Wedding Recipe Scrapbook Courtesy of Winnie & Walter and Pinkfresh Studio

A true match made in heaven, Winnie & Walter is teaming up with Pinkfresh Studio to bring you an Embellishment Kit filled with goodies for your card-making or scrapbooking delight!

 The kit comes in an adorable pouch, and includes stamps, a die, adorable heart confetti with the middles removed, tags, copper letter stickers, wood veneer, copper buttons, epoxy stickers, you name it!

It was the perfect set of products to get started on the Family Recipe Scrapbook that I make for each of my husband's cousins for their wedding shower. Here's a photo of the last scrapbook I made. The whole family sends in their go-to recipe and some photos of themselves, and then I put them all in pages. The one I'm working on now is scrapbook #6 out of 7. Cousin #7 is in medical school so I'm thinking I have a few years before that one is due : )

The bride-to-be is Abby ... the one fanning her dress above. It was SO HOT when her sister had her wedding pictures done. I love this shot, and I love that it fits PERFECTLY with the sentiment that Julie designed from Winnie & Walter. The frame around the sentiment is a stamp and die cut. I also stamped the single, lined diamond shape repeatedly to make my own background. The wood veneer girl was colored in slightly to give it two tones. Love the shinny copper alpha stickers ... they're great to put right on a photo.

  

The kit also comes with two cute tags enveloped with stiff mesh. Here's one of the tags. I took advantage of the mesh and loosely stitched gold thread through the holes. It's supposed to give the impression of a butterfly's path. The butterflies are from the Essentials: Audrey Cutaways. I wrapped the extra gold thread around the butterfly to make a shiny body.

  

Here's the scrapbook page. Aunt Jerry is not longer with us, but I love that she's still a part of the family recipe book. The word cutaways from Winnie & Walter are absolutely perfect for scrapbooking. With so many pages to do, I don't have a lot of time to spend on each one. These large format cutaways fill the space nicely in no time. In a Word: Love and The Big, the Bold and Blessings are used here.

 

Here's the other tag. This one I embellished with cut out leaves from In Bloom: Addie's Garden, some twine and gold thread, and a sequin. Done!

This is my family's page (recognize me?!) If you haven't tried this grape salad yet, you are MISSING SOMETHING AMAZING. Seriously. Every single event I take this to people are mobbing me for the recipe. The grapes make you think it's not bad for you, but once you taste it you realize that there's all sorts of sweet things going on. It's even good 3-4 days afterwards. I highly recommend trying this for your next summer get-together. Make sure you take copies of the recipe though!

   

Here's a bonus page. It doesn't use products from the kit, but there are several Winnie & Walter products on it so I thought I'd share. The Big, the Bold and Extras and The Party are represented here.

There's a big give-away on the Winnie & Walter blog; be sure to check it out! Thanks so much for looking. I'm just going to warn you, I'm in slight panic mode to get this scrapbook done before the wedding shower next Sunday. Pretty much anything posted on my blog until then is going to be a scrapbook page! OK, you've been officially warned : )

-Kelly

Memorial Day Chalkboard Art

I am so grateful for the sacrifices made by service men and women throughout history. This year I decorated my chalkboard for Memorial Day with a good quote, "Home of the free, because of the brave." Thank you, thank you to all who have served!!

For those in the United States, I hope you have a great Memorial Day weekend with your family. We're still in the process of moving, but I hope to buy a grill this weekend and get our summer started off right!

Fusion: Easy Layered Flowers

Welcome to another fun Fusion Challenge! Today's card is indeed a fusion of everything ... the yellow and white flowers on the blue background, and the sketch. I initially turned the sketch 90 degrees counter-clockwise and just had the striped blue cardstock as the base, but the sentiment seemed too close to the bottom so I mounted the smaller blue base on a large format white base.

 
Aren't the flowers lovely? They are all from a set that was just released at Top Dog Dies yesterday! It's called Pretty Petals #3. I love that after one pass through the Big Shot for each color (white, yellow, vellum) I have 4 or 5 gorgeous layered blooms. The dotted accents really make the layers stand out well.



Here are some fabulous cards by our design team!

Amy Tsuruta

 Betty J.

Jeanne Jachna

Julia Aston 

Katie Brooks

Lynn Mangan

Kimberly Wiener

Lyndal Higgins

Michelle Williams

Michelle Lupton

Stephanie Severin

Winners: Will be chosen by all of our teammates, each choosing one favorite. The winners will be announced at 4 am (PST) in two weeks!

Thanks for looking!
-Kelly

TDD Shaker Card Blog Hop

Welcome to the Top Dog Dies blog hop! Along this hop you will find all sorts of clever shaker cards from the Top Dog Dies design team. This card uses the Vintage A2 Mat Die to hold seed beads in the shaker cavity. When you hold the card upright, you just see the "happy birthday" message that's been stamped on the acetate.

Then when our 3 year-old cousin Sophie shakes her card,

she'll find her name!

 I like using seed beads because they move easily due to their shape and weight. Sometimes the sequins frustrate me because they stick to the acetate. I threw a few stars in there to break up the beads.

I wish I could see her tiny hands shaking her birthday card! The letters are from the Vintage Alphabet Set.

Each Design Team member has created a special shaker card using dies from Top Dog Dies. Visit each blog, check out the shaker projects and leave your comments.

