Cosmo Cricket

Girl Friday and The Boyfriend

 

Lindsay was in desperate need of two layouts yesterday, one with Girl Friday and one with The Boyfriend. I rushed over to help him out and had the best time with these two old friends..... I mean Girl Friday and The Boyfriend. Yeah, Lindsay's my old friend too...... really, really OLD friend!

Anyway, I found myself humanizing these paper lines. Is this something you ever do? I have a habit of projecting my human feelings onto inanimate objects. It all started when I was a kid. I remember hating to use the yellow crayon on my projects. It seemed no matter how careful I was it would get the other colors smeared in with it and get all muddy, streaky and ugly. But, if I didn't use it, I started to feel bad for it....... poor yellow..... all alone, never getting a turn to come out and shine. Eventually my sensitivities would get the better of my and I would give yellow a turn.

When Eric bought me my new Mac, it took me about a month before I would use it. He would tell me how it was so much faster, how the screen was huge, how I was going to LOOOOOOVVVVEEEE it. But, I just couldn't help feeling like a traitor. Me and that old Mac had been through a lot together.

As I pulled out these older lines, I felt bad that I haven't use them for so long. What does this all say about me...... except for the fact that I'm certifiable? I don't know, but here's to you Girl Friday and The Boyfriend. Enjoy your day in the sun!

Ok, enough of me and my quirks. You are all waiting to hear who won those stamps, right? Congratulations Shannon L. @ 8:15am. Send your info to kristen at cosmocricket dot com. Hope you have fun with them!

Unity Stamps with Cosmo Cricket: GIVEAWAY!

What could be better than Unity Stamps? Ones with Cosmo Cricket Material Girl and Garden Variety artwork on them of course!

I am really excited about these. Check out how cute they are, and they come with a ton of images.

There's Garden Variety:

And two from Material Girl:

Now I'm not a great stamper. In fact, every time I see a project from the amazing Debbie Olson, I realize just how much I need to work on my stamping skills. She blows me away. Look at how cute this project is!

To see more of Debbie's amazing projects with these stamps visit her blog today. Just don't get discouraged. I'm sure if we all keep trying we can master her skills! ;)

I love how Wendy Anderson stamped the spools and then wrapped thread around them. I'm sure I could handle this technique and it's "sew" cute! See more on her blog.

Laura Craigie used the cow to make her own patterned paper. It's mooooooovelous. Ok, I'm getting carried away with the puns now!

 

Gudrun's card has such a vintage feel to it. I love that red with the black and white stamping.

 

Then there's Natasja. She did a similar technique like Laura, using the stamp to make a patterned paper. It also looks to me like Natasja used paint with her stamp in place of ink. Fun!

 

Now, for some fun tutorials with these stamps you'll want to check out Unity's blog hop. I know I'm going to. Watch out Debbie.... after I learn these techniques you'll have nothin' on me! :)

Tell us what you think. Are you an avid stamper? Are you a beginner like myself? Do you just LOVE these stamps? We want to know. One lucky, random winner will get all three sets!

If you would like to increase your odds, check out Moxie Fab today too.They are having a giveaway of their own for these goodies.

Have fun everyone!

Papercrafting should be an Olympic sport

 
 
From what we have learned, there are incredibly talented people all over the world creating fantastic projects. We've had design team members from, Germany, Japan, Holland, and Canada.

The projects we receive come from everywhere and from all walks of life.

If Curling, Badminton, Table Tennis, and Synchronized Swimming are Olympic sports. And Tug-o-war, Croquet, and Basque Pelota were Olympic Sports. And Korfball (which by the way looks really fun) was a demonstrated sport in 1920 and 1928, but it didn't take, then paper-crafting should be considered.

 I would gladly volunteer as a judge.

Speaking of international paper-crafting, all of the layouts above, come from Brazil, and a very talented scrapbooker named Melissa Dias Becendorf. Thanks for sharing Melissa!

Watch our blog tomorrow while we team up with Unity Stamps! (don't tell anyone but I think were going to have some great giveaways too)

Have a great day!
 
