Happy Monday!
Still time to enter my birthday giveaway here: Giveaway

This week we have a fun sketch at Paper Makeup for our challenge.  I love following sketches.  Sometimes my layouts get into a rut...so it's nice to look at a sketch and work in different elements that I wouldn't have otherwise thought of.

Since it's my birthday today, I went with a fun dessert card and a super appropriate sentiment.  The colors are actually much more pink, but my camera washed them all out for some reason...

I used the yummy ice cream image from Paper Makeup's So Sweet set and framed it in a die cut scallop circle.  Then flagged a sentiment from the Guilty Pleasures set that I felt was very fitting.

The two corner borders are punched with my MS Lace Edge punch and then wrapped in pink and brown twine from The Twinery.  I added a few pearls to the corners for some extra bling.
Here's the sketch:

Be sure to stop on by and join us! 

read more →

I can't believe it is Monday again.  Weekends go way too fast, and when the week before doesn't go the way you want it to, having a long, slow weekend is what you beg for.  But it never works that way it seems :)

My "go-to" pick me up last week was chocolate.  I can't get enough of that stuff on rough days...or any day really :)  Good thing we don't have a ton of it in the house or I'd really never be able to stop.  So I decided to make up a card to show my appreciation for this delicious stuff that I love so much.

Our challenge this week at Digi Makeover is to use punches and/or dies.  This was pretty easy for me since I use those all the time on almost every one of my cards.  Not that I have a huge collection of them...but I love the ones I do have.  So I set out to make my card.  I used the PMS Fairy from Paper Makeup and her super yummy looking bowl of chocolate ice cream.  She is cut out with a Spellbinders label die and chalked around the edges.

I layered her on top of a double row of my MS Lace Edge punch and a scallop circle I cut with my Silhouette.  The flower is another Spellbinders die from the Anemone set.  I punched up a couple paper buttons and added twine to the centers. 

Then printed off and flagged my perfect sentiment from Create with TLC and it was all done!  It says exactly what I was feeling :)

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Color Me Creative #70-Gorgeous Brunettes
    Crafty Catz #187-Let's Go Pink
    In the Pink #22-Pink with Flowers
    Melonheadz Friends-Die Cuts
    Nutcrafters #45-Food and Drink
    The Twinery-Anything Goes

Stop by and join in the fun!!!

read more →

I hope everyone had a fabulous weekend!  Not much happened here.  The weather went back and forth from rain to sun, but overall was good enough to get a nice 6 mile walk in yesterday.

That was after I spent the afternoon baking up 3 batches of chocolate chip cookies, per a request from one of Matthew's co-workers :)  So my card for today fit's well with the weekend events.

Our new challenge starts today at Digi Makeover and it's to use Kraft paper!  It took me awhile to really get the hang of using Kraft, and I'm still no good at it.  But I have found that I reach for it more and more now days so this was a fun challenge to try out.

I made a cute little pocket card!  It's pretty simple but turned out so cute!  I used Duncan from Paper Makeup Stamps and colored him in with my colored pencils.  And of course, decorated his platter of cookies with chocolate chips :)  I've been playing around with combining a few chocolate chip recipes to get exactly what I want.  It's almost perfect, so maybe I will share that with you some time soon :)

The little sentiment on the tag was stamped from the Here's the Scoop set from Lawn Fawn.  I love how you can bend those stamps so they work on circles!  Then I just trimmed it out with a scallop cut black background.

Duncan is mounted onto an embossed oval.  The frame for that has been cut with my Silhouette.  The final details were to add all the pretty blue gems to everything.

Be sure to stop by and see the rest of the Makeup Artists creations!  And join in the fun!  All you have to do is use a digi!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    A Gem of a Challenge #83-Emboss It
    Artistic Inspirations #45-Stitching
    Fussy and Fancy #90-Bling it On
    Mayzy Art #19-Polka Dots

Thanks for stopping by!

read more →

Good morning!  We're starting a new challenge today at Digi Makeover and it's an easy one-Anything Goes!  You can make whatever you wish!

Father's day is coming up soon and I haven't started on any cards...these last few weeks my motivation to craft has been pretty slim.  But I browsed through the stamps available at Paper Makeup and found this sweet monster image and just loved it, so I went with that.

Stuck with a black and white theme.  It felt more suited to the image than trying to throw a bunch of color in there.  I tried to add a little bow to my baby monster but getting a bow that small to look good was just too hard...so I left it off.  I used Me and Pops from Paper Makeup and added a few square brads behind the image that I have had for...oh...7 years...lol :)

Stop by and join in the fun this week!

Entering this card into the following challenges:
    Card Mania #21-Spots and Stripes
    Cupcake Crafts #244-Boys
    Digi Darla #64-Father's Day
    Word Art Wednesday #81-Anything Goes

We decided that since camping isn't possible for us right now, we were going to make smores on the porch!  I saw this idea someplace on Pinterest and finally got the chance to try it out.

The little terracotta pot wrapped in tin foil worked perfectly and we enjoyed some nice warm and gooey smores last night after supper :)  Just like camping! read more →

I've decided to try and start broadening the subjects of my blog.  Cards are fabulous and a major part of why I started this blog, but I want to start sharing other things with you as well.  It may take awhile, and there will probably still be more posts about cards than anything else, but I hope you will stick with me and enjoy the new topics :)

I've been craving sweets lately, but we have tried really hard to cut down on having those in the house.  Which is nice, but it's almost like the less we have of something, the more I want it...

I found a random box of white cake mix in our cupboards and decided I wanted to make something with it...but wasn't sure what.  Cupcakes ran through my mind, but I wasn't feeling really in the cake mood.  I've made cookies before with a box cake mix, but I make cookies often enough that those didn't sound good either.

I decided to start surfing the web to see what other people do with their box cake mixes to jazz them up a little.  I found this fabulous thread Here that has so many good ideas and tons of them stood out to me...unfortunately I didn't have ingredients for a lot of them.  So I kept searching.  I came across the peanut butter bars comment and fell in love!

I've been addicted to peanut butter lately.  We make these peanut butter/oat protein balls that we've been eating after our workouts that are so yummy (I'll share that recipe sometime in the future), and we've fallen in love with making peanut butter/chocolate/banana smoothies on the weekends.  So peanut butter was definitely a good choice to add to this box mix.

A few changes that I've made to the recipe:
It was suggested to use yellow, but I used white since that was all I had on hand.
Instead of the suggested water, I used milk.  Not sure what sort of difference this made with the bars since this wasn't for a cake, but I read that milk will make cakes denser and that was sort of my goal in making these.  So I used milk :)
I'm sure you could use crunchy peanut butter or almond butter in this recipe.  I only had creamy :)
And of course, I added about 1/4 cup of chocolate chips to the batter.  Desserts have to have chocolate!

Here is the recipe:
1 box of white or yellow cake mix
1 cup of peanut butter
1/3-2/3 cup milk or water
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350.  Mix together the cake mix, peanut butter, milk and egg.  Pour batter into a lightly greased 9x13 pan.  Bake for 20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

These turned out fabulous!  Mine were slightly underdone and I didn't use a 9x13 pan...mine was 9x9 which made them pretty thick, but still delicious!

You can whip up a batch of frosting to put on these too if you want.  I didn't add any as they were pretty sweet already.  Definitely try this recipe out!  You will not be disappointed!
If you do, let me know what you think!  Or if you made any modifications to it!

Enjoy your treat!
<3 Emily read more →