Happy St. Patricks Day!

St. Patrick's Day is tomorrow, do you celebrate?  We sure do, we're having a dinner tomorrow night, all the traditional stuff, corned beef, cabbage, red potatoes and carrots.  I wanted to do a little decorating too so I decided to make a Shamrock Garland. 

I used this file for my Silhouette Cameo and cut out 3 of the different types of shamrocks.  I varied the sizes and also used different shades of green paper that I had on hand.

Here is what I ended up with.  I think I had about 6 dozen shamrocks cut when I was done.

I wanted to add a little sparkle because that's just how I roll.  I really wanted to cut some of the shamrocks out of glitter paper but from what I read online it could dull your cutting blade so I decided not to do that since I only have one blade right now.  My solution was a bottle of Lime Green Stickles that I've had forever but never used.

I ended up drawing a line around the petals of the shamrocks and absolutely loved the way it looked.

Here they all are laying out to dry.

I decided to vary the lines I drew just so they didn't look all the same.

For the garland that was going to go on the mantle I started with one of the larger 5" shamrocks for the center point.  I cut lengths of simple white ribbon from the craft store and adhered them all to the ribbon using my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher. 

Pretty festive if I do say so myself!

I also wanted to dress up the light over our kitchen table and since I used all my white ribbon on the mantle I switched to some yellow and white stitched ribbon that I also got at the craft store.  I cut lengths and tied it to the light fixture.  I wanted to be able to use it again so I figured I could just untie it no problem.  Since the shamrocks were going to move around I ended up stapling them back to back with the glitter sides out down the lengths of the ribbon.

I also did a garland for over my kitchen window using more of the yellow and white ribbon.  Sorry the light is so poor in this shot, its pretty dreary and rainy today.  These are not doubled up since the back won't really show. 

I love how festive it looks and love even more how quick and easy it was with the Cameo.  The only real time element was drawing on the stickles but that didn't take more than about 30 minutes.  I ended up using all but 4 of my shamrocks so I'll save those for my Project Life pages this week.

Simone had a little class party this past Tuesday and a Leprechaun came to her class and made all kinds of mischief.  She has been asking if one was going to visit our house, so I guess I need to go out and find Leprechaun stuff for him to leave behind, should be interesting!

I hope you all have a wonderful St. Patrick's Day!

Project Life - Week 10

10 weeks sure do fly by.  I can't believe its already mid-March.  Spring is in the air and we were lucky enough this past week to have wonderfully blue skies which I used as a theme for the week.

Here is the full page spread.  I did do another insert this week to showcase two of the photos I had from our trip up to Lake Tahoe which you'll see larger down below.

I'm going to keep my chatter to a minimum today, I don't want to bore you with too much detail on what products I've used, especially if its stuff I've already talked about. I'll try to just call out anything new that I used for the first time this week. If you have any specific questions for other stuff please let me know.

Here is the close up of the left side and a look at all that blue sky.

I used the new Dear Lizzy cloud vellum sheet for my insert and had some leftover so I made it my title page.  I backed it with a piece of white card stock so it would really stand out.  I also added one of the Dear Lizzy chipboard clouds just as a little extra touch.  I stamped the date on a label from an old October Afternoon label sheet.

This is one of my favorite pictures from the past week of me on my bike.

A lot of the same type of stuff I have been doing, printing photos small for the smaller slots and also a few this week that are full sized.  I added the journaling directly to the photo on the right and printed it out.

More of the same for these slots as well.  Keeping it easy which some weeks is really nice.

This was a fun slot a cool 5 Random things list that was generated around on Instagram.  It was fun!

This paper is from the new Margie Romney-Aslett paper line for Bazzill.  I purchased a 6x6 pad and love the designs, I can see myself using this paper a lot.  The photo is taped down with a piece of the washi tape I got from Japan last week.  It's silver, a bit hard to see in this photo.

Here is the front of the insert.  I used a protector that was from the Ali Edwards December Daily album kit from Studio Calico.  I was about to sew my own when I remembered that I had purchased an extra pack.  They fit perfectly over the Design A slots and only needed to be trimmed down a little bit to work.  I also had to punch new holes so it would line up where I wanted it too.  I used the Dear Lizzy Cloud vellum for the insert and mounted my photos and the journaling tags so they matched.  I wanted the cloud vellum to show around the edges and make the items appear to be floating.

Here's the back side.  I wanted to type my journaling and couldn't figure out how to run the tag thru my printer so I decided to create a document in Elements the rough size of the tag and then just printed it on card stock.  I used the tag as a template and cut around it and it looks just like the tag on the front but this one is just card stock. 

Here is the right hand side.  I crammed a lot of photos on this page, I had a lot to share and was having a hard time editing my photos.  Trust me there were more that did get axed and it was hard to do.

Lots of this side is from the trip to Tahoe, it was fun having a trip to document.  It was our first one since starting this project so it was interesting to see how it would work out. 

