A Southern Belle Afternoon Tea Bridal Shower

Hello friends.  This last weekend was "Bridal Shower" weekend for my daughter, Bethany.  She had two bridal showers, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.  This post will tell you about the Southern Belle Afternoon Tea Party shower, which was held on Saturday at the home of my next door neighbor, Penny.

Penny planned a lovely, elegant, yet relaxed shower with fabulous finger sandwiches, delicious hot tea, and a lovely (and yummy) cake.  Penny borrowed my tea and sandwich server sets for the guests to use.  The dishes are some what old fashioned, the tea cup sits on the little plate along with your finger foods.  This shower was perfect for my vintage themed bride! 

(Bethany and Penny posing for a photo)

I crafted quite a few items for this shower, beginning with the banner pictured below.  You might recall the banner from THIS blog post.  The pennant sections feature Southern Belle Secrets. 

The center pennant panel on the banner defines a Southern Belle.   Some of my very southern friends liked the definition!  They thought it was much better than "simpering female"!

Being me, as well as being the mother of the bride, I decided to embellish my gift bag to match the theme of the wedding.  I used a cut file from the Silhouette America store, though I added a second layer behind the teapot and teacup. 

 I used an Anna Griffin embossing folder and embossed the top layers before adding foam tape strips to the back of the cuts to adhere them to the gift bag.

And again, because I AM ME, I crafted my gift card to again match the theme of the shower.  I used a dress shaped card and inserted a large hat into the cut file.  I then added extra flowers and other details to dress up my Southern Belle card.  

I was especially pleased with the way the hat inserted into the file.  I cut a top later for the hat and did a bit of shading with markers before adding the band and flowers.    I finished the card with a lovely stamp which reads "True love stories never have endings".  That is my wish for Bethany and John.

Other than the dinner plates and salad plates to her place settings, I also gave Bethany an extra little gift.  It came wrapped in a brown gift bag with tissue and ribbons, so I only had to craft a card for the gift.

I found this fun vintage sofa cut file in the Silhouette America store and thought it would be PERFECT for Bethany.  I copied the background of the sofa, duplicated the cut a second time and welded the two pieces together, attaching them at the top back to create a card base for this sofa. 

I used three colors of card stock to cut the card/sofa elements.  I used an Anna Griffin embossing folder to emboss the upholstery pieces before assembling the card.

I finished the card with ribbons, pearl brads and a Happily Ever After stamp on the back of the sofa.

The final bit of crafting I did for Bethany's Southern Belle shower were the party favors.  I had intended to use organza gift bags with tea inside and attach Love is Brewing gift tags.  Cute idea, huh?  We it was all good until I opened my South Carolina Plantation Tea and found the silk tea bags were in envelopes far larger than I had expected.... And of course I made this discovery the night before the shower!  Yikes!

I had already created the tags (above) for the bags using the "print and cut" feature on the Silhouette, so I just switched gears and created a new gift packaging.  I took an SVG purse card pattern and made a few edits to create a simplified version of the purse.  I cut the purses in three pieces: the basic top opening card piece, the handle/flap piece and the little banner piece.   

The purses came out beautifully once the tags were attached.  And inside?   Two special silk tea bags for an afternoon tea party favor!

Below is a photograph of the lovely - and delicious - cake that Penny served.  The writing on the cake reads, "Showers of Joy, Bethany"!  

I confess that I forgot to take photos before we ate so I missed the full table effect - and all of the pretty dishes, but I did snap a photo or two before we cut the cake.

Below is a blurry (read "soft focus") photo of Bethany and I.

And finally a photo of Bethany and her future mother-in-law, Kathy Ross.

I cannot thank my neighbor enough for hosting this beautiful shower.  And also thank you to the wonderful ladies who attended "showered" Bethany with gifts and love!

Family Healing and Remembrances

(Doug and his mom, Mother's Day 2013)

Hello everyone.  As you read this Doug and I are in Chattanooga with his family.  Doug's mother very unexpectedly passed away earlier this week.  It came as such a shock to all of us.  Aside from mobility issues, his mother was not ill.

