Kristine Andrews Photography

 I received a free photo shoot and digital images but all opinions are my own.

I've been meaning to write this post for a while now, but obviously I haven't been super active on my blog lately.  I thought I was busy before, but now that I'm back to work full time I realize that I didn't know what busy was.  Finding the time to do, well anything, is proving to be quite a challenge.  We are slowly getting our feet under us, but it is definitely a work in progress.  Anyway, back to this post.

I don't know about you, but I love taking pictures of my kids.  Of course I think they are the cutest children in the world and they change so fast that I want to capture their sweet little faces as often as I can.  As great as the photos I get are, there is no substitution for professional photos.  A professional photographer is exactly that, a professional, and the photos show it.  

I was lucky enough to meet Kristine Andrews about a year ago and she has helped us get some amazing photos of our boys.  Kristine did Luke's first birthday photos.  He did not like frosting!

She did an adorable Valentine's Day mini session with both boys.  Love!!

Then over the summer we finally got around to doing  family photos.  

Kristine has an incredible knack for capturing all of the aspects of my boys' personalities, and there are many.  

I mean, look at those faces!  Honestly it was hard for me to pick which shots to include because I just love them all!  My favorite shot from the whole day is this one where you can just see how much we love each other.

Professional photos can get really pricey which is why a lot of people don't do them, but Kristine is super affordable.  I also love that she includes digital images in her packages because in this day and age, let's be honest, that's what I want.  Of course I want to frame prints and hang them up, but I also want to be able to put them in a digital frame, share them on Facebook, and use my amazing professional photos in the grandchildren calendars I make as holiday gifts for our parents every year.  Owning the digital images allows me to do all that and more.

Another cool thing that Kristine does is when you get your digital images, she gives you more than one edit of each of them.  She gives you a black and white, as well as several slightly different color versions where the colors/light have been adjusted.  I actually don't know what the real terms are for that, I'm not a professional photographer.  I just know that I like having the options.

If you are thinking about having some photos taken, I highly recommend Kristine Andrews Photography.  We have so many amazing photos of our beautiful boys, and our little family, thanks to her.


 I received a free photo shoot and digital images but all opinions are my own.

DIY Elephant Nursery Art

When we found out we were having a boy Josh was relieved because the guest room we would be converting into the nursery was already painted a very pale blue.  With that in mind I set about deciding on a theme for his room.  I spent a lot of time on pinterest and google looking at nursery pictures.  I wanted something that would be baby appropriate, but wouldn't be so babyish that he would outgrow it before we were ready to change his bed into a big boy bed (that is when we changed Jake's room's theme).  I finally decided on an elephant theme in light blue and chocolate brown.

Now that I knew the theme I had to figure out what I wanted on the walls.  As I mentioned here, I'm going to be making a brothers picture frame to hang up, and I plan to make the letters of his name, assuming we can come up with one, but that wasn't enough.  I was at Michael's and they were having a big sale on canvases so I bought a bunch in different sizes as well as a bunch of different scrapbook papers in light blue and chocolate brown hoping they would provide me with inspiration.

After lots of consultation with my dear friend Amy (if you haven't checked out her blog, you totally should) I came up with 2 pairs of canvases I wanted to make.

The first, and larger, pair of canvases represents our family.  The canvas on the left has the biggest elephant, Josh, and the bigger of the kid elephants, Jake.  The canvas on the right is for the baby and me.

I started out by using my silhouette to make elephant stencils. (If you want this stencil, email me and I will send you the file, I haven't figured out how to put Silhouette files on here).  Evidently an elephant with an upraised trunk is good luck so I was sure to include that detail.  I changed the size of the design to make different sized elephants.

I then traced the different sized elephants onto my scrapbook paper and cut them out.  I did this before I had successfully used my silhouette to cut scrapbook paper without it tearing when I removed it from the cutting sheet.  Otherwise I would have just used the silhouette to cut out the elephants from the scrapbook paper instead of making a stencil and cutting them out by hand.  I cut the ears out of the opposite scrapbook paper for contrast.  I also used my silhouette to cut the circles out of my two colors of cardstock.  If you have a larger, circular craft punch, that would work perfectly here too.

I then used the Golden gel gloss I used when I made my comic book letters to attach the elephants and dots to the canvases.  After smoothing it all out I noticed that I had a few ripples so I took a toothpick dipped in the gel gloss to stick those little spots down.

For the second, smaller, pair of canvases I painted them brown and then used the Mom sized stencil from the other canvases to cut out these elephants (one facing either way) and attached them the same way.

It's hard to tell in these pictures, but the elephants on the brown canvases are a white scrapbook paper with tiny pale blue polka dots all over.

I was really happy with how they turned out and they ended up being super inexpensive which made them even better considering how expensive new babies are.  Once we have his room finished I will post some nursery pictures but this was such a great project I wanted to give you the details now.


I'm linking up with Link Party Palooza and Pin Junkie, Strut Your Stuff Saturday, Best of the Weekend, Show Stopper Saturday. Marvelous Monday, Mix It Up Monday, and Inspiration Monday.

Brother Picture Frame

While looking on pinterest for nursery ideas I came across this brother frame.  I loved the phrasing and thought it would be so cute to make one for each of the boys' rooms.  I decided I would use square frames, dark brown for the nursery and white for Jake's.  I'm still looking for a frame for the baby's room but I found a white one at Joann's on sale for $7.99 and I snapped it up during their teacher appreciation sale so I got an extra 25% off, score!
 
Jake has a baseball themed room, which I'll post some pictures of soon since we did some really cool DIY projects in there, but for now, let's talk about the project. When I saw this cute baseball scrapbook paper I knew it would be perfect for this project but I was a little nervous to use it since I haven't had a lot of success using my silhouette with anything other than cardstock.  It was on sale for 16 cents though, so I figured I would give it a try and I'm so glad I did because it turned out perfectly.

