My Niece, the 2010 Dairy Princess

A little shout out to my niece, Nicole who was recently crowned the Madison Co. Dairy Princess - yeah Nicole! You are a great girl and I'm sure you'll represent the County well in your reign as Dairy Princess... We are all very proud of you! Isn't she beautiful...

And here's the card I made to congratulate her. It features a set names Anabelle designed by my friend Diane Zechman. I've had this set for quite awhile and have used it quite a bit as I grew up on a a dairy farm, so cows are near and dear to our hearts. Nicole now lives on the family farm as my brother (her father) took it over and runs it now with his wife. As I was making this card, I said to my husband... is it really bad that I haven't made a card for Nicole making National Honor Society yet, but I'm making her a Dairy Princess card?Hay (pun intended), we all have our priorities, right? I just know how hard Nicole worked and how much she wanted this title, so good job Ne-cole! We love you!

Spartan Baseball Birthday Card

Well, it's baseball season again! Today marked the offical opening day of Little League here in New Hartford and another birthday party tonight! My son's travel baseball team-mate invited him to his birthday sleepover, so I of course had to make a card. I love that my kids' friends are expecting a special "Mrs. Moran" card, lol. My son wanted me to make his friend a "spartans" card. The t-shirt image is a stamp from TooMuchFun Rubber Stamps and really does come in handy with 2 sports maniacs as kids. I stamped the image in versamark and clear embossed, then colored in the fold lines with brilliant blue ink. Then I highlighted the trim with my white gel pen. I tried to cut the spartans baseball part with my cricut, but didn't have enough time (or patience) to continue, so I resorted to stickers and a hand cut swoosh thingy. I'm not sure if you can see or not, but I even added 2 "buttons" covered with crystal effects. The back was kept simple with letters cut with my serif alpha from Stampin up and more stickers for the #. When I was all done, I also covered a piece of white typing paper with coordinating stamps (used inside the card) and used that to wrap the gift (a movie sized box of candy and an i-tunes card). Hope he likes it! Thanks for peeking at my blog :)

Everything Nice

So I got a text tonight from my friend that she needed a baby card for a girl by Sunday. I came home and went to Splitcoast for some inspiration. I found this card by Kim and fell in love! I didn't have all the exact same punches, etc so I made a few alterations. As I got started, I realized that I didn't have the stamp set Everything Nice (Stampin' Up!) and thought that maybe it was one of the many that was included in My Digital Studio (Did you know that the program comes with over 60 stamp sets?!?) Anyway, this set wasn't one of them, so instead I used My Digital Studio to type in my own sentiment, printed it out and viola, a card was born! Thanks for stopping by today!

Color Renovation at Stampin' Up!

As you've probably heard by now, Stampin' Up! is going through a renovation.... a Color Renovation. They have done extensive research and found that this cosmetic update is needed. In the process of the re-vamp, they have decided to discontinue 29 of our former core colors once the new catalog comes out on July 1 st. While I'm VERY excited to hear that some of our beloved old "in-colors" (like River Rock , Pink Pirrouette and Wild Wasabi) are returning to be part of the basic colors, I am a bit apprehensive about losing some of the current colors. So, for people like me who will miss certain colors (for me it's creamy caramel for my build a bear die and blush blossom for my punch art people's face, arms and legs), I have put together a paper share. There are 7 categories that each contain 4 colors of paper. Each share costs $6 and includes 6 sheets of each of the four colors for a total of 24 sheets. The groups are listed below as well as represented by their corresponding number on the color dot. I hope that you can click on the image to enlarge it... sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

If you would like 1 (or many) spots in this color share, please email me at tillyhead @ roadrunner . com . If you are not local and would like to participate, just add $4.95 flat rate shipping per 3 shares.

p.s. Flyer created using My Digital Studio Software... lovin' this program!

Sweet Scoops - Sneak Peak

Ssssshhh.... this is a sneak peak of a new stamp set from Stampin' Up!'s Summer Mini. The mini goes live on May 1st. Because I'm a demo, I get to pre-order from mini so I can be all ready to show samples when it is open to the public. This set I actually earned for free for placing a qualifying order within 3 weeks of the regional that was supposed to be held in Syracuse, NY but was canceled due to snow (the drawback of living in CNY). This cute little set has the 2 cone types and hard and soft ice cream scoops as well as sprinkes, a cherry, a wood grain looking stamp that gives your hard scoop ice cream that striated look and the sentiment. I'm just realizing that I managed to use ALL the stamps from the set on this card.... yeah me! The darker green cone on the right is done by inking the solid hard scoop and then taking some ink off by stamping the un-inked texture stamp onto the inked ice cream scoop. The hard scoop ice cream on the left is what is left on the texture stamp after removing ink from the other cone. Confusing I know, but worth the effort of explaining I hope. What do you think?

My Digital Studio - Pee Wee Hockey Scrapbook

I have spent the better part of 3 days working on this digital scrapbook for my son's hockey team. They were an AMAZING group of kids this year and pretty darned good hockey players to boot! They participated in several important tournaments including our own Travel Tournament, a Thanksgiving International Invitational, A Northeast Regional qualifier and the Silver Stick International Finals in Michigan, Pre-Sectionals, Sectionals and ultimately the New York State Championships! Wow - how's that for a bit of a brag :) The scrapbook was made using My Digital Studio and is the first real project that I've done with it. It was so easy. A bit time consuming (83 pages), but that's because I didn't have all my stuff together and I had to scan a bunch of newspaper articles and clippings in. I've pulled a sampling of pages to show you here. The best part of this digital scrapbook is that when the players are viewing their copies, they can click on the "hot spots" and see the articles written about them! The program even has the ability to record (we read in some of the coaches emails) and add audio bytes as well as video bytes. Unfortunately, my video camera wasn't cooperative this weekend so that will have to be next year's scrapbook! Enjoy the pages and please let me know what you think! CLICK ON ANY OF THE PAGES TO SEE MORE DETAIL!

I'm bummed that the coach wears purple page got messed up during exportation. The fonts didn't transport, so it screwed up the placement. It is supposed to read "Our COACH rocks... even in PURPLE". It's one of my favorite pages. He obviously didn't know the reporter was coming to do a story on the (red and blue) team.

Note: These awesome photos were purchased and downloaded from http://www.myhometownsports.net/ articles Jeff Pexton at http://www.photoreflect.com/
Jeff does an awesome job covering local sports and highlighting them online. Thanks Jeff!

This page features grandma and grandpa with the "fatheats" that I made of my son and his friend (the goalie). Also pictured are the fans holding up their kids' heart during the game. Believe it or not, for playoff games, we are not allowed to bring noise makers to the arena. What kind of hockey is quiet?!?