Friday, October 1, 2010

The "Magic Tree House"

Sorry for the long delay in posting . . . between me being sick, my daughter being sick, and my computer dying it's been a rough month or so.  Good news is everyone is healthy again (knock on wood) and I have a new computer.  I have been crafting and here is one of the projects I've been working on.

If you are not acquainted with the "Magic Tree House" books by Mary Pope Osborne you are missing out.  Our first grader is reading various books in this series as part of her curriculum at school and they are wonderful!  Here's the gist of the storyline:  A brother and sister, named Jack and Annie, discover a tree house in the woods near their home.  It is filled with books, books and more books.  As they look through a book on dinosaurs one of them says "I wish we could go there."  The tree house begins to spin and the wind blows and then everything goes still.  They look out the window and the picture in the book is right there before them, in real life.  Turns out the tree house belongs to King Arthur's sister, Morgan, who is Camelot's librarian (of course that's not revealed until book 3 or 4).  Morgan travels through time collecting books for Camelot's library.  The author winds historical fact into her wonderful books -- so the reader is actually learning something whilst enjoying a great book.

Last spring I offered to help her multi-age program's teachers with classroom decorations and they took me up on it.  So I have been creating a larger-than-life book "cover" for each of the books the kiddos read.  I have had so much fun creating them -- I don't duplicate the original cover, my cover ideas usually come to me as Demi and I read the books aloud.  Anyway, I've created covers for the first three using a standard sized poster board, my Cricut (of course!), ink, chalk, pens and lots of adhesive.  If you'd like details on what cartridges I used, drop me a line and I'll give you the info. 



Thanks for looking!

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Catching Up!

Greetings and welcome to Back-to-School time!  I for one am excited that my daughter embarks on her journey through first grade tomorrow.  And more importantly, so is she.  We went on Friday (with the masses) and met her new teacher and saw her new classroom.  Both seem very nice!

With three little girls at home all day, every day I've not gotten much accomplished craft wise -- I've been too focused on hanging on to what little bit of sanity I had left!  LOL!  My nieces are going to stay with their Grandma during the day now and my dear daughter will be at school so it's time for Momma to get her craft on!!! 

Here are two projects I managed to complete and photograph.  The first is an explosion box I made for my Dad for Father's Day.  The second is a "30 SUCKS" bouquet I made for my baby sister's big 3-0 birthday earlier this month.  Enjoy!


Stay tuned to see what kind of trouble I can get into with 6 hours all to myself!!!!!!!!!

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

BBTB 2 Challenge: Owl

The challenge this week over at Bitten by the Bug 2 is to use the owl from the Storybook cartridge or any other cart that has an owl.  I haven't invested in the Storybook cartridge, yet!  But several of the carts I do own have really cute owls on them.  I had a hard time choosing between the owl on Create-A-Critter (CAC) and on the Disney Happily Ever After (HEA) cartridges.  The HEA owl won!

I created this card for a dear friend who has a wicked sense of humor.  She recently had to have reconstructive breast surgery and I knew that she would get a laugh out of this card.  Enjoy!