This couldn't have been easier and is so easily customizable.  Just change your paper and frame and match it to any theme.  You could also change the wording to "Best Friends Are We My Sister And Me" if you have little girls or one of each.  In Silhouette Studio I opened up a 12 x 12 page (that's the size of my frame) and tried out a bunch of different fonts until I found one that I liked.  I typed the first half of the phrase at the top of the page.  Then I used the square shape tool to draw a 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch box in the center of the page.  Finally I typed the second half of the phrase at the bottom of the page.  Then I was ready to go.

I used a cricut cutting mat instead of the one that came with my Cameo because it is slightly less sticky so it is easier to get the scrapbook paper off without it tearing.  Then I loaded the cutting mat into my Cameo and let it do it's magic.

Once it was finished cutting I very gingerly lifted the main page off of the mat.  The paper was a little curly after being pulled off of the cutting sheet so I put it under a heavy book to flatten back out while I used my little silhouette spatula to pry off the tiny pieces from inside the letters.

The trickiest part, and it really wasn't that tricky, was gluing the inside part of the letters onto the background page.  I put the baseball paper on top of a 12 x 12 piece of red cardstock and then layed a book on either side to hold it in place.  Then I took all of the tiny pieces and laid them on the red paper where they belonged.  One by one I used my Tombow Mono permanent adhesive to carefully attach the inside of the letters to the red cardstock.  Then I just put the two pieces of paper into the frame. 

I can't wait to put in a picture of Jake holding his baby brother.  When I do, I will use my Tombow to glue the picture to the red cardstock and just lay the baseball paper on top.  They are both the same size as the frame so they stay in place perfectly.

I'm linking up with Thrifty Thursday, Link Party Palooza, Best of the Weekend, Pin Junkie, Simply Create, A Peek Into My Paradise, Strut Your Stuff Saturday, Think Pink Sunday, Sweet & Savoury Sunday, Sunday Showcase, Marvelous Monday, Busy Monday, Monday Funday, Motivate Me Monday, Mad Skills Party, Inspiration Monday, Pincentive Blog Hop, Tasteful Tuesday, Whimsy Wednesday, Thrifty Thursday, and Pin Junkie.

Comic Book Letters - DIY

My birthday is December 30th.  Then I married a man whose birthday is on New Year's Eve.  Fast forward to 2009, I had a January baby.   Now this little guy is expected at the beginning of December.  This all means that our life is pretty much crazy from Halloween until mid January.  At the same time, birthdays are a big deal to me.  I know what it is like to have your birthday get lost in the shuffle of holidays and winter break so it is really important to me that my kids' birthdays are amazing.  I also realize that I can't go all out every year because it is a lot of work so I decided that I would do an over the top home party every other year and on the off years our kids can have a party at a place that does it all for us.  This is a good plan except that this coming January, just 5 weeks after our little man is due to arrive, I will be throwing an over the top party.  Yes, I am crazy!

In order to make this all possible, I started working on the party this summer.  Jake decided on a Superman party so I've spent the past few months pinning away and planning.  Now it's time to start working on the details.  Obviously there are some things I won't be able to do in advance, but as much as I can, I plan to.  That is where today's post comes in.  Having never used Mod Podge before I used this great video tutorial by Being Geek Chic.

To make these letters you will need a comic book you don't mind cutting up, paper mache letters (I found mine at Hobby Lobby), scissors, a pencil, a paintbrush, matte Mod Podge for paper (the one with the light blue label), and Golden's medium gel gloss (optional). 

 

I made the J and the S before I started this blog so these pics will focus on the M which I decided to add later.  I only used Mod Podge on those, but then I bought the gel gloss for a project for the baby's nursery and found it less ripply, so I decided to use it for the M.  It's pretty pricey though so I wouldn't buy it just for this.  (I used a 40% off coupon to make it more affordable.)

Start out by picking the images you want to have on the front of your letters.  For the letter J, I decided to use one large image that would cover the whole front.  For the M and S I picked more of a collage style.  Once you have picked your image you will need to trace your letter onto the image and then cut it out with your scissors.  *Elizabeth recommends attaching the full page to your letter and then using an exacto knife to trim it, but when I did that I ended up with a bunch of ragged edges so I pulled it off and redid it by tracing the letter on the comic page and cutting it out with scissors.

Paint a thin layer of gel gloss (or mod podge) directly onto the letter.

Then carefully lay your cut out comic piece on top smoothing it out as well as you can. 

Repeat this process until you have covered all sides of the letter.  The inner parts of the letter are a little tricky (I used my paintbrush handle to help press them down).

Then let it dry for 2 hours.  After 2 hours have passed you will paint another layer, of Mod Podge this time, over the top as a sort of varnish.  If you wanted it to have a glossy finish you can use the gel gloss for the top as well but I wanted matte so I used the Mod Podge.

That's it.  You are done.  If I'm totally honest, I ended up with a few ripples and it drove me crazy but Jake thinks they are the coolest thing ever so I am embracing their imperfection.

I'm linking up at Flashback Friday, Manic Monday,  Marvelous Monday, Mix It Up Monday, Inspiration Monday,  Craftastic Monday, Busy Monday, More the Merrier Monday, Mad Skills Party, Whimsy Wednesdays, Lovely Ladies Link Up,  Made By Me,  Wake Up Wednesdays, Project Stash, Pin it Thursday, Less Laundry, More Linking, Real Family Fun, and Thrifty Thursday, Pin Junkie, Link Party Palooza, Show Stopper Saturday, Bakerette, and StrutYour Stuff Saturday.