Bauble Ring & Cupcake Cutie

Again if you've known me longer than five minutes you know that I'm insanely obsessed with, "The Wizard of Oz," from the books to the movies. Well, imagine how wildy excited I was when I saw on the Oz boards (Yes, there are enough of us we commune together on message boards) when I read that Tarina Tarantino would be doing her own line of "Oz" inspired jewelry line called, "My Pretty." I quickly ordered the Look Book which was fantastically amazing. I uberly fell in love with the electric butterfly barrettes and pins and the bubble pop collection inspired by Glinda. I'd say about a year or so ago I did some of the butterflies:

Poor things, they're a bit mangled now and this isn't even half of them. But I like to switch them back and forth from rings to hair pins. And if you're feeling a little down, putting on a butterfly will definitely put a little sparkle back into your step!

Well, moving on, about two weeks ago we went to our in-laws for swimming and dinner. My fabulous mother-in-law, Linda, has a little basket of costume jewelry for all of the grand-daughters to play with. I spotted a pink fake pearl clip-on earing and it brought back memories of Tarina's bubble pop line and how I could easily turn this sad excuse for an earing into a gorgeous bauble cluster ring. I thought about pilfering the earing away into my pocket and not saying a word, but my conscious got the better of me. Of course didn't have anything to worry about because when I told my mother-in-law about my idea, she loved it. I kind of frankensteined some jewels from some other pieces around my craft room and I had a small assortment of crystal bicones, silver spacers, etc...

Here's what I came up with:

It's quite a bit chunkier than the Tarina Tarantino one; I think hers had three charm loops to add the beaded pinheads to, but the ring I had on hand had about 16. If I had left any of them blank then the ring would have looked a little funky. I honestly haven't beaded since freshman year of high school. I used to LOVE seed beading little bracelets for my friends. My mom still beads quite a bit and does custom jewelry for friends and family.

On to SUPER cuteness...


Last weekend I had the opportunity to do a photoshoot with a good friend, TeAnn, and her brand new little angel, Jessa. I don't know what posessed me to think of it, but I had a vision of the baby on a cake stand with cupcakes all around her. Crazy, right? I know.... but I baked the cupcakes and I made the cupcake stands. To be honest, they were inspired by Hello Hanna's sweet stands. But, by the time I saw them I didn't have time to order them. Enter my scanner, SCAL, expression and cuttlebug. Gosh, I love tools. Only about two hours of work and they came out pretty well I think. Baby Jessa wasn't thrilled about sitting on the cake stand and she was a bit bigger than I had anticipated. This shot is far from perfect, but I just loved it anyways.

Another few shots from the day...

And one more little sneaky peaky....



Can you guess? Huh? Huh? Alright, well it's probably more exciting for me, but still I love to share! See ya'll soon!!!

Getting Organized...

If you've known me personally, you probably know that I'm a very disorganized person. It's just not in me. And you may say, "Oh gosh, Sara, it can't be that bad." And I respond with an, "Oh, no, it is that bad. It was so bad that in elementary school the kids used to hate getting set in a desk-grouping with me because I always had the messiest desk and consequently we were generally the last table to get to go to lunch.

Anyways, where am I going with all of this? Well, to be honest, I haven't improved much. But, I have made a severe step in organizing my life with my craft room. To say I have some "stuff" is a vast understatement. I have a poop-load of crafting supplies, mostly scrapbooking. It outgrew our garage so inside I came and searched for the best way to store my ridiculous amount supplies. You can go back to my My Scrapbook Room post to see all the deets. Anywho, I'm continually looking for good ways to store all my supplies and make them more accessable. I kept running into a problem with my Distress inks, especially since I just got the new 12 colors. I have one of the extra large ranger cropper hopper storage bins meant for the Ranger Adirondak inks. I use this to store everything and it's out on a shelf, but it's been kind of a pain in the butt to constantly open and close it, go through all of the colors just to find a couple that I need and then try to match the foam pads to the right ink pad. So, finally I came up with this:

I had some adhesive backed paper I cut into strips and distress inked with each pad I owned then wrote the name of the ink color. I've just decided to keep the whole case open since I use my distress inks so often. I was going to try and take off the front cover, but was hesitant since these storage cases are no longer being produced and are considered gold by rubber stampers.

So the first photo you saw at the top of the post is all of my distress ink pads in little jewelry ziplocs (found at your local craft store in the beading aisle). I used the same adhesive-backed paper to label each little bag, and used my crop-o-dile to punch a hole in the top. I then threaded them through a large 2" loose-leaf book ring (found at your local office supply store).

Ahhhhh... now that makes my brain feel a lot better. Everything has its place and I don't need to be mixing colors on foam pads. Because I've tried to use walnut stain on a black soot pad and it didn't turn out too well... oops.

Thanks for visiting! Have a great day!