Darth Vader Pinata

I totally cannot take credit for this creation, but I thought it was too cool to not release onto the WWW. :) My sister Emily threw a very fun Lego Star Wars party for her son a few weeks ago, and was inspired by my Dr. Doofenshmirtz pinata last month to create a Darth Vader pinata.  She used the same paper grocery bag + crepe paper technique (you can find a link to it on my that post), and then found a tutorial here for how to draw Darth Vader.

I think the addition of this awesome cape might be my favorite part.

And of course, what would a Darth Vader pinata be without a giant light saber whacking stick?

Here it is in action, after already having taken quite the beating.  It was a huge hit at the party. (Pun totally intended.)

I was so proud of Em's creativity with this guy -- what an awesome pinata!

More peg doll AND mixed media fun...

When I fell in love with peg dolls earlier this year, I immediately started planning the little families I would paint for all the little girls in our family.  We do a cousins' gift exchange on both sides of our family, so I was really happy that my kids drew the names of two of our nieces, thereby giving me an excuse to do it sooner rather than later.  Here they are!  (You'll have to excuse the poor lighting -- I had to hurry to take these late at night because I was trying to pack them to ship in the hopes they'd get there in time for Christmas.  Ah, procrastination...)

And this one is my favorite -- in our siblings' exchange I drew my sister Ange, who is at that just-starting-out-crossroads-what-do-I-do-next-with-my-life stage.  I wanted to make a cool mixed media canvas with a She Art girl on it for her, but she is a live-out-loud 3D kind of girl, so I thought it would be fun to make a peg doll to coordinate with the canvas instead.

I cut a bunch of thin strips of paper (from Basic Grey) and mod-podged them on for her dress, then painted the cardi and scarf over the top.  (I also gave her a ruffly yellow scarf just like this.)  I also used a "Just Be YOU" stamp from Unity at the bottom.

Here's a close-up of the Dr. Seuss quote I used, which I did with a combination of paint, marker, scraps of the same Basic Grey pp, and bookpaper.  I love how it turned out!

I am having so much fun painting peg dolls that I think I will be listing custom dolls in my etsy shop soon.  Always a fun new adventure!

A fun announcement and a stack of cute cards...

Hello, friends!  Today I am very excited to announce that I have been invited to join the design team over at Apron Strings Designs, a kit club that offers various scrapbooking and cardmaking kits chock full of fun and current goodies.  (The current part makes a big difference to me -- I've been a part of kit clubs before where it seemed like everything was last year's scrapbook trends.)  I'm the "All-Year Cheer" card kit designer, and I'm really excited to be able to stretch my card-making muscles and see what I can create.

These cards were created with the January card kit, and you can see more layouts and cards created from this month's kits over at the Apron Strings blog! (Click on any picture to enlarge.)

Thanks for stopping by!  I hope you'll check in again too see more fun from Apron Strings Designs!

Project Life 2012

My goodness, I can't believe it's been a month since I posted anything.  It was a delightful month, though, and I hope all your holidays were as lovely and family-fun-filled as ours were.  Anyway, if you've been hanging out with me here for a while now, you might remember my enthusiasm last January about starting Project Life.  And I did really well until the early spring.  Then I got behind.  Then I got caught up.  Then at the end of May I put it down and didn't look at it again until the last week of December.  Oops.  But I was dead set and determined to finish what I'd started, so over the last couple days of December I worked hard and finished my album.  It wasn't a picture a day, and there is definitely a lot of detail in the beginning of the year than in the last half, but I was thrilled to have it completed.  That's me, late at night on January 1st, hugging my finally-finished album.


What did I learn?  That I really do love to document all the everyday details of our family, but that the traditional way would not work for me.  I still took pictures almost every day, but then it would take me forever to get them printed.  I don't like to print pictures at home, so by the time I'd get to Costco to pick them up, I'd have a hard time remember the dates of all the different pictures, so it required a lot of backtracking to figure things out.  But I believe that it is totally worth the effort, and I love the Project Life products.  So this year, I'm going 100% digital!  I downloaded the Clementine kit from www.jessicasprague.com and set up a few different templates for myself in my graphics software (I use CorelDraw).  This way I'll be able to drag and drop the photos and all the other goodies right in and all the date and such will be right there.  I can type in as much journaling as I want and easily tweak things for various layouts.  I just finished my cover page and my first week, and I have to tell you I am super excited!  I think this is going to be the ideal solution for me.  Here is my cover page, which I made by using one of the papers and then layering a bunch of the other elements over it.

This is my first week:

Okay, it's actually not quite a week -- we're still missing Saturday, but we had a huge event that day that I'm going to dedicate a whole 2-page spread to.  At any rate, I am loving this!

Any other Project Life-ers out there?  What is your approach?  What do you think the chances are that I'll be able to keep up this year?!