Please keep Doug, his sister and two brothers, and the entire extended family in your thoughts and prayers. This is going to be a painful time for all involved, but I am hopeful that together it might my be a healing time too.  

Ice and Snowmageddon

Hello Friends!  Welcome to Icemageddon!  After a weekend in the 60 degree temperatures, Mother Nature has once again teamed up with Mr. Freeze (think Batman villain) and they are implementing their diabolical plan on the Southeast. Things were so bad here that the Weather channel's Jim Cantore was in town, informing us that we are located in the epicenter of this storm.  Thanks Jim, I think we figured that out with a glance at the  map!

When you look at these photos you should be aware that it has NOT snowed yet. We are supposed to get snow starting tonight... anytime now, actually.  The white in these photos is ice.  Everything is iced over here in Aiken.   The first three photos are from my front yard.  I am currently avoiding the back yard.  Doug told me that part of the woods came down on our azaleas.  I should have asked about my blueberry bushes, but to be honest, I am not sure that I want to know.

I ventured no further than half way down our driveway and across into our front yard.  Doug went and knocked ice off of the DirecTv dish and he went out back with the Duncan.  Not me, man.  I am cozy and warm and staying inside.

Meanwhile, facebook is full of photos of our frosted town.  The traffic circle on Lauren's Street is generally a very busy place.  Not so today, though there are some tire tracks in the ice.

Lauren's Street, the main shopping area down town, was closed today.  In fact, everything was closed today.  Aiken is officially iced over.

I hate to see this, in the photo above some of the very old magnolia trees have lost large limbs.  I have had limbs falling in my back yard as well.  When they break it sounds like an explosion.  The limbs just cannot support the weight of 1.5 inches of ice.  By the way, it was not really snowing.... Google added the snow to the photo for me.  I thought it was pretty so I kept it!

And for you golf fans (MFJ - Jayne) this is for you:  This is a photo from the Augusta Nationals today.  It is only seven weeks until the Master's tournament. The grounds keepers are going to be busy removing fallen and broken trees and limbs, as well as clearing the debris.   But in seven weeks this same scene will be resplendent with a green carpet of grass and fabulous blooming azaleas!

Not wasting my day too much, I have been working on Valentine's for Bethany's students.  I should have plenty of time to finish them as there is not school today or tomorrow for local students and teachers.  Hopefully we will be back to normal by Friday.  I am just thankful that unlike 10 years ago during the ice storm, we have not lost power.

Happy New Year & New Opportunities

Wow, it is already Jan 5th and I am FINALLY doing my first post of 2014.  If you follow my blog, you know that life has been busy and eventful for us.  We are waist deep in wedding planning, an experience that Bethany and I are both enjoying.  She has such lovely vision and ideas about what she wants!

The photo above is one of several that I took to use on Bethany and John;s Save the Date postcards.  This is the photo that I chose to use.

Holiday Happiness Continues

Hello friends!  I thought I would be posting a New Year's project for the New Year Linky Party at Bitten by the Bug 2.  But after lots of company, a tummy thing, and even more company, I did not get my New Year project completed.  I did, however, have a wonderful surprise visit from my older son last night!!! 

The big news at our home this Christmas season, is John and Bethany became engaged!  He took her to Asheville, NC to the Biltmore Estate on Friday, December 27th and proposed.  We knew this was coming, but I could not help but admire what a wonderfully romantic setting John chose for his proposal.  As you might guess, my life has transitioned into wedding planning as they plan to marry this summer!

Since I have no project to share with you, I thought I would share a few Christmas morning photos (in which half of us are still in our PJs - including me!).  Above - Doug models his Dr. Who hat and scarf.  Below - John is thrilled that Crissie restocked his classroom supplies!

Ian LOVED his new bass and did not want to put it down to open his other gifts.  I told him that he acted the same way over the Little Tykes car when he was two. Every other gift was opened from inside the car we named "The Flintstone-mobile".

Bethany likes sloths.... Aaron and I each got her the same sloth for Christmas.  She was thrilled with her twin sloths!

