Wow, I have really neglected my blog as of late. I had a nasty respiratory virus for the first part of summer and have been playing catch-up ever since. Between that and the grandkids I haven't accomplished much else. Of course the ridiculously high temps and humidity haven't helped much either. I'd just as soon be a hermit as to go out in that heat....blech!!! So I thought I'd post some pictures of the things I have managed to do! The first pictures are of the skinny book pages I have made for the monthly swap I am in. These first two pages are for Karen's "Grandma's Attic" theme. I loved this theme! These pages were made using old family photos. On this first page, I used a photo of my Mom, one of my Mom and Uncle Gene when they were little kids and one of my Grandma and Aunt Ann. I used a piece of vintage ledger paper and an old brass stamping piece for embellishment.


This page uses and old ledger sheet for the background and a postmark from an old letter sent to my mother-in-law from a friend of my husband's who was in the service during the Vietnam war. The couple in the old car are my Great-Aunt Ann and Great-Uncle Wilbur! I embellished it with vintage lace and buttons.

These pages are for my friend Caryl. Her theme is "Dreams"....a fun theme to work with. I found so may great dream quotes so I had a hard time narrowing it down to two. These are all PaperWhimsy images.







These two pages were for Freida's "Venice" themed book. I was really stressed about this theme, but after my search for images, I felt a little better about it! I painted over the gold areas of the mask below with some sparkly gold paint and the canal image on the second page was painted over with clear crackle paint kind of creating the illusion of an old oil painting.



Someone dropped out early in the swap, so I made an extra set of pages for Linda K's "Summer" themed book. There are tiny seashells sewn to the bottom of this page.



The images on the page above are printed on a paper that resembles fabric. I would love to find a source for this paper, but so far no luck.

This page has a real capiz shell attached and the background is made from various fibers sewn together. The nest is made from strips of paper cut from a vintage book page.

These skinny pages were for Lisa's open theme book. Cemetery images and Marie Antoinette were among the things she likes...hence my choice of images used. The swirl stamp under the cemetery angel is embossed with a rough feeling embossing powder that reminds me of stone and the flower is handmade using fabric circles singed around the edges (with fire extinguisher close at hand!) then assembled with a button for the center.



These pictures are of a journal I made for my friend Heather for a swap on the PaperWhimsy site. I love PaperWhimsy collage images...and making books...so this was a fun swap for me!



These are tags and little charms for the All Things Tim birthday swap using Tim Holtz stamps and products.



These are the charms I made for two charm swaps. One was a mini-book charm swap and the other was an open theme.