i love birthdays

Yes, it's quite true: I love birthdays!*

(* = anyone else's birthday except for my own!)

I think birthdays are my favorite holiday, yes, sometimes more than Christmas. I think it's the best time to celebrate someone's existence, and it provides the best excuse for showering someone with gifts and sugary sweets like cupcakes. :)

I also find that I am faced with an unusually huge amount of birthdays during the summertime. I found myself needing 6 birthday cards around mid-June for some very dear coworkers and friends, so I decided to raid my stash of card making supplies and create some fun cards. The biggest find was a pile of alphabet stickers that I had been meaning to use on scrapbook layouts, but I bought them before I was hit with "scrapper's block" (think writer's block) so they've just been collecting dust in my crafting room. So here are the six cards I put together for some very special friends:

The first one was created for Antoinette, my carpool buddy. I know, I didn't end up using alphabet stickers on the card itself but I found a chipboard letter to use instead. I did end up using the alphabet stickers on the envelope and man, her name took up all my t's!

I put a restaurant gift card on the inside of the card and thought my A Muse stamp that says "have a delicious day!" was the perfect sentiment for it. The funny thing is that I traced the outside of the gift card and tried to do a mock version underneath the real thing, but my drawing skills suck and I botched that idea. Oh well. (LOL)

This card was for my stepmom, Debbie, and as you can see I did use some fun letter stickers here. These are by American Crafts and have a leathery feel to them. And of course, I love the green color!

Again, I didn't use the stickers on this card but I was having fun using them on the envelopes. I used a bee theme with Jess's card because she wants to be a beekeeper. Yes, she really does! :)

And then on the flipside, I used the letter stickers on both the card and envelope for my friend Kathleen's husband, Matt. I love those puffy stickers for some reason. They just glow with cheeriness.

This was a fun "look who's turning 30" card for my coworker, Nathan. (Duh, you can read the envelope, huh? Sorry about that.)

And last (but definitely not least) is this little one I put together for my friend Jennifer who - can you guess it? - is a fellow Cancer baby. I used my crab and cupcake punches for this one. I forgot to take a photo of the envelope before I gave it to her but I used the pink alphabet stickers on it. I ran out of e's before I realized it and resorted to using a number 3 the wrong way instead.

I just received a huge order of stamps that I bought after Papertrey Ink's July release so I hope to get back into the swing of things with cardmaking. There are so many ideas swimming through my mind these days but it's been a struggle to actually get the mojo enough to make these ideas happen. Stay tuned ... more crafting posts will hopefully come soon!

cupcake tower fit for a queen

This Sunday is my boss, Elissa's, birthday and since I'm going to be out of the office on Friday, I decided to surprise her today instead. I got this really cool collapsible tower from AC Moore and decorated it with cupcakes, Gerbera daisies, some curling ribbon, and a bow. She loves the color hot pink so I went with as much of it as I could find! I must say that a bit of my Martha side came out today and I was quite pleased with the way the tower turned out!

The cupcakes were by Betty Crocker - yellow cake and then I added some Ghiradelli milk chocolate chips, topped with vanilla icing, and then sprinkled with edible glitter. Who would've thunk that they make hot pink edible glitter?! Yes, edible!

feelin' crafty

What do you buy a young lady who is turning 7? (Note: I'm posting this now that I know Rachel has seen my blog on her birthday and I'm assuming that she won't see it again before tomorrow when we give her her birthday gift. Crossing my fingers here, peeps.) I guess the better question that I always struggle with when it comes to kids' birthday gifts is what should we give to them that is not a toy or clothes? I like to aim for useful things, or things that are functional yet fun.

I bought Rachel a bunch of stickers while I was at a store one day, so I came up with the idea of making her this sticker book so that she'd actually have some place to stick them to. You know, some place other than on our body parts, the refrigerator, or in a random coloring book. I used an 8" circle chipboard album (by 7 Gypsies I think) that I picked up at Right at Home Scrapbooking a while ago, then covered each side with colorful paper. It came on the silver ring so I tied some pretty ribbon on it and added some shiny rhinestone stickers. Voila! A sticker book hopefully worthy of stickers.

Also in prep for our trip out to Williamstown for the weekend, I decided to stick with the brown paper that the framed photo we were giving to Tony's parents came in instead of fishing around for something else to use. So I whipped out my Fontwerks clear "George Outline" stamps and stamped directly onto the package. I like how it turned out - very simple, plain, and to the point.

And lastly, I had put together a baby card for our friends Jen and Brian before I went to meet their new addition, Adam, last week. I really like how the design turned out so I made a more generic version (the one I gave them had an "a" on it) using an "It's a boy" stamp.

The cover reveals the top half of the inside of the card.

a few random things

Just wanted to post about a few random things tonight. First and foremost, a big happy birthday wish to my husband, Tony.

Rewind to Friday ... 08.08.08. What a cool date, eh? I can't imagine how many people got married on that day. Wouldn't it be cool if your baby was born on that date? I have always had this weird fascination with numbers. Anyway. Moving on now.

My coworker, Donesia's, birthday was on Friday so she got to celebrate a fun 08.08.08 birthday this year. I made this card for a bunch of us at the office to sign for her using a Stampin' Up! stamp that Liz gave to me with my last order (thanks, Liz!). I am really into the idea of using large, decorative stamps as backgrounds these days. I love how the foam letter stickers stand out on this card.