Santa, that awesome fellow, brought me cutting mats and a great die and stamp set.  I was very happy!!

Not to leave Duncan out, he too received two gifts.  He is so sweet and so happy when he opens a new toy!

Aaron and Crissie were funny.  He got a KitchenAid, and she got a tent!  Role reversal much?

And here they all are: Ian, Bethany, John, Crissie, and Aaron.... and Duncan the wonder dog, Edgar the pug and Magnus the puggle.  What a crew!

Please DO go by the BBTB2 blog and join the New Year's Linky Party.  I think it is going to be fun!!

Merry Christmas!!

Pretty Woman on a Pretty Layout

Hello everyone.  I hope you feel like another layout featuring my lovely daughter, Bethany.  There is a story behind these two pages.  Bethany came home one afternoon after teaching all day and I thought she looked fabulous - especially for a woman who had just spent 8 hours with 20 second graders!  I decided to snap a couple of photos of her.  But of course, Duncan the wonder dog felt like he needed to be in the photos with her.  After some good petting, he gave her such a loving look, then he and Bethany both looked at me and smiled!  The photos were so cute that I had to scrap them!

I actually made most of these two pages last summer at Scrap Convention in a  layout class.  And even though cutting the individual pieces, stamping the individual cuts, adding ink, glitter, etc is time consuming, I always think the end result is so worth while!

My matting color choice may seem unusual, but it actually matches the subtle blue in the background print paper.  Also it matches Bethany's skirt.

I used a lot of glue and fine glitter on this layout.  The flower centers are glitter covered glue.  Also i used fine tip on the glue and outlined the word LOVE and applied glitter to the word.

Family Time and Girlfriend Time....

Hello everyone.  I know it is Monday and that normally means it is time for my weekly Bitten By The Bug 2 post.  However this week I did not get my project finished.  It was all designed, but not cut when I left for a weekend at Lake Murray at my friend Sally's lake house.  And while I accomplished a lot this weekend, I did not get my BBTB2 project finished!  Sad, I know!  I did have a lovely time at the lake and I want to thank Sally and Beth for hosting us again.

I will be sharing some of the projects that I made this weekend later in the week.  I still need to photograph the projects and tonight I am just too tired to do that.  I actually fell asleep sitting up on the sofa checking my email.  My sweet hubby sent me off to bed for a nap, while he made dinner for us!  What a good, good man.

Remember last Monday when I told you that Ian had come home for the weekend?  I so enjoyed his visit that I set up a 20 minute photo shoot with Ian, Bethany & John, Doug & I in the back yard.  I need new photos of Ian and Bethany for our annual calendars I made each fall.  I decided that John will be added to the family calendar beginning in January so I needed photos of him as well.

I thought for a 20 minute photo shoot that we did okay.  I love the photos of Ian and many of those of Bethany & John together.  And of course these two cut solo photos of Bethany - above and John - below.

I managed to get two good photographs of Ian and Bethany together.  In this photo I think they look a great deal alike.

And as we were wrapping up, Bethany snapped a couple of photos of Doug and I together.  I especially liked the photo below.

Please do go over to the Bitten By the Bug 2 blog and check out the Design Team's cats and dogs projects, and to congratulate our new Design Team members!!

Defense Prompt Leads to Fun Layout

Hello everyone.  Today's layout is, of course, one of my LOAD 513 layouts.  The daily LOAD prompt (again they are all from the board  game Clue, or deal with mysteries) was a motive for a crime.  Last Saturday the motive was self-defense.  

I was at a loss for what to do with the self-defense prompt, but I saw several great ideas in the LOAD project gallery.  One of my favorites - someone took a photo of her facial care products and called that her self-defense against aging.  I wasn't as creative.  

I went digging through my photo stash and found this funny photo that Aaron photo-shopped of himself.  I am guess this was based on an X-man movie character. 

During his college years, and shortly there after, Aaron took a series of photos where he is impersonating different characters... JFK, James Bond, a Battlestar Galactica bridge officer, etc.  I took three of those photos and added three of my favorite "Aaron" photos - Aaron teaching, Aaron and Crissie, and Aaron, Bethany, and Ian with Chip and Dale at Disney, and created a this fun, cartoon-ish layout.

