A day with TIM!

As I always say... I am LUCKY to have Absolutely Everything in my backyard in MA... to have these wonderful women and Kate's talent and business... again, I had an amazing opportunity last night and today... I got to learn from TIM HOLTZ! What FUN.... he is such a nice guy and his teaching mannerisms make you feel like you are the most talented person in the world! He has a way of teaching classes that allows you to understand why and how you use the products that he has chosen to represent, design and use in his creative endeavours. If you have ever logged onto his blog and taken his monthly 'lessons' or the 12 days of Christmas from 2007, you know that he walks you through the process step by step, teaching you to use a product, how you use it with other products, how it's going to interact with products, why he would use it in a certain way and then wa-la you have an incredible finished design! I learned so much from his 12 days and the monthly tags. Learning it in person was incredible!

Tim came to AE for one of 2 "Holiday Festivals" that he is teaching.... If you click on the link you see the design he made for these classes... well, he shows with a canvas bag using this design for each and every person that is taking a class! For going last night, that bag was full of goodies to make the make n takes - lower collage - and other fun stuff to play with!




Above is a picture of Heather taking a break from all the crazy wedding plans with me and Tim... He was just so sweet and was so happy to take pictures with us, talk to us...
Below is a picture of the album that we did... go to his blog and check out the Festive Windows picture... yah, that's an acrylic album! We sprayed this amazing frost stuff on the covers of the album that create that look. We then learned how to use alcohol inks and paint the 'Paintables', acrylic line from Prima... a technique that I was a bit afraid of and he made it seem like we were picking up markers and coloring!

As always, I leave AE spending money and so excited to start a new project. Maybe someday I'll finish all those projects!

On a side note - I am SO excited b/c my favorite kit designer ever had been on a bit of hiatus and re-appeared this week. Fran introduced me to Scrapologie about 2 years ago, probably more, and I always wait for new kits. She no longer does a monthly kit, but does them throughout the year. Tonight she put up for sale her Provence inspired kit... her blog can be seen by clicking on the above link. Ranjini's talent is just so incredible and she continues to 'awe' me with her creations. Someday my final projects will look this exciting (esp when I learn to use photoshop on my new computer!)

Just a vew more pictures....

I can only upload 4 pics at a time... A few more from the day...

Heather's getting married!

Heather is getting married in THREE weeks!!!! Wow... it's almost here. It's been an incredible 2 year journey. I am honored to be the maid of honor and with that have had a wonderful time organizing her shower (back in May) and then last weekend our bachelorette soiree...
Heather is the star of the 4th picture down... her creativeness is going to result in one of the most incredible weddings. She has spent the last year organizing, brain-storming and spending countless hours in her "ladyland" doing what is known as DIY projects. From pom-poms on flip flops for the guests, to out of town gift bags, amazing packages for the wedding party, ribbon wands for the ceremony (in lieu of rice), felt bags to hold the wedding programs, plastic holders for the pictures that everyone can take part in with the photo booth, all the vintage elements that she's adding to round out a vintage themed wedding... the list goes on. A local photographer, Kristin Spencer who is doing HJT's wedding, created a blog last year called Chatty Brides for local women (it's gone national now) to post about planning weddings... to view a lot of the projects that Heather has done, visit the site. It's incredibly inspiring.
I wanted to organize a day with Heather's closest friends doing activities that she and I enjoy and also partook in when we lived in Newport together. We started the day at Greenvale Vineyards in Portsmouth, RI - down the road from where the wedding is going to be at Glen Manor. Greenvale is a small vineyard focused primarily on whites that grow well in NE along the coast. We had an amazing tour guide, Bill, whom took us through the vineyard pointing out the various grapes and the process of growing. That was followed by a tasting of the wines. Greenvale has jazz on Saturdays and encourages you to bring a picnic, or they have boxed lunches you can order ahead of time. I made a picnic for the 8 of us that included wonderful cheeses, salad, soup and cookies. We relaxed, had wonderful conversation with 8 incredible ladies, drank wine and laughed a lot. Thank you to my dear friend, Frances, who took these pictures. Fran has spent many hours this year working on her photography skills and it shows.
I haven't seen pictures of the rest of the day yet... I can only imagine! We took a ride out Ocean Drive for afternoon cocktails at Ocean Cliff - a spot that Heather and I often haunted! We had a hotel room in town so we went back there to spruce ourselves for an evening out... another favorite haunt was Cooke House right in the heart of Newport. We had a wonderful dinner followed by dancing in the Boom Boom room! Late night we visited a place we also spent a few hours at... Pelham.
All in all it was a successful, relaxing fun day in preparation for what will be a wonderful weekend for Heather and Ryan.

Using distress paints...

One of the things that I've been focusing on this year is using different mediums that are new to me. I know I've said this and sound like a broken record, but being able to go to such a wonderful store like Absolutely Everything is the best thing for me! I have learned so much. At the end of last year I started to learn how to use distress inks and embossing powders by Tim Holtz through Ranger. I have posted a little on this before... throughout this year I have been accumulating those products and then started in on the distress paints.

At the end of the summer I had some time to really start playing in my craft room so I made some thank you notes, but really made tags and wrote on the back. The first 2 are the tags... the second one had a mini tag attached that I wrote on and it went right into a little pocket on the front of the bigger tag. For both of these I embossed using the harlequin stamp, painted over and then using a wet paper towel removed the paint from the embossed part. Then I stamped the clock with black Staz On. Once you get going on these projects they are pretty easy.

This is a card I made for my cousin Erika for her birthday. She lives in CA with her family, but her husbands family is from CT. They Christened their daughter, Clara, in CT so we were able to go for a visit and finally meet little Clara - who is a hoot! Definitely a descendant of the Mayer women (my Mother's family!) Erika's birthday was that week so I made this card. My latest thing are the chipboard keychains from Maya Road... they make the best tags on gifts! I used the cupcake for the front of the card. I did the same embossing and painting over on the top. For the rest of the card... this is a 6x6 card... I used paper from the Graphic 45 line - a wondeful, vintage inspired line of papers that I can't resist - and cut that 5.75 x 5.75 to fit over a red card. I distressed the edges and used a little distress ink. The sticker on top is from the vintage poster labels that Cavallini put out - another wonderful line that you can watch out for at Home Goods, if you're lucky! Add some fibers... ok, fibers... it started with Heather buying them at Michael's in bulk... then we scored one day at Joann Fabrics when they were having a huge sale. Last week I found them at Ocean State Job Lot for a $1. These bad boys are the best! I now have 2 tupperware containers full of them!