I love these little stick on sequins.  They are by Pebbles and I love them, I must get more.

I used a new digital journaling card from Erica Hernandez its confetti and sequins and I loved how it turned out.  I printed the whole thing on photo paper instead of on card stock.

More frames like I used last week and Tiny Templates in action as well.

We had a Parents Night out when we got home Friday, we managed to have dinner and see a movie which we don't always have time to do.  The movie was just so so, in fact quite bizarre.

I had a lot to include on Saturday so I did a collage of photos.  I used the last photo slot for my journaling which totally worked out.  These are all Instagram shots too.

One thing that I have realized this past week while I was backing up and working with my photos is that it appears 97% of my photos these days are from my phone.  I did take my small Cannon Power Shot to Tahoe with us so a lot of photos were done with that when we were sledding.  I don't think I took one photo with my DSLR last week at all.  I really miss shooting with that camera so I need to make more of an effort to use it when were home.  Its just so easy to use my phone, its always with me.  Anyone else out there noticing the same thing?

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the pages this week, see you on Friday.

Coconut Cheesecake anyone?

It's Sunday evening as I'm writing this, my clock says 6:31pm but my mind, body and sunshine outside tell me its really only 5:31pm but due to Daylight Savings time we all must now pretend its really an hour later.  It sucks waking up on Monday after the time change, it's easy on Sunday to pretend it never happened but Monday morning is a different matter. 

I'm gearing up for a busy week ahead, a family member is coming to visit so we have lots to do to prep and I'm trying to get things done in advance so I can play this week instead.

I worked most of the day today on my Project Life pages for week 10 and they are done.  I'll photograph them and get Wednesday's blog post written tomorrow so that's a box I can check off my to-do's, yay!

I have lots of laundry to do and a house to clean, and prep for a big St. Patricks Day Dinner we are having here on Saturday night.  It's a holiday my family always celebrated due to some Irish blood deep within our roots.  It will be fun to have everyone over to help celebrate, and come on who doesn't love a good Corned Beef, Cabbage, Red Potato and Carrot dinner.  I'm thinking I might make my Coconut Cheesecake for dessert.  It's been awhile and it's always a big hit, here's the recipe if you are interested.

Barbara's Coconut Cheesecake

Prep Time: 15 min
Total Time: 6 hrs 25 min
Makes: 16 servings

1-3/4 cups Chocolate Graham Cracker Crumbs (approx. 1 ¾ sleeves)
1/3 cup butter, melted
1-1/4 cups sugar, divided
3 pkg. (8 oz. each) Cream Cheese softened
2 tsp. coconut extract
3 eggs
½ cup Sour Cream

½ cup Coconut Milk

2 cups Sweetened Flake Coconut

Topping

1 cup Heavy Whipping Cream (or more if you like)

1 tsp. Coconut Extract

2 tsp. sugar

½ cup toasted sweetened Flake Coconut

PREHEAT oven to 350°F if using a silver 8- or 9-inch spring form pan (or to 325°F if using a dark nonstick 8- or 9-inch spring form pan). Mix crumbs, butter and 1/4 cup of the sugar. Press firmly onto bottom and up side of pan; set aside.

BEAT cream cheese, remaining 1 cup sugar and coconut extract with electric mixer on high speed until well blended. Add eggs, 1 at a time, mixing on low speed after each addition until blended. Blend in sour cream and coconut milk. Then mix in sweetened coconut and pour into crust.

BAKE 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes or until center is almost set. Turn off oven. Leaving door slightly ajar and leave cheesecake in the oven for 1 hour. Remove from oven; cool completely. Refrigerate 4 hours or overnight.

SERVE: whip heavy whipping cream with coconut extract and sugar.  Spread on top of cheesecake and sprinkle with toasted coconut

I hope you like it if you try it.  See you back on Wednesday for more Project Life.

Lake Tahoe

Sorry this post is going up so late and will be so short.  We just returned from two days up at Lake Tahoe.  The snow was awesome and the weather was fantastic!  We stayed at the Mont Bleu in South Lake courtesy of a very nice and cheap Groupon.  We don't ski but still had a great time sledding and saucering up on the mountains.  Simone also had a blast winning lots of tickets at the hotel arcades coming home with lots of treasures and stuffed animals we don't need.  Oh and there may or may not have been a Shamrock Shake in there somewhere, you'll just have to scroll down to see.

The beautiful view from our hotel room

She won 680 tickets with a $20.00 investment

The sledding up at Adventure Mountain, where we ran into one of Simone's good buddies which made sledding even more fun.

Last night we ate at one of my favorite restaurants, The Chart House.  We use to go to the one in Sausalito all the time but it closed years ago.  Lucikly there is one in South Lake and it was just as good as I remember.



Yep, there was and it was totally awesome!

Have a great weekend everyone!