Piali Biswas

Natalie Dever

Marcia Dehn-Nix

Kymona Tracey

Nicki Scheck 

Jeanne Jachna 

Vickie Zimmer

Kelly Griglione <-- You are here!

To add extra fun to our blog hop…we are offering up a prize! Three winners will receive the New Top Dog Dies Hot Air Balloon Die Set. For your chance to win, enter your email address below by 5/20/15. Winners will be posted on the Top Dog Dies blog after 5/20/15.

Fill out my onlineform.

NSD Make Your Own Background Challenge + the Move

Happy National Scrapbooking Day!! What would this day be without a scrapbook page to share? My annual scrapbook page is better than no scrapbook page I suppose! Winnie & Walter is teaming up with Pinkfresh Studio to sponsor several challenges for this special weekend. Please see each blog for all the fun details. Sure hope you'll try one or more of the challenges (you do not have to make a scrapbook page)!




I really wanted to document Whale Day at my first grader's school. He made the sweetest shirt, with his own idea to put both of our hand tracings on the back. Then he labeled inside the hands "me" and "mom". Then he drew a heart between them. Then he drew a smiley face on the heart. Awww, I was just so touched that he wanted me on the back of his Whale Day shirt, and then he went and drew this awesome heart between us! I had to stop thinking about it before I got teary in front of his friends!





My challenge is to make your own background. I used the single stripe from Scenery: Stripes as a permanent guide for my journaling.  Cover Model: Multifaceted Cutaway is used as a stencil to make a background for the journaling, as well as to make a border around the entire page. I just masked off the edge and then sponged ink through the stencil.




Having boys, I often stick with bold and graphic designs, so getting to work with Pinkfresh Studio's very whimsical Up in the Clouds line of products was a big treat for me. Love the puffy stickers and the gold rub-on above it! Even though there are hearts and pink involved, I think it's funky enough to be used for a boy's layout.

Sure hope you're able to join in the fun at Winnie & Walter, Pinkfresh Studio, or both! Remember, you can do cards for the challenges as well : )




I am in the middle of moving! We closed on the house yesterday and are trying to move as much as we can ourselves. Boy am I sore already. And tired. But it's so exciting! Every time I take a load into the house I smile. Can't believe it's finally ours.



You can see a portion of my patterned paper collection in the back ... see that lovely column of white? Our garage door was left open while it was raining one day and the ends of many of the pages started warping : ( Luckily, most are back to normal now. I really panicked!




We took two full loads over yesterday, and will do another one today before we take the truck back. It's hard to believe we have this much stuff! Then we will list our house next week. Our quick week-long bathroom remodel turned into 6 weeks, so our house is very late getting on the market. The bathroom remodel just finished Thursday at 9:45 pm when our electrician finally left our house. There are many balls in the air!

Anyway, I'm anxious to see what everyone has been up to recently. Hope you're all having a great weekend!
-Kelly

w&w: Multifaceted Marvelousness

Are you ready for facets? Great! There are three different stamp sets you can pick from over at Winnie and Walter now (well, technically you can pick them out at 10 pm tonight)!

This card features the faceted heart from True colored with copics in an ombre fashion. A few strips of paper are wrapped around the cards on a diagonal. To make sure the colored cardstock matched the faceted heart, I colored white cardstock with the lightest marker I used on the heart. What do you know, it matches! In true Winnie & Walter fashion, they have knocked it out of the park with font selection and pairings for sentiments.

 

OK, so this one might be a little out there, but I wanted to see if there was anything hidden I could find in this large, faceted, background stamp. A goldfish was the best I could come up with! Although this is indeed a fish, you could certainly do a range of colors, different shades of the same color, bleed one color into another, or smoosh the alcohol inks on it (like earlier this week). The different sections are watercolored, and the facets are gold embossed.

It was only natural to try a necklace from these lovely gems in the new set called My Precious. For the coloring, I watercolored a swish, let it dry, and then stamped so that the lighter section is centered. Scenery: Stripes is used for the wide band behind the panel.

To make it more like real-life, I added a jump ring and metallic thread for the chain.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this release! If you haven't already, check out the amazing projects from Julie, Shay and our guest designers on the Winnie & Walter blog. Of course, there's also a ton more inspiration on the personal blogs of our Talent:

Gayatri | Heather P. | Joni | Lea | Mayuri | Vanessa | Heather H.

Finally, don't forget to comment-to-win a stamp set each day of the release on the Winnie & Walter blog, and enter the big give-away to win the entire April/May release. Stamps go on sale tonight!
  

Thanks for looking!

-Kelly

CAS-ual Fridays: Calm and Loving

We've got one last set to show for the CAS-ual Fridays release called Calm and Loving. It includes a charming tree of hearts with a bunch of different sentiments to go with it. For this one I added some sponged ink in the middle of the tree to fill it out, and wrapped a sentiment around it.

Even though the hill is patterned paper, it still looked a little plain, so I added one of the Lovely Link dies to jazz it up. That did it!

Everything you've seen this week is now available at CAS-ual Fridays Stamps!

If you haven't already this week, take a peek at what the other Ink Squad girls created:

Marcie | Jingle | Virginia | Deepti | Zoey | Angie

Thanks for looking!

-Kelly