Trick or Treat!

This week we are all about treats over at Frosted Designs.  We want you to create a project involving some holiday treats.  It doesn't have to be Halloween related (I am just on a roll with my Halloween stuff lately).  You can use any holiday you want.  It can be a project to hold treats, a card with a cute treat on the front or a layout about one of your favorite holiday treats. 

For my project this week I used a digital stamp from our awesome sponsor this week Purple Panda.  I have really started to fall for these digital stamps.  They are so fun and are really convenient since you can print out multiples at once, re-size them and they are just so versatile.  I when I was perusing the site I saw the R.I.P. stamp and knew that I had to have it.  We are throwing a Halloween party this year and we have been going all out with it.  I knew this stamp would be perfect for some of the treats we were making at the party.  So I made cupcake flags, treat cups and dish I.D. tags with the stamp for our party.  They are going to look great when everything is all set up together and I know our guests will get a total kick out of them. 

Die Cuts

This week at Frosted Designs we have another super fun challenge going on this week!  This week it is all about using die cuts on your project.  Die cuts are a great way to add fun shapes and texture to a project that would be almost impossible to do by hand (at least for me).  I love to use my Cuttlebug and my Bosskut Gazelle and with the two the possibilities are nearly endless.

This week I am still on a Halloween kick.  What can I say I just love Halloween.  It is such a fun time of year.  So this week I decided to go ahead and make some Halloween decoration for our house since it is seriously lacking at the moment.  I made a Happy Halloween sign using Graphic 45 paper (I just can't get enough of that Mad Hatter and the whole line) and I used my Cuttlebug to cut out the alphas and the circles used to make the flowers.

 

Halloween

I want to first apologize for taking so long to get this up.  Things around here have been kinda rocky so I haven't been doing the best with keeping up with my blog.  What's the matter?  Well in the past 6 months I have gotten into running and lifting heavy weights and have been really enjoying doing both.  I have worked really hard and made some really big gains in both my speed, stamina and strength.  I have even been training for several races.

Recently I have been having some health problems that are starting to get in the way of that.  Most aren't very serious, but just require a bit of patience and rest to get over, but this past week I somehow managed to injure my knee.  The jury is still out on what I actually did to it and I won't know for another week as I have to have an MRI done and wait for the results, but it is looking more and more like I will have to drop out of my upcoming races.  It has been very frustrating to be sidelined with an injury and have two of my major past times taken away from me.  Honestly it has put me into one heck of a funk.  I have been in pity party mode and I haven't really felt like doing a whole lot of anything other than emotional eating and feeling sorry for myself.  Both are bad things and not very productive.  So here I am today vowing to try to snap out of it and get back to blogging, commenting, and most importantly crafting.

Now all that is out of the way....On to this week's challenge at Frosted Designs.  This week we are supposed to make a project that has to do with either Fall or Halloween.  I love Halloween and it is by far one of my favorite holidays so I knew that I wanted to do a Halloween project this week.  There was just one problem...I don't have kids and DH and I haven't done anything really picture worthy to celebrate Halloween much this year.  What's a girl to do?  I started to dig through a bunch of my old photos and thankfully found this photo of my adorable nephew from a few years ago all duded up as Spiderman for Halloween.  Thank God for nieces and nephews.  They always provide some adorable photos.  I gave this a bit of a Steampunk twist to it (because I seem to be obsessed with steampunk lately) and I used the AMAZING Graphic 45 line of Halloween papers.

 

Doodling

This week's project for Frosted Designs is a little late, but I say better late than never!  This week at Frosted Designs you are challenged to use your own handwriting on a project.  The handwriting can be in the form of doodling, journaling, etc. as long as you write it with your own hand the sky is the limit.  I love doodling so much that I did 2 projects for this week.  The first is another one of my trash the dress layouts.  I used a ton of doodling on it.

 The second is a layout about me cradling my dog.  I used both doodling and handwriting on this layout.

Books

This week on Frosted Designs I am host another challenge.  When coming up with this challenge I wanted to really challenge our followers and step just a little outside the box.  So I turned to my favorite pastime and that is reading books.  I love to read and I have been an avid reader since I was a little kid.  The books I read are very much interwoven into the fabric and story of my life.  So this week everyone is supposed to use a book to inspire their project.  Head on over and see all the great projects and learn about some great books.  Plus check out the new prize for the month of October!

Anyway...On to my project.  This week I chose the Dark Tower Series by Stephen King as my inspiration.  This series of 7 books is are some of my favorites.  I am currently re-reading them and will probably do so again countless times over my (hopefully long) life.  They are full of suspense, excitement, love, determination, sadness, intrigue, etc.  I just honestly can't say enough good things about these books.  I will admit that they get off to a bit of a slow start with book 1 (gotta cut Mr. King a break as he was only 19 when he wrote it), but if you make it past that you won't regret it.  So, my project...

First I will start with the title.  "The world has moved on " is a phrase that is used repeatedly in the books.  In the story the world has changed rapidly and time has gone a little funny.  Things just aren't quite as they seem.  I have used the title (and the hidden journaling) to express how much my "world" has moved on since the time of this picture.  I was only 20 or so at that time and things sure have changed.

For the overall style of the page I used Steampunk.  I felt it really fit well with the story as the story has a curious mix of old and new.  It isn't Victorian, but rather more Western so I shifted the focus of the Steampunk a little to be more western.  I once again used the new Graphic 45 paper, Steampunk Debutante, to make this page.

Next are the roses and the 1 3D red rose.  Roses were a big part of the story, but there is a single, special rose in the book.  It is almost a character in and of itself at times.  It holds the world and it has a huge draw over many of the characters.

The train is also in the 3rd and 4th books.  He is called "Charlie the Choo Choo" or "Blaine".  He is a train with superior knowledge who likes riddles and is a serious obstacle of the 5 main characters.

The bear is to represent the character, Shardik.  He is an guardian from the old ones and is a giant cyborg of sorts.  He is part machine and part flesh.  That is why I put the gears and cogs over the bear to show that.

Finally the number 19 is in the story a lot.  It holds a special significance that I believe comes from the fact that Stephen King was only 19 when he started writing this story. 

All in all I hope you enjoy the page and are inspired by the challenge.  I have a great time working on this layout.  Get busy crafting and reading!