Halloween Button Bauble & Tutorial

Kristin Cronin-Barrow (a designer at Sweet Shoppe Designs) is turning 30 this week and she's having a week-long celebration with various giveaways and stuff.  One of the challenges is to create a layout or project with either 30 flowers or 30 buttons on it.  The winner will receive a month long guest spot on her creative team.  I decided to take mine hybrid and use one of those empty baubles that are starting to pop up in the craft stores for the upcoming holidays.  While shopping for the bauble, I found this fun and cute ribbon with green, orange, and black polka dots on it.  I had found my color inspiration!

So, in keeping with the orange, green and black colors, I took some different papers from various kits (the darker orange is from All Star, the lighter orange and green are from Artist's Canvas, and the gray is from her contribution to the Sweet Shoppe collab freebie Simple Pleasures) and printed them off on matte presentation paper.

Then I used one of the small circle paper punches I have and cut out a handful of them.  I don't have a smaller circle paper punch, so I took a round object and traced it and then hand cut it out.  Talk about tedious work! 60 small circles in all because I wanted the buttons to be double-sided.  I used my good old Tombow adhesive to create the double-sided buttons.

Then I took one of my most favorite hybrid utensils - the paper piercer - and poked holes in the buttons so I could later thread them.  FYI, I use the back side of a mouse pad as a mat so I don't poke a hole in anything below the button.

Then came the real fun part: hand stitching each and every button to make it look like a true button.  30 buttons in all.  See!  For this, I used a needle and embroidery floss.

By this time, my oldest son was home from preschool, so he helped me insert the buttons, along with some black Halloween crinkle (as the bag said) that I got from Michael's into the bauble.

And voila!  The finished product!  And yes, there are 30 buttons in there - it is kind of hard to photograph all 30 of them in a round object!

Autumn Blessings

When I first saw the Taylored Expression Sketch 128 I had no idea what to do!  I had to think about it for awhile.  Then when I saw the new kit coming out tomorrow (9/23) from Jennifer Fox and Nikki Epperson, I knew I wanted to use that kit with the sketch.  This is what I came up with:

For the words 'Autumn Blessings' I used DJB Gimme Space by Darcy Baldwin and Lauren Reid - one of my favorite fonts.  

Happy crafting and scrapping everyone!

You Make My World Happy

I can't get enough of the new kit from Meg Mullens and Kristin Cronin-Barrow called A Wonderful World.  I decided to use it on Mojo Monday's Sketch 156 this week.  Here's how it turned out:

And another view:

I'm not happy about my little handwritten sentiment.  Had I been thinking clearly, I would have printed it out on there instead of me writing it.  Oh well!  It is what it is.  :)  

Happy crafting and scrapping everyone!