Hat's Off to Ribbon Tutorial

Every year the Manhattan Woman's Club has a Reciprocity Meeting where we invite guests from other clubs. This year's theme was "Hat's Off to Women" and we were all asked to wear a hat to the meeting. It was held at the BEAUTIFUL Jacob Henry Mansion in Joliet so I wanted to be a bit fancy. I found this very plain hat at K-Mart and I really liked the silver around the edges.


Well, those who know me know I can't just wear a plain hat. So I got out a bunch of my spring colored flowers and started playing with different combinations. I kind of knew I wanted pink and purple because those are my favorite colors at the moment but...


...let's just say I had a variety of flowers to choose from. Yes, that's my inner hoarder peeking out again!


Of course, I had to replace that goofy string tied around the hat with a beautiful ribbon. I recently discovered that you can color just about ANYTHING with Copic Markers so I grabbed this White Stitched Grosgrain May Arts Ribbon (WA01) and blended my pinks and purples in a sort of random way, just going from light to dark and then back again. And you will notice, you can still see the "stitching" on the ribbon too!


I tied my beautiful ribbon around my hat and left the ends long to dangle from the back of the hat. Then I hot glued my chosen flowers and leaves to the hat and sat back and realized something was still missing...


So I pulled my Copics back out and colored the brim of the hat too! This time I paid attention to make sure that I didn't have the colors in the same places on the ribbon and the brim. The whole time I was coloring I felt like a "bad" kid who was coloring something I wasn't supposed too, LOL! But when I was finished, I knew it was the right move, the hat looked fantastic!


Here's my very fancy 3 year old modeling Mommy's new hat! I think it looked pretty great and I got a lot of compliments on it too. Hat's off to you!

Our New Baby!

That's right, we have a new.... FUR BABY!!!!



This is little Lacey our new 7 week old Australian Sheppard puppy! Yes, we are nuts. The basement flooded a couple weeks ago so we had to clean it out and our new couches are being delivered tomorrow, so in the midst of all this chaos... we decided to add a puppy to the mix!

Well, at least I have an excuse to use more of the DCWV Pet Stack that I bought.....

Echo Park Paper Beach Baby Layout

Today I'd like to share a layout I created with some of the gorgeous paper from the Echo Park Paper This & That Graceful Collection. I took these photos of my daughter building her first sandcastle in WI a couple years ago. I used a bit of Bakers Twine to tie up my banner which I cut with my Cricut using the Country Life Cartridge. I also used my Cricut to cut the word "Beach" from the Ashlyn's Alphabet Cartridge. I used my Tim Holtz Distress Inks to ink... everything and of course I used my Pink ATG to stick everything down. Thanks for stopping by the blog today!