Cake Decorating 101 and More on the Memory Book

Hi Everyone!

Did you get the big snowstorm? We received a whopping 18 inches of snow! Although it's a pain getting this much snow in March, it sure is pretty......






It's a nice wet snow, so the kids should have a blast building snowmen, sledding and having the traditional snowball fight! lol

Are you a cake decorator? I have always wanted to create awesomely decorated cakes and have taken a stab or two at accomplishing that. I can't say I'd win any prizes but every once in a while the juices flow and I give it a try. Recently, one of my buyers wanted a special vintage image to create a tutorial for CakeJournal.com. She did an awesome job with the tutorial and it looks so easy that I'm definitely going to give it a try for my Easter cake. To view the tutorial click here . I'll let you know how it turns out... Oh by the way, the vintage chick image that she used is available via my ArtFire shop. To purchase the image click here .

Since my last post, I presented my memory book to my son's soon-to-be bride at their wedding shower. It seemed to be a big hit. But as usual, I forgot to take the final pictures of it totally completed - figures doesn't it - I always seem to forget that critical step... lol Guess I'll have to make a trip to their house so I can show you what it looked like. Till then, here's a few more pictures of the individual pages.

Megan has chosen black and purple as her colors, so I tried to incorporate those colors as much as possible. I found an awesome DP book from Colorbok that was full of rose designs and used a lot of MS punches as well as ek punches.





For this book, I planned on leaving a pretty large pocket when I put the pages together. So I decided to create a pocket insert which could be used for journaling or photos or whatever. These pocket pages are about 6.5 x 6.5" and decorated on both sides, so there's plenty of space for photos.






I guess that's all for now. Make sure you check out CakeJournal.com and make sure that you......

Have a great week, plumb full of smiles!
Peggy

Valentines, A Memory Book and a Free Vintage Image

Hi Everybody!

Wow - spring is here! The robins are back, the spring showers have started - I'm so excited! It's going to be a very busy spring, we have Easter, taxes, 2 weddings, 3 birthdays and Mother's Day coming up! I can't wait - except for maybe the tax part.. lol

It's been a while since I've posted so I have quite a bit to share. I totally missed sharing Valentine's with you and I've almost missed Easter.. lol but today I'll try and catch up a bit.

First a funny story... some of you may recall, that my hubby and I are staying at my DMIL's. She has dementia - suspected Alzheimer's. After a terrible infection in her knee which left her wheel chair bound, she has been working very hard for the last year and half to get some standing and moving back. She has gone in for regular shots in her knees which have been very painful but she has been a real trooper in putting up with it. She has been working very hard on strengthening her legs and using them. Well, she has finally gotten to the point where she could stand for a few minutes, and we've been trying to work on taking a step or two... just enough to move from the wheelchair to a seat or her bed. She's making progress on this but it has been a very slow process. For a little more background, mom has what's called a high-low bed. That's a bed that has a motor on it which can be used to raise or lower the actual bed plus it has bars on both sides which prevent her from accidentally rolling out of bed. The bars span the length of the bed except for maybe a two foot area at the head and foot of the bed that is left open.

Well now, here's the funny story part... the other morning I went in to get mom out of bed and low and behold she was sitting in her wheelchair! You could have knocked me over with a feather! The bars were still up on her bed, she had her shoes on and had almost made it to the door when I found her. I was so amazed! I asked how she did it and she didn't know, acted like it was an everyday kind of thing and she let me know that she was ready for breakfast! How on earth she wiggled out of her bed and walked to her wheelchair, I'll never know. I guess all I can say is that the body and the mind are amazing things! This hasn't happened since and I truly hope that it doesn't, it scares me to death that she could have fallen and hit her head or broke a bone but I'm still amazed that she accomplished this great feat and I didn't even get to see it! It was a nice surprise but she's given herself away now, we need to push her a little harder because now we know she can do it. She's blown her cover! lol

Ok, since I missed Valentines with you, I'd like to backtrack just a little and share the Valentine cards I made for the grand kids. This year they got to go to Disney for 10 days and they didn't get back into town until Valentines Day. With their trip in mind, I decided that their cards would have a Disney flair - what would be better than a Princess and Peter Pan.

I had the Princess and Peter Pan images but I wanted a castle and a tree house for the backgrounds, so I went searching on the Internet and found a coloring page with a castle and a how to draw page with the tree house. I had some Disney scrap paper that had Captain Hook and his helper so I was ready to put it all together. I colored the castle and the tree house with my acrylic paints and blinged up the princess with lots and lots of Stickles, added some dimension and here's what I wound up with.