 
  

Happy Birthday Jack!

My last baby is all grown up. Jack is 5! Look at that face. I know I'm his mom, but have you ever seen anything cuter?

Here are my 5 favorite things about this 5 year old.

1. Jack randomly comes up to Eric and myself throughout the day, wraps his arms around us and says, "I love you." Also, whenever I say, "you're a good boy", he says, "you're my good mom" back. How can you not love that?!

2. Jack loves cars. He can turn anything into a car simply by sliding it along a surface and adding sound effects. In his world, cars are really people though. They are the characters that play in his doll house. He feeds them and they do things like swim, have sleep overs and go to the park.

3. Jack is the only family member that loves Suki, our dog, enough to kiss her. Gross! But we all still kiss him....... hmmmmmm.

4. He, like most 5 year olds, says exactly what he's thinking. I took him to see Oceans over the weekend and in the middle of the movie as they were showing some weird looking fish, Jack says, as clear as a bell, "Don't you think those are kind of creepy, Mom?"

5. Mostly I love that he is kind, gentle, imaginative, happy, silly, creative and MINE!

Thanks for letting me be a mom and brag a bit today.

Material Girl Banner

Have you noticed that banners are the big thing right now? They are super cute, fun to decorate with and simple to make. What's more, they use up those scraps, just like Amy talked about doing in her weekend post...... although they also create them too! But the really frugal side of me loves that they make inexpensive window treatments.

Here is one I thought was simple adorable. It's made by Merdrey Chew using Material Girl.

Happy Monday everyone!

Fun stuff comming up and Amy's tips

Hi there! It's designteam time of the week again and we wanted to let you know we have some fun stuff plannend for next week since next week is National Scrapbookingday! So make sure to check our blog next Saturday (several times) since we will be here with some fun stuff and of course....give aways! As a part of the fun you can ask everything you ever wanted to know of us, the designteam members from Cosmo Cricket. You can place your questions in todays comments section, do not forget to let us know for who the question is meant :) And the most original, funniest or best question will win a price! Now, do not forget to comment on Amy's post down here because I can tell you, it's great!

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Hi Everyone! Amy here today to tell you about some tips and tricks that I do help with one of the biggest problems I have in scrapbooking-little teeny pieces of scrap paper everywhere! We all have this problem right? (please say right so that I am not the only one! :D) They are such a pain sometimes! It seems a waste to throw it away, yet you can seriously only so many 1 1/2 inch squares of the same patterned paper! LOL! Well I decided I would try to show some ways that I I use on my LOs to work on diminishing my pile. I must tell you that none of these ideas are new or my own genius! They are ideas I have seen for a while now, and absolutely LOVE using on my own pages all the time! I just thought I would come on here today and share them!
 
This first LO does a couple of things that are fun and handy! I used quite a few tiny strips of patterned paper as simple and subtle accents to the page. In the first spot was the border, where not only was this a color accent to the picture but also the frame for my LO. I had some little half inch strips in my paper scraps bag and decided to cut those in half longwise to create the little strips. Then on the bottom of my LO, just below the picture, I have two more strips of paper that I used decorative scissors on. Actually to be honest, one of them is the negative of another time that I used the scissors on a piece of paper! (Can you believe I even keep those?! :P Yeah I do.) 
 
 
 
   
On a sidenote: I wanted to point out the hand cut clouds and other characters on the LO because those are from the border strip papers! I will admit I have a little difficulty using the border strip papers only because I am unsure how to get them on the page! So instead I hand cut all the super cute little things on the strips! I love doing that because it gives me all these sweet and teeny things to use on my pages!
 
Now this next page uses punches as the basis for using up scraps! :D For example, I used punches of paper and adhered them to my LO to create a kind of scalloped circle! Well I guess it is not really scalloped because I used a pinked circle punch, but it is kind of the same thing! :D On this LO I used multiple punches to create my embellishments and accents. The pinked circle border was super easy-all I did was punch them, use a little bit of repositional glue (just in case I needed to move them), stuck em on and sewed the whole thing together! Super simple! Moving further down the LO you can see I made a tab for my journaling tag with a punch. And then even further down I created kind of the center piece embellishment for my page by layering punches of paper! 
 



