Happy Halloween!

Hope you are looking forward to a Happy Halloween today! Do you have any fun plans? Are you dressing up? I haven't really dressed up for years, but this year I bought a gypsy costume and I'm excited to wear it. May kids are really excited that I have a costume!

I've been collecting a bunch of fun Halloween ideas on Pinterest and thought that I'd share a few of my favorites with you today.

Frankenstein Rice Krispie Treats   from CraftGossip.com

I like that these treats are on sticks and displayed in a tin full of candy corn.

Printable Treat Toppers from Wants and Wishes Etsy Shop

The orange cheese balls are a fun Halloween colored treat.

Veggie Skeleton from Feeding Frenzy

There is a chance kids would eat a few veggies on Halloween with this cute guy at the table.

Mummy Juice Boxes from Parents.com

All you need is white electrical tape and googly eyes. This would be a fun surprise in your kid's lunch box.


Chocolate Spider Web Cake in a Jar from I am Baker

The webs don't look too hard although they would take some patience.

Halloween Mason Jars from Every Creative Endevor

These look easy and would it be cool to line the driveway with these on Halloween.

Mummy Pretzels from Bright Ideas

This looks like a fun food craft that the kids could make with me.

I didn't get to make fun Halloween food this year, but now I'm set with a bunch of fun ideas form next year.

Hope you enjoy the day and have a few pieces of your favorite candy!

Fancy Pants + Tombow Blog Hop

Fancy Pants Designs and Tombow have teamed up this week for a full week of blog hopping. Tombow was generous to send me a bunch of there products to try out and use on my projects. Today, I get to share two projects with you on the Fancy Pants Design blog.

Both of my projects share ideas on making your Halloween treats just a bit more fancy.

Hope you'll stop by the blogs and enjoy the blog hop!

Fancy Pants Designs Blog
Tombow Blog

Birthday Gift in a Snow Globe

Last month I spotted this Gift Card Snow Globe idea from the Creative Mama on Pinterest and knew that I wanted to make something similar.

Last weekend my daughter was invited to a birthday party, so it was the perfect time to try out the snow globe idea.

I stopped by the dollar store hoping that they would have some candles that I could use and luckily they had candles with numbers 1, 2 and 3. Perfect since the birthday boy was turning 12. The candle packs also came with smaller star candles.

For the assembly, I hot glued the candles and gift card to the lid and let it dry. I then added some glitter and water to the jar and screwed on the lid.

To add a little personalization the jar, I cut "Happy Birthday Ryan!" from red vinyl and stuck it onto the jar. Quick and fun gift wrapping!

We did finish off the jar with ribbon around the base of the jar with a little gift tag attached, but I forgot to snap a photo before we ran out the door to the party.

500th Blog Post >>> Let's Celebrate!

Wow, this is my 500th blog post. I love sharing my thoughts and creations with you and I'm thankful for you! Thought it would be fun to celebrate with a  giveaway. What do you think?

I will randomly select one winner to receive the upcoming Scrapbook Circle Harvest Festival Kit from the comments on this post.

Just leave a comment letting me know what you love most about autumn.

***Comments will close Monday, October 31st. Winner will be announced later that week!***

Thanks for your support!

Harvest Festival is Here

The Scrapbook Circle November Kit, Harvest Festival, is now live on the site.

The cozy fall colors mixed with the great patterns make me excited to create.

I'm still have plans for several more projects, but here's a look at my first layout share with the kit. This page is the first of a few about my kids' combined birthday party.

Enjoy your day!

Embellished Treat Holders

With Halloween almost here, I guess I have candy on the brain. There are a bunch of scrapbook clam shell  packaging things here at my house and I thought they'd be perfect to hold a few bits of candy.

I pulled out all of my Fancy Pants Oct. 31st goodies and quickly put together several treat holders. With rub-ons on the front and paper on the inside, there really were fast projects.

It was fun adding bits of ribbon or buttons to finish off the design.

