Ohio Ornaments

It's true. I love my Pinterest boards! I'm so visual and Pinterest is so visually awesome. I love looking at my boards, pinning projects for a later date, looking for inspiration.

I went through my boards the other day and decided to re-pin all the projects and recipes and layouts I have used [see it here]. Of the 4,003 images I've pinned, I've only used 59 of them! Doing the math fairly quickly, but that's barely more than 1%!!!

And the thing is, I love the things I pin. I want to use them. So this month and next year, I'm planning to do just that. Starting with this project:

State Ornaments: [Pin] [Original Source]

Aren't these adorable? I loved the Pinspiration and thought these wee lil hoops would be the perfect little stocking stuffers for Matt's family. We'll be in Ohio for Christmas this year and I'll be able to hand them out (in person!) then.

I went with Ohio State colors on this one, topped off with a silver ribbon. Stocking stuffers can now be checked off the list!

cheers & besos,

Tomerlin Presies

Good morning! Man does it feel great to be scrapping and blogging again =) I'm still scrapping out of boxes, but I'm hopefully I'll spend a good chunk of next week getting my scrapbook area set up and organized. 

In the meantime, I made a few Christmas gifts that I wanted to share. It was frustrating to want to use some things I knew were packed, but I made these work in the end.

Here's a shadowbox (is that what we're calling these?) of Matt and his sweet Grandma Rose. 

I love this smaller size and the 3 little boxes to decorate. It makes it easy! Well, as easy I'll let it. These tiny spaces are hard for me to fill for some reason! These 3 took me hours to make because I kept shifting through options, trying to find what I wanted.

I drew a lot from the colors in each of the photos. Grandma Rose's shirt helped me pull in some blues and pinks, and the trees helped with the greens and yellows.

I used a hodge podge of products on all of these. Most notably on this one, I used some of the new 5th & Frolic from American Crafts and the Crate Paper Trendsetter I think it's called.

For this one of Matt and his family, I pulled out greens, blues and khakis, plus some black for good measure. Products are from Studio Calico, American Crafts, Basic Grey, Echo Park and the Girls Paperie.

But I think I had the most fun putting this one of Matt and his sister together. Jenn's shirt made for such a pretty jumping off point. There's some Dear Lizzy, Crate Paper, Amy Tangerine, Crate Paper, Echo Park thrown in here.

So yes, 3 presents done!! 5-6 more to go! Be sure to check back for more of these lil trays. Also, check back this week for the wrapping and decorating of the presents. Arguably, this might be my favorite part =)

cheers & besos,

Hybrid: Text as Graphics

[[Warning: Whinge about to occur!! Ugh, so since moving to my new place, I haven't found a good spot in which to take photos of my pages. The photos are coming out light in some places, dark in others, the colors are always off and I just can't seem to figure it out! Honestly, and I hate to admit this, its half the reason why I'm not updating the blog. I know I'm too much of a perfectionist but it's seriously driving me nuts!!]]

Ok, now that I've got that off of my chest, I have a new page to share and a new challenge to issue. It's my monthly Hybrid Diva Ch{all}enge Masters prompt.

This month's challenge is to use text as graphics for your page. I managed to do this in a variety of different ways.

With the help of Word and some text boxes, I created this "fancy" title. I liked mixing the fonts and the text sizes for a more graphic effect.

I added this tab to the top of my page. It's a theme I'm going to stick with for awhile. I think since I didn't get to participate fully in Shimelle's Learn Something New Everyday class, I've subconsciously been tagging things as "learned" in my head for awhile. I thought this was a fun way to incorporate "life lessons" into my journaling and my pages. I'd love to have a whole album with the theme of life lessons.

And then I made some baseballs. And I'm LOVING these little guys. They were the launching off point for this month's prompt. They're cute, simple and super easy to make!

All you'll need is a block of text, a circle punch and I choose to use distressing ink, but obviously that's optional. Print your text, punch it out, distress or embellish as desired. Viola!

I hope you'll play along. And be sure to check out more Week 2 challenges this Sunday! (I'm a bit early) Thanks yall!

xxbesos

j.leija

Ohio to Texas

Ohio to Texas

The Story:

Ah, the infamous Road Trip of 2010 aka The Advent of Matt to Texas. 5 States, 24 hours and 1,483 miles of driving is what it took. We laughed as hard as we've ever laughed before and fought just as viciously too but managed to survive this road trip, relationship in tact. I knew it was going to be an important milestone for us and I'm thankful that I had the time to go. It was a definitive ending to our loooong distance relationship and a hopeful beginning to a new shorter distance one, a neat bookend.

The Page:

The page itself is fairly straight forward and also entirely scrap-lifted from the genius Vivian Masket. Funnily enough, her layout was about Texas too! I loved the simple design, the white space and the "off" photo placement. Used my Slice and Basics Design Card to cut out the stars and "2". And is that tiny license plate not the cutest? It's Karen Foster and I picked it up from Scrapbook Junkie this weekend.

xxbesos

j.leija