>One of Martin’s recent projects

>Well, here I am, putting in a blog entry as well. My little entry here will be very brief. The last few months I have been working on a little bar that we could put in our youth room at church – a place to hold the food and drink and some other misc. stuff. More importantly, my hope was that it would be another way or place or setting to have conversation. So, I tackled my first project with Eddie Visscher – one of the junior high youth in our church. We got together a few hours every month and just did a little bit at a time – having a lot of fun while we did it. We were satisfied with the end product as we are both amatuers at this kind of thing. I give most of the credit to Eddie for his work on this. He did almost all of the nailing – while i just held everything in place. I forgot to take pictures of the progress – but here is a couple of the finished product wn in our youth room at church.

>Another little project I’ve been working on…

> I’ve told some of you that I’ve been working on a little project… and here it finally is! For the past couple years, I’ve tried to put a recipe binder for my friends who are getting married. It was something that someone did for me, and I am really glad I have a binder to store all the recipes I get from the internet or from friends, or where ever.
I use a binder that has those clear pockets on it so that I can decorate the front cover – just to make it a bit more fun.
I’ve been asked to give a bit more detail about the projects I put up on the blog, so here are a few of the details:
You’ll recognize the paper from the little monkey card I posted a while back – from wild asparagus. I traced the flowers from a chipboard stencil I bought from the dollar store, and then used my Coluzzle circle cutter to cut the centers for the flowers. I also used my Coluzzle for the ring in the top corner. By the way… I think this is the best circle cutting system ever! I love how it has a whole bunch of sizes in one little template, as opposed to a punch where you only get one size.
I used my scalloped scissor for the blue strip, and used my paper piercing tool to make the little holes in it.
The word “recipe” (for both the front and the side) was printed onto cardstock on the computer – I typed each letter in a textbox, and made the background color of the boxes brown. I cut them down to size after printing them, and then I sanded each square just cause I like the texture it gave.
Hmmm… i don’t really know what other details to give. I think the rest of the project is pretty self-explanatory.

Hope you have a good weekend! We’re planning to do some yard work and have a youth event – we’re looking forward to both!

>A fun manilla folder album

>I love to scrapbook and make cards. I don’t always take much time for it – but I still love it! Most often, I find my ideas online from other creative people who share their projects… just so you don’t think I have all these wonderful ideas on my own. For this project, I wanted to give a family that we babysat for a few days a little memory book of our time there. I was looking through the Taylored Expressions blog, and found this idea. You can find the instructions here. Each section has a pocket in it, and inside the pocket, I put a few pictures. Some are just single matted pictures, but for the “nice” and “silly” girls sections, I used little accordian-folded strips of paper with several pictures on them. It’s an easy way to tuck lots of pictures into a small space! I marked each item that could be slid out of a pocket with a little piece of ribbon. I had a lot of fun with this project… I’ll for sure be making one of these again sometime!