I'm also really diggin' this pink and blue combination for some reason. I just think it goes so well together, so I made Liz a thank you card to thank her for the flower stamp (silly, I know!). Renee loaned me her Making Memories tag maker tool, so I used it around the stamped "many thanks" image. Again, lovin' that background stamping!

We watched the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and were just blown away with how much detail and coordination went into each part of it. This Boston Globe article talks about how a Chinese film director, Zhang Yimou, designed and directed the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony with a $300 million budget. Holy crap! This guy's a friggin artistic genius. I was simply amazed at how beautifully coordinated everything was, and blown away by the sheer number of people involved with each "scene". I found this video about the dress rehearsal. Can you imagine how much discipline and focus it must've taken for all these people to make the show as seamless and perfect as it was? Craziness.



Lastly, we went to a wedding shower for our friends, Jill and Drew. It was on the rooftop of their Comm Ave condo building and the view from there was amazing. It's where I took some fabulous 4th of July firework photos a couple of years ago. The weather couldn't have been better and it was just fun seeing how excited the two of them are about their upcoming wedding date (October 5th). I snapped this photo of the Prudential Tower tonight.

And no, we didn't see Tom Brady while walking down Comm Ave tonight. ;)

tennis + dave brethauer + a birthday card

Tony and I decided to try playing tennis again today. It's been quite a while since we've hit the courts, and part of that was probably because I sucked so bad for a while there. Ha! Of course, the wonderful husband he is, he would never never say that but I know when I stink at a sport. I think I was almost 20 pounds heavier back then, too, so of course, I was probably a lot slower on my feet. What-ev.

After driving around in search of an empty court, we ended up at our old stompin' ground: Bunker Hill Community College. What's nice about these courts is that they are tucked away from the main road so most people probably don't even know that they're there. They were kind of beat up for a couple of years but it looks like they recently replaced the nets and they look nice now.

Turns out that we didn't suck as much as we had anticipated sucking. LOL I'm still quite out of shape though and had to stop for a couple of rests as my heart beat a gazillion times a second. Our tennis balls are quite old though, so they don't have much bounce to them anymore. Or so, that's what we'll blame part of our suckiness on for now anyway [wink, wink]. But we've decided to a) get me a new racket (mine is very old, strung quite loosely, and the grip is shedding - gross!), b) buy some new tennis balls, and c) get me some new sneakers that don't make my baby toes so sore (<-- I decided this last one just now) before we hit the courts again next weekend.

Tony and I both used to play avidly when we were younger. Did you know I was on the varsity tennis team in high school? Well if you saw me running around today you definitely would not have thought that - ha ha ha!

Renee and I took a colored pencils class taught by one of the owners of Memory Box Co., Dave Brethauer, at Ink About It in Westford, MA yesterday. He taught us some pretty neat blending techniques to use with colored pencils and we worked on pieces for five different cards. I liked this one with the fall leaves the best because we used three different colors and it really showed the blending technique the most.

On a side note, I've been awaiting my recent order of Stampin' Up! goods from Liz to arrive so that I could try this idea that I've had brewing in my head. I used the jumbo rolling "happy happy birthday" stamp and "wild wasabi" cardstock and ink pad from Stampin' Up! to make this card. I used the little cupcake stamp from A Muse and then punched them out with a circle punch. Anyway, it has been such a long time since I've created a card so I thought I'd post it here.

Later that night, Tony and I had a nice dinner at Coda in the South End. Read about it here. Hope everyone had a nice weekend!

back to the real world

Wow, I can't believe June is coming to an end already. I suppose having a wedding and honeymoon kind of makes time go by quickly, too. Before I go into wedding talk, a quick happy bee-lated birthday wish to my friend, Liz, whose birthday was on the 20th of June. And a bee-lated shout out to my nephew, Evan, who turned 4 yesterday. Also, happy anniversary to my new in-laws, Joe and Mary, who are celebrating their 41st today.

So the wedding. The wedding. Wow. What a fun time! Occasionally stressful, but fun! We are so thankful that so many of our family members and friends were able to fly out to join us in California. We were blessed with beautiful weather, our guests had fun trekking around Northern California, the local wineries sold cases thanks to us (ha ha ha), and we had a fabulous time celebrating. If you haven't done so already, check out our photos on Shutterfly. I've posted photos from family and friends, plus our honeymoon photos, and a couple of little videos. We haven't developed and uploaded the disposeable camera photos yet, so there are a lot more to come.

Oh and does it kind of freak me out that there are already over 9,000 hits on the site? Um, yes. Gulp.

So has it been hard getting back to real life? Yes. My body is still kind of jet-lagged and so I haven't been going to bed at a normal hour yet. I think the first week back I couldn't fall asleep until 2 am. Ugh.

And to make it semi-worse, I'm going through another skin patch test this week so I have stuff taped to the top of my back right now. (I'm going through my blog archives and I can't believe I didn't write about this back in January when I went through it the first time.) I had such a bad reaction to something(s) the first time I had this done that it spread into other areas of my back and the doctor couldn't get a clear reading. Hence, the re-test. Although this time we're just testing 50 out of the original 73 items so it isn't quite as bad as I thought it might be. I go back to see him tomorrow and to have the stuff removed, but I still can't completely shower until I go back on Friday for another reading. Sheesh. I just hope we find out what else is bothering my skin these days. Does anyone know how I can exchange my skin for some new, non-allergy prone stuff?!

Trying to stay positive ... think good thoughts ... SO can't wait until Friday!!