 
 
On a sidenote: Notice how I painted my background paper white? I decided to do this because I wanted that paper but just not as bright as it normally is. Painting it white made the pattern and color more subtle, and ended up making all my embellishments and picture on the page stand out that much more!
 
I did something similar on this next LO. I used several cut outs from the Girl Friday Wednesday paper on my LO, but didn't want them to be quite so dark, so I gave them a quick wash over with some diluted white paint! :D Don't be afraid to change a paper to suite what you need! I do this all the time! 
 



 
 
This LO incorporates all the things that I had discussed with the last two LOs. My accents on this page are created solely from punches, decorative scissors, and hand cut shapes. I layered and layered, and then sewed them all into place. All the butterflies were cut out of pieces of paper that seriously I don't know what else you would have been able to do with them!
 
Well I hope you enjoyed this today, and that I have helped inspire some ideas into helping reduce the amount of little scraps you might have! :D

Have a great weekend!

A real Flashback Facebook Friday......

 
 
Facebook is a very cool way to reconnect with friends, keep track of family members daily goings on, see what your friends of days gone by now are doing now, and oh yeah.....check out their pictures! Vacations, kids, grand kids, family photo's, etc....

Which by the way, brings me to today's blog topic. I went to Facebook the other day and my best friend in high schools cousin, who I knew quite well, and who was two years older than me, looked really, really old. I was astonished and kind of felt bad for him.

So today I thought I would post pictures when I was younger and then my current picture (the one in the middle). I don't think i've changed much, do you? How do I do it you ask? I haven't had any pictures taking of me since 1978.

Okay and now for some great projects from one of our international Design team members, Gudrun Loennecken (pronounced low in neckin). (I think I like how that's pronounced) 

She's talented and we appreciate all that she does!

   
 
 
Have a great weekend and "keep on trucking", uh...I mean "Scrappin"

 
 

Early Bird Fabric Winner

Congratulations Shannon Bogan who said, "OMGosh, I just about peed my pants when I saw this! This is my fave CC line EVER and I would DIE to have this line in fabric. I can't wait to get my hands on it. The projects are endless and this whole line fits my decor perfectly. [insert high-pitched girly squeal here] Love it!!!"

Now that I've disappointed more than 600 of you, I'll go hide for the day. I'll be back tomorrow when hopefully you've forgiven me.

Shannon, send your info to kristen at cosmocricket dot com and be sure to keep a close eye on the deliveries. I'm afraid that there could be lots of ladies stalking your ups man in hopes of snagging that package out from under you.

Giveaway: Early Bird Fabric!!!

Yep, that's right. I am sooooooo excited about this one. One of our most popular paper lines EVER is now fabric!!!

How many times have you all told me that you want this for curtains in your kitchen or craft room? Can you imagine the cute aprons, handbags, skirts, headbands, etc. you could be sewing up? This is a must have and you can win it!

Tell us what you would use a set of these lovely fat quarter for to be entered into our random drawing. Then check back tomorrow morning to see if you were the lucky fan.

Universal Truths Tuesday.......New Release coming soon.......Great projects!

The layout is courtesy of Marie Levite and the cards are from Joan Umano. This is the first time that we have featured the projects that they have created.

Next, I think sometime later next week we will be releasing a new collection as a mid-show release. This is a great collection that you won't want to miss! And finally, some of the universal truths that i wish could have come up with. My favorite you ask? The bad decisions make great stories. I have a ton of those!

UNIVERSAL TRUTHS

1. There is great need for a sarcasm font.

2. Was learning cursive really necessary?

3. Bad decisions make good stories.

4. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren't going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.

5. "Do not machine wash or tumble dry" means I will never wash this - ever.

6. I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.

7. I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

8. I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.

9. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

10. Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.

Have a great Tuesday!