MDS Blog Hop - Celebrate Stampin' Up!

This year is Stampin' Up's 25th anniversary!  Oh, how I wish I could go to Convention this month.  I couldn't go to the 20th anniversary either and was determined not to miss out again, but life has a way of changing those plans :)  So for now I'll have to be content with looking at all the great pictures my friends will take.

To celebrate this fun event, I created a card in honor of Stampin' Up!  Actually, I just took one of their cute templates and changed it up a bit. Here's the before:

And the after!

We're thrilled to have Julie Davidse as our Guest Blogger today! Hope you enjoy all the projects we've shared! 

1. Holly VanDyne 2. Amber Meadows 3. Jeanna Bohanon 4. Julie Leblanc 5. Aly Schilling 6. Erica Shaw 7. Cindy Schuster 8. Julie Davidse - guest blogger!

MDS Blog Hop - What are you working on?

Good morning everyone!  We're thrilled to bring you more wonderful projects today - I've seen them already and they are fantastic!  You'll definitely thank yourself for hopping today :)

We're moving in a few months and as I was going through my son's GIGANTIC pile of art projects I came across some baby pictures of both kids.  It inspired me to go a little further back than I have been lately and scrap some of those events I always said I'd get around to.  A few days after my youngest son turned two we moved from Utah to Virginia so we decided to combine things and had a birthday/going away party - it was such a fun day.

Did you know that you can edit a punch?  That's how I angled the strips of paper.  Pretty cool feature if you ask me!  

I'm working on more pages to go along with this one, but for now it's a good start.  Hope you enjoy the rest of the hop!

Mandy Grant Amber Meadows Rochelle Gould Jeanna Bohanon Erica Shaw Cindy Schuster Holly VanDyne Aly Schilling Julie Leblanc Kimberly Van Diepen Guest Blogger - Julie Davidse

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MDS Monday #4

This week's challenge was to use punches - and I'll tell you right now that I didn't start out with a birthday page in mind. Seems like I've been doing a lot of birthdays lately. However...as I was looking through photos, I came across the pics from Chris' birthday last year and they were so cute I just couldn't resist.

I have to ask though - do my pizzas really look like pizzas, or is it just that I've been staring at them for so long my mind doesn't know the difference anymore? As I said in my previous post, I've never done punch art before, so this is a whole different ball game for me!

Punches used:

Circle
Small Photo Corner
Scallop Border
Modern Label
Lots of Tags Shape 2
Small Heart

For stamps, I used the Notes and Details and Enjoy Every Moment. I used paper from the Love Letter pack and my font was Pea Bhea.

Don't forget - the lovely ladies at Utah Divas International have all posted their punch challenges, so take a look!

MDS Monday #3

I'd planned to work on a few projects last week - I have some new stamp sets and paper that are screaming to be used - really, I can hear them all the way from the basement - but this was a tough layout for me. I found the idea somewhere in cyberspace and I just had to try a version of my own. It was an easy layout, but I think the problem started when I couldn't let go of the original design. Yup - I was so focused on recreating the layout that I kind of forgot to tap into my own creativity. Strange how that happens...

Really, if I'd been smart, I would have set it aside and come back to it, but I just couldn't let it go. I worked on it all week, tweaking different elements, rearranging, adding and deleting. I think I finally have a page that I can say I'm happy with. And I'm done tweaking - PROMISE!

So, drumroll please...here's this week's UDI MDS Monday Challenge:

What do you think? Is it worth a week of fussing? Maybe, maybe not - but I like it and I doubt Andrew will be as critical as I am when he's looking through his scrapbooks. :)

Don't forget to check out what the rest of the awesome UDI ladies created for the challenge!

MDS Monday #2

In honor of President's Day, our MDS Monday challenge was to use red, white and blue in our layout. I really wanted to think outside the box on this one and come up with something that wasn't patriotic, but I just couldn't get the U.S. flag out of my head. I decided the best idea was to stick with what I know. Lucky for me, my sister's birthday falls on July 4th and since I haven't scrapped the pictures from last year's celebration I had plenty of material to work with.

One of my favorite things about working with MDS is that I can change the size of any stamp, embellishment or punch. It's so much fun to use one stamp and then change the size to make it look like another image. Rubber stamps - as much as I love them - can't do that!


Make sure to check out some of the other Diva's creations on the UDI blog!