stitched in a line next to a large kraft and I mixed in a bare chipboard snowflake with a jewel in the center and two snowmen that I stamped and color lightly. I topped that arrangement with a NEW DIE CUT that I made and that you can have if you follow my blog and e-mail me!!! :) I finished with spelling the word cards with silver glittery Thickers. I kind of like this cluster. It's full of layers, and it's large….I like it! :)

Day 7

I wasn't very inspired for day 7. My girls had a birthday party to attend, and things weren't going very well for us so my husband proposed to bring them to give a 3 hours of time for myself. PERFECT! But what do you document when nothing really happens?

Well, here I wanted to use a picture of the birthday party, but didn't really want to mention the birthday party, because it was not really a part of pre-Christmas schedule if you know what I mean. I will mention the birthday party in our Project Life album though. So anyway I started to look for embellishments and I found this beautiful stamp saying "dear Santa" and it hit me: it was time for me to write to Santa and ask him for peace, and love. That's what I did, not mentioning any details of what makes my life hard these days…. I don,t really want to remember WHAT ahas happening that make me sad, I just wanted to free my heart and to maybe get some enlightenment in return. And you know what, it worked. The Christmas Magic and Santa did their job. :)

One again, I love my little embellishments cluster. I used a 4x6 journaling card from the Project Life Midnight Edition and over the talk bubble I layered velum peppermint candy, the "dear Santa" stamp and a velum starburst topped with a golden sequin. I stitched over the stamp, to make as if the ornament would hang from the tree and I stitched next to it and hung a real ornament which is a shrink plastic little tile that I had made for a page for Arielle when she was 10 months old. It's a stamp of an angel and her name and the date of that page is on it. I lost unfortunately lost the page when we got water in the basement 2 years ago, but I kept that little embellishment and now I thought it was the right moment to use it. I like that it adds so much dimension without being very bulky. And I like the angel. it fits with my Christmas theme. :)

Day 8

Pat brought us to a hockey game in Hartford and made for a fun afternoon with music, popcorn and hot chocolate. it was perfect!! It was the mascot's birthday so they made kind of a family event out of it with around 10 mascots meeting the kids. We were sitting really close to the ice and it was really great! I didn't journal about that though. The details don't interest me much here. I just wanted to have the feel of a fun family day. I'll journal about the details in my Project life album.

And while creating I found these great stamps in my kit box. I stamped with gold ink for a stunning effect!!

I'm now standing at day 9. I have post it on my pages to come with one word on each page for the story I want to tell or the feeling I want to cary over. I'll get to it tonight. :)

Thank you so much for stopping by, and don't forget to e-mail me if you want any of my die cuts files.

If you want to get ALL the die cut files, write in the subject line: Die cut giveaway pack
And if you already have the other die cuts and would like to add only this Christmas one, write in the subject line: Christmas only die cut.

My e-mail address is:  mariepierre_c(at)hotmail(dot)com
and make sure you follow me. :)

Thank you for your support!!!

Marie

PS: tomorrow I have a gorgeous gorgeous page to show you!!!!