I had a lot of fun creating them and the kids really enjoyed them. Would you like to create your own Princess or Peter Pan cards? You can find the images in my ArtFire store, for Peter Pan, click here , for a pink princess, click here , for a blue princess, click here .

Can you hang out with me for a little longer? I think I've already told you that my youngest son is getting married in May, well I've been working on creating a memory book for him and his bride and I'll share that with you... no not all of it today, but over the next few posts. I've been working on it for the past month and presented it to his new bride at her shower yesterday, so now I can share without ruining the surprise. Here's the very first page in the their memory book.




I love this rose image, it's so life like and it lends itself very well for a dimensional image. I used three different layers for the rose itself and two for the leaves. I added some diamond Stickles to the highlighted areas of the rose and leaves and some gold Stickles to the border - my printer doesn't print the color gold it always turns out green. For additional bling, scroll work with a black flower was added at the corners - the bride has selected black and purple as her colors. I left a pocket behind the rose image and inserted a tag that can either be used for journaling or a photo. The tag has a charm that says "love", but in the picture it's turned around so you can't see it. I wanted the memory book to have lots of places to add photos or journaling, so between each page I added a pocket that has a two-sided insert. Both sides have room for additional photos or journaling. On the insert I attached 3 little black flowers and another charm that says "I Do" and some black ribbon . I really liked the way it turned out.



I appreciate your staying and hopefully reading to the end of this post... lol and I truly think you should receive a reward for your due diligence. So I thought I'd share my dimensional rose with you. I hope you create something awesome with it and if you're so inclined, email me a picture of your completed project or share the link if you post it, so I can see your awesome creation! The image is all set to print on a 8.5 x 11 sheet so that all the images will stay scaled correctly. Don't forget to click on the image before you save it.



Have a great week, plumb full of smiles!

Peggy

Visit PeggyLovesVintage's ArtFire Shop

Candi's Baby Shower - A Memory Book, Diaper Cake and Fun!

How's everybody doing? Fine I hope! It's been super busy around here. Seems like I'm always saying that, but it's true! lol I have a long post and lots of pictures to share so I'm going to jump right into it.

My daughter (Tara), my granddaughter (Jordan) and I have been extremely busy getting ready for a baby shower for one of Tara's BFFs. These two have known each other and hung around together since they were about 11 years old, quite a long time. So Candi is like a member of our family and Tara was very honored to host a baby shower for her. Of course Tara's first call was to momma..... "Can you help?" and of course I jumped in with a loud YES! So we set on our journey and started planning.

Candi wanted it to be primarily for family and really close friends and it was to be a boy/girl party. I must admit, I know that's the thing now, but I'm old school so it was a new experience for me. We planned a cookout with plenty of food, cupcakes for dessert and present opening as the main events for the party. Candi's step-mom wanted to have some shower games so she took charge of those events. So with everything scoped out, we got our creative juices flowing and here's what we came up with.

I love creating memory books. They seem to be so much easier for me to put together than a card. Seems odd to me but it takes me forever to design a card and then I'm always a little disappointed because it never looks as good as what it did in my imagination. lol But I keep trying. Anyway, I've created several memory books and I always enjoy the process. This time though I decided I'd try and make it into a real book, so I started off with some research on how I could bind it all together. And to my surprise, I quickly found a fantastic tutorial on this subject. It was clear and easy follow and only used supplies that I currently had on hand. Woohoo! I didn't have to purchase anything! I was very pleased with the results. But more about that later.

Once I verified that I could make my own book, I started creating the individual pages that I would include. I wanted to create something that would allow Candi to show off the special holiday pictures of the baby in a fun way. So I wanted each page to revolve around a picture. I used images from my Vintage Greeting Card collection as temporary place holders in the picture frames. These will be replaced by actual pictures of the baby as the year goes on. I also planned on including a little journal tag behind each image.

I used 12x12 pastel card stock and cut each one in half which gave me two sheets of 6x12 which I folded in half. This gave me two pages of 6x6 paper. I planned on only decorating the inside of the folded sheet and left the outside of the sheets blank. Now, all I had to do was decorate it and here's the results.