I like that even though I used a digital program to scrap this layout, I could still personalize the voice balloons.   I enjoyed coming up with the caption, "Take that, Captain Slime Pants!"

This is a close up of the Aaron photos as well as the hings I added between two of the photographs.

Thanks for stopping by today and checking out my cartoon layout - Defender of the Plant Earth!  This is not my normal style of scrapping, but it was fun to create.

Defining a Generation Through Music

Hello everyone, TGIF!!  I did it again today... I put off the planned post in favor of my latest LOAD 513 layout.  This layout was so thought provoking and fun that I ended up actually turning it into a four page layout.  The first two pages are featured here today and I plan to only tell you about pages three and four.

Thursday's LOAD 513 was a weapon from the Clue game - the candlestick.  In an effort to come up with an idea, I was typing my stream of consciousness - Candlestick, menorah, burning the candle at both ends, burning out, jack jumped over the candlestick.... You get the idea.  When I reached "Jack jumped over the candlestick" I thought of Don's McLean's song, "American Pie" and the reference to JFK in "Jack jumped over the candlestick" lines.

American Pie took me to the thought of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" - a list of historical and cultural events in Joel's lifetime - all but 11 years, also my lifetime.  And then, because I couldn't just pick an idea and go with it, I started thinking of about music that defines different eras or events in my life time.  The sixties and seventies were full of anti-war and peace songs, one of my favorites being P.F. Sloan's "Eve of Destruction", released in 1965.  In May 1970 four student protester's were killed by National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio.  That fall Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young released Stephen Still's epic "Ohio" - better known by the name "Four Dead in Ohio".

In 1971 Don McLean released "American Pie", a musical poem that details music history of the 50's and 60's, with cultural and political references included.  McLean never really calls anyone by name, but the Music that died was Buddy Holly, The King was Elvis, the Marching Band that took the field was the Beatles, etc.  Jack Flash jumping over the candlestick - where this all started - was the assignation of President Kennedy.  When asked what the song meant, McLean once replied, "It means I will never have to work again!"  He was probably right!!

Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" is a highly percussive song from 1989.  The song was written because a student told Joel that his generation was inheriting a world that was a mess.  Joel thought about it and realized that the world has always been a mess - We didn't start the fire - and that it would continue to be so.  Good point.

These four songs - and yes, there could be others, I feel define my generation socially and historically.  I grew up in the 60's and 70's, watching in wonder the Civil Rights movement, the anti war protests, the British Invasion, the cold war, soldiers coming home, the POW's coming home, the American Bicentennial, Watergate and the Nixon administration which robbed us of our innocent belief in government (though truthfully that trust has been sold out LONG before).  I sang along with John Lennon as he Imagined... and with Elton John as he Crocodile Rocked!  We as a Nation protested the Olympic Games hosted by Russia, and we protested Apartheid.  So yes, these four songs do come close to defining my generation....

I used Studio J to digitally scrap these pages.  This was necessary because of the photos I chose to use.  I found era specific photos as well as the candlestick and fire images.  After selecting specific phrases from each of the four songs, I began writing my journaling.  I must say it is very difficult to cover this topic in one journaling block!

I enlarged the journaling for you so that you can understand the difficulty of fitting this information onto the pages.

I truly enjoyed researching and scrapping these pages.  Page three and four feature the same "papers" and colors, but no photos.  Just a title, a couple of embellishments, and the lyrics to the four songs.  Do you know HOW LONG American Pie is?  Two full columns in very small font!

If you would like to see this entire layout larger, just click on the photo below and it will open in a new window.

One last note, one of the funny things about my LOAD 513 experience?  I am sort of missing the boat.  It is supposed to inspire quick layouts from the prompt.  Well, clearly this was not a quick layout... And even though I am doing LOAD my way, I am having a great time with this!

I hope some of you might consider joining me in the next LOAD adventure - because I WILL do this again!