Since the paper is all double sided, that meant that the back of the project was already decorated too. I just added a few stickers and design embellishments to finish it off.

We gave these out along with some baked treats when we BOOed a couple of neighbors. We love the tradition of getting BOOed and BOOing our neighbors at Halloween time. If you want to start up this tradition in your neighborhood, the TomKat Studio has a fun free printable that you can use with instruction on how it works.

Hope you are having fun getting ready for Halloween!

Boo Banner @ Glitter Academy

Friday night I went to a Glitter Academy crafting night. There were several crafts available for purchase, but with of the stuff I already have at my house, I decided to come up with my own craft. My friends Aimee and Jennie came and we had a great time together.

I'd brought a bunch of Halloween stuff to use to make banners for Aimee and I. When we met up with Jennie, I asked what she was going to work on and she said she'd just brought Halloween stuff to make a banner. How funny! Great minds must think alike!

The banners took over three hours to make, but there may have been more talking and eating than crafting going on.

The main treat at the event was ice cream from SubZero. It was pretty cool set up. You get to choose your dairy liquid base (custard, yogurt) and then your flavor (chocolate, pumpkin, strawberry) and then they pour it into a bowl and freeze it up into ice cream in about 10 seconds. Pretty fun! Plus there was a candy bar that was perfect for topping the ice cream after it was frozen.

We each embellished our banners differently and I didn't get any close up photos of their banners (camera phone + low light = blurry photos) but I did take a few of my banner today.

I think my favorite part of the banner may be the little bat hanging from the O because it's glow in the dark. I'd picked up a pack of glow in the dark bats last Halloween, but this is the first bat to make it's way out of the package. Maybe more will get to come out next year.

Hope you are looking forward to a great week!

Candy Thief

While going through older Halloween photos, I came across one that has always been a favorite and decided it was time to use it on a layout.

Here we have one-year-old Hannah stealing a sucker from three-year-old Max. Look at his face. Makes me laugh every time I see this!

Layout Supplies: Fancy Pants Oct. 31st line: Paper, Chipboard Banners, Buttons, Design Embellishments, Glitter Cuts and black alpha; Glitz Designs Teeny White Type Alpha, Cosmo Cricket Tiny Numbers.

Although another Halloween is almost here, fall weather has yet to arrive at my house, so I thought that I would bring a bit of fall indoors. Here's a look at some of my fall/Halloween decorations.

The great thing about most of this decor is that it can stay up for October and then November with a few minor changes. I'm lucky to get decorations set up, so I like to leave them up for a while. What about you? Do you like decorating for fall?

Tonight I'm heading out to the Glitter Academy Girls Night Out where my friends and I will be doing some crafting. They had projects available for purchase, but with so much craft stuff already in my house, I decided to come up with my own craft. I'm going to be putting together a Halloween banner tonight! Should be fun.

Hope you have a fantastic Friday!

Cabin, Tires and Halloween

Last weekend I went up to a cabin with a friend and our kids for some relaxing and playtime. I brought my scrapbook stuff with me and got to work on a few layouts. It was great to have so much creative time!

We did have one crazy adventure on a narrow back mountain road with a steep cliff off to one side where we got a flat tire. Lucky some really nice people stopped to help us and all was good.

I worked on another Halloween page while up at the cabin. This one uses photos of each of my kids from Halloween last year.

I used the Scrapbook Circle Hallow's Eve Kit for this page.

Oh, and I have a little peek of the upcoming November Scrapbook Circle Kit for you...

Can't wait to share more!

Dressing Up for Halloween

Only two more weeks until Halloween! My kids are very excited and they have been finalize their costume over the past couple of weeks.

I came across a couple of Halloween photos from a few year ago of my youngest and her friend.  Here's a layout of the same girls from last month. It's so fun to look at older photos and see how they've grown.

Everything came from the Scrapbook Circle Hallow's Eve Kit. I'm excited to use a few other older Halloween photos on pages. I think I'm a bit behind on documenting Halloween!