The Mommy and Me page was the last page that I created and I had pretty much used up all the good pastel color sheets, so I'm not too fond of the colors used. But didn't want to run to the store... lol

Now all I had to do was bind them all together. Remember back a ways I told you I left the outside of the 6x6 sheets blank. I knew I was going to use different colors of the pastel card stock so I didn't really want to decorate a page that was say half blue and half green so my intention was to attach the outside sheets together. I was a little worried about the thickness of the decorated pages. So as I had them all stacked together and was analyzing them I decided I would only attach the front edges of the back sides of the sheet to each other. That way the back side or folded edge was a little freer to move. Hopefully that makes sense. So I used lots of sticky tape on about half of outside sheet (non-folded edge) on one of the undecorated sides and carefully attached it to next page in the book. This worked like a charm. Each page was now doubly thick and sturdy but the folded edge was free. I didn't remember to take pictures during this process so if this doesn't make any sense just let me know and I'll recreate what I did and snap a few pics to help you out.

Now, it was time to make my book cover. Like I said earlier, I found this fantastic tutorial that walked me through the process. You can check it out by clicking here. It was really easy to do and I was very pleased with the outcome.

A couple of things to be aware of... I was too slow with attaching the binding to the back of the pages so my hot glue cooled enough that I had to add more. So I think the next time, I will only do about half of the length at a time and then attach it to the binding vs. the whole length. Also, I used a cotton based material as my cover so by the time I had the whole thing covered in glue, it was seeping through to the table, so be sure and do this process on something that won't be harmed by some white glue. lol And one other word of caution, I was a little disappointed in how the cotton fabric looked after it was attached. There was some dark and light splotches all over it. My guess is that this is caused by the amount of glue that was used and the fact that it wasn't evenly spread across the fabric. The decorations that I put on the outside of the book masked this problem a little bit, but I think I might try a different type of fabric the next time. All in all, for a first time project I was very pleased with the results.

Here's Candi and Rudy checking out their memory book.

Tara decided she wanted to create a diaper cake for Candi. So once again, an Internet search yielded all the information we needed to complete our design. We checked out several sites and combined different techniques together but you can click here to view a tutorial on creating your own diaper cake. Tara gathered together the supplies, 2 bags of newborn Pampers, some ribbon, some rubber bands and plenty of little things for decoration. Then Tara, Jordan and I got busy and created our "cake". My primary job was rolling diapers and creating the bow both of which look pretty good (teehee). It was simple to do and it only took us about 2 hours. Here's Jordan with our finished project.

The last thing we had to do was bake and decorate cup cakes. We created some little cup cake toppers using guess what? - Why Vintage Baby Images of course! I set up some little 3" round images and we used a scallop die cut. We then used the same scallop die cut out some pretty card stock for the back. Jordan glued them all together - her first time using hot glue. I only heard a couple ouches.. lol .

And our finished cup cakes.....

For games, Candi's step mom had the guys create babies using play dough then Candi and Rudy had to judge which one was the best. This was a really cute idea and I was surprised at how creative the guys were. I didn't get any pictures of their babies, but everyone really enjoyed this game. She had a play "How much toliet paper does it take to go around Candi's belly". It was really fun watching the guys try and figure this out. Some were really nice and some not so nice. lol

So that's it folks, everyone had a great time and I can't wait for the baby to arrive!

Have a great week, plumb full of smiles!
Peggy

A Memory Book and a Free Vintage Image

Hi Everyone!
How's your week going? It's been a little hectic around here this week. My DFI is back in the hospital. Hopefully, it will only be a short stay this time but it puts a kink in our normal schedule.

Trevor has returned from his Fort McCoy stay. He has just a little over 2 weeks before he deploys to Afghanistan. Saturday, he's having a little gathering for all his friends at a local tavern. I'm sure it will be an interesting event. lol

I decided that I'd make him a little memory book to take with him. I'm hoping that when he gets homesick, it will bring him a little comfort. I thought I'd make it in the same way I did the kid's Disney memory books, except this time I didn't leave the pockets between the pages. With the zigzag format I thought he could set it up somewhere, a shelf, a trunk, or even a bucket. I also made a little box that he could store it in. Anyway, I'm really happy with the results and I hope that he likes it.



















I'm really enjoying making these little memory books. I think I'll have to make a few for Christmas presents.. lol

Spring is showing its head around here. I noticed today that the Ornamental Pear tree has blossoms and the Lilacs are waking up. We don't have any Cherry blossoms yet. I'm looking forward to seeing them, because we usually have our last frost when they're open and I'm so ready for the cold, gloomy weather to go away.

Do you have a favorite spring flower? I must say that Jonquils, Lilacs and Pansies are my favorites. I thought I'd share a pretty Pansy image with you today. They always seem to be so bright and cheery to me. I think they're always good for a smile. :) Make sure you click on it before you save it.


Have a great week, plumb full of smiles!
Peggy