Calligraphy with Quilling and a weekend St. Louis visit

We visited old friends in Saint Louis this weekend and visited all our favorite places of nostalgia--Forest Park, St. Louis Zoo, our old church, Tortillaria. We also stopped by a couple of new additions to St. Louis that arrived after we left: IKEA, Jeni's Ice Cream, and Lonas Lil Eats. It was the best way to spend 3 short days in St. Louis!

B & T were our amazing hosts and fed us/cooked for us/drove us and let us play with their adorable kids! B ordered a custom quote of Joshua 24:15 embellished with quilling, inspired by a previous project. I hand-carried the framed print onto the plane and was quite relieved when I was able to deliver it safely to St. Louis. This was another collaboration between Karmomo (the brushlettering) and me (quilling).

Since I'd made gifts for B&T's 2 boys in the past, I decided to be fair to their 3rd child and make her a personalized gift---another log branch slice ornament! B&T plan to use it as a door sign for her room.

Thank you card for B&T's generous hospitality during our lovely St. Louis weekend visit!

Easy patterned pencil cup organizer

Recently I've been feeling motivated to organize my office and craft supplies, partly because Andrew returned from his out-of-town rotation. This meant clearing out all the paper and pens and markers and half-finished craft projects invading his side of our shared table area.

In the process of organizing and labeling everything, I decided to jazz up my pen/pencil cup organizers with gold and white chevron leftover wrapping paper. This was literally the easiest less-than-5-minute DIY project ever and I would do it again a heartbeat!

Supplies needed:

• Spray adhesive (or glue)
• Wrapping paper or wallpaper of your choice
• Tin cans--washed/cleaned and dried. I used cans from my clam chowder soup obssession

Step 1: Cut the paper in a rectangular shape to wrap around the can

Step 2: spray adhesive all over the exterior of the can

Step 3: Carefully press the paper down onto the can and smooth out any wrinkles

 

And...that's it! 

This can is the perfect size for my Tombow dual brush pen markers!

Birthdays and babies

My coworker have been keeping me busy recently! They ordered 4 greeting cards from me this week and I finished them just in time for my trip to New Orleans. I used my new Cricut Expression 2 machine to cut out the Scottish terriors, banner, baby carriage, and to stencil out letters. My learning curve is still pretty steep right now and I'm spending more time choosing and designing the cuts than it takes for the machine to actually make the cut. I'm loving the crisp edges of the machine cuts though!

One hot mama! Gold glitter washi tape, scrapbook paper, and I used the end of a pencil eraser dipped in gold inkpad to make the polka dots!

A little blue quilled heart for a baby boy!

Hand-stamped bluebird, banner and Scottish terriors cut by Cricut machine, and washi tape (Elmer's designer masking tape)