9 Years Old + Quick Party Favors

Today, my Max turned 9 years old. He's such a funny, clever and determined kid.

I made the traditional birthday breakfast with candles this morning to start the day off right. He choose Oatmeal Waffles topped with strawberry freezer jam and sausage for our menu this morning.

Yesterday, we celebrated Max and Hannah's birthdays with a party with their friends at Amazing Jake's. Amazing Jake's is an indoor amusement park with laser tag, mini golf, go carts, rock climbing, video games and carnival rides plus a dinner and dessert buffet. All of the party kids seemed to have a great time and I was happy to safely return all of the kids to the parents at the end of the night.

Since I knew most of the kids would be getting a bunch of prizes from the ticket redemption from arcade games, I didn't feel like we needed to give out a big goodie bag.

But I wanted each of the party guests to go home with something personalized from us, so I put together giant candy bars covered with patterned paper wrappers.

Some of my favorite things about this project:

* All of the supplies were in our house (except for the candy bars)
* It was a great way to use up lots of paper scraps
* Simple project that my 3 kids were able to work on with me
* Personalized name tags
* Who doesn't love a giant candy bar?

We had seven girls and seven boys at the party, so the styles reflect some more girly styles (flowers, butterflies, pink) and some my boy styles (starts, numbers and blue.)

I used this Scrapbook Circle printable for the two different labels on the candy bars. I love that I can select just one element on the page and them print a bunch of them in Photoshop.

If you want your own copy of this page, you can download it HERE and print and use as many times as you would like. Hope you enjoy it!

Party Time!

It's birthday season at our house. Two of my sisters had birthday already this month plus my youngest celebrated her birthday last Wednesday. Then it's Max's birthday this coming Wednesday.

Just to make the celebrating even more fun, my kids just finished their first week of a 2.5 week fall break.

We celebrated Hannah's birthday by starting off her day with Oatmeal Waffles and candles.

After breakfast, I surprised her with one of her presents >>> earrings! She has been wanting to get her ears pierced and she was so excited about her present.

We also saw Dolphin Tale which was a great family movie. During the week the kids also went swimming and we went to a Diamondback game. It's been great to have a lot of relaxed family time together.

Tonight we had the grandparents and aunts and uncles over to celebrate the kids' birthdays. We grilled sliders and made Pioneer Woman Mac & Cheese.  For dessert, Max wanted creme puffs and Hannah wanted a Chocolate Fudge Cake. My dad also made homemade vanilla ice cream. It was quite a party!

Looking forward to another fun week with our kids and I'm hoping to sneak in some crafting time too!

Cousins and Game Night

The new Glitz lines make me happy and excited to create! This month I choose to create two layouts with the Dance in Sunshine line. I'm really loving the yellow/aqua/purple color combo in this line.

My first layout has a collection of photos my kids and their cousins playing together this summer. We live on opposite sides of the United States from each other, so we don't get to see each other very often. But when we are together, I love watching the cousins play.

When I saw the big circle patterned die cuts in the Glitz Whatnot pack, I knew I wanted to use them on this page. I just cut them in half and used them behind the photos.

My next layout has a collection of photos from a family Guesstures game. Some of the photos captured some pretty funny expressions.

I love all of little bits and pieces from the Dance in the Sunshine line. The Glitzers, stamps, epoxy stickers and trims make it easy to embellish a page.

Thanks for stopping by today!

Playtime with Cousins
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Patterned Paper: Raindrops, Stripe, Polka
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Whatnots
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Peek a Boo Transparency
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Glitzers
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Epoxy Stickers
Glitz Designs White Type Teeny Alpha

Sunday Night Games
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Patterned Paper: Polka, Stripe, Damask, Raindrops, Birds
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Stamps
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Trims
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Glitzers
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Epoxy Stickers
Glitz Designs "Dance in Sunshine" Giant Rhinestones
Glitz Designs White Type Teeny Alpha
Other: Scrapbook Circle Printable, Ink