Easter Crafts

I finally took some photos of the projects I worked on the last 2 weekends. The first is a plastic egg wreath that I found the instructions for on Pinterest. It was easy enough to do and turned out really well. I used a piece of cardboard cut into a roughly 12-13 inch circle and then cut a nine inch circle from the middle of that to make the ring; 2 packages of multi-size eggs from Michael's; hot glue; leftover easter grass from last year to fill the spaces and hide the cardboard; and a bow I purchased at Michael's.

My next project was Easter cards. My mother in-law got 4 kits for me from the scrapbook store up the street (Photoscraps in Eldersburg, MD) and brought me her Copic marker collection and her stamping inks to use. She also brought a set of Easter stamps she got so I could make additional cards too. The card with the bunny in an airplane and the one with the bunny cacthing butterflies are the kits that I colored, cut out and put together. So cute!!

The next card I came up with, using the bunny in a basket stamp she brought. I stamped the bunny on special cardstock and colored them. The Copic markers are incredible to use. It's best to use them on special paper for Copics, which allows for smooth blending and no bleeding. I used the rest of the stamps in the set to add the words "Good things come in small sugarcoated packages" and "Must Have More Candy" to the front, and "Hoppy Easter" to the inside.

My final project was the paper Easter baskets that my mother in-law showed me how to make. She saw these at scrapbook store also. You trim a 12x12 sheet of medium weight paper to 9x9. Then score it in three inch intervals (so in the end the score marks create 3 rows of 3 squares). Next you score each corner sqaure from the outter corner to the inner corner, which help them fold in to the center of the basket. Punch a hole in each folded corner; run a ribbon through and tie. Use a 1 inch strip of the same paper to make a handle that you attach to the inside. I used a border punch on mine. I'll fill these with some easter grass and put a treat filled egg in each pocket. Plan to make these for family and a few of my friends' children.

Hope you get to do some fun things for Easter. JD even helped grandmom make his cards for my parents and his god mother. 

Nights Under Canvas...

That's what they call a night out camping in our MAC (Mid-Atlantic Campers) forum. Since we have the hybrid with bunk ends, we are sleeping under canvas, just like in the old pop up we had. MAC started as an off shoot of Pop Up Explorer (PUX) and most of us still had pop ups when the group originated. Many in the group have since upgraded to travel trailers or hybrids, like ours. It's pretty cool to see the clever mods people have done to thier pop-ups...adding storage, air conditioning, fridges, etc. One thing we'd like to do is start replacing the bulbs in the lights with LEDs, which would be great for dry camping (i.e., national seashore with no electric hook ups). When we found our Rockwood Roo, we pretty much got everything we wanted and were looking for. It was a deal we couldn't pass up.

I'm so excited this year to be able to use it alot more. It was hard to plan camping weekends when Reece was out of work. We didn't have a whole lot of extra cash for booking a bunch of weekends early in the year, like most peoople do. If you don't do it early, then you get what's left, if you can find anything at all. Since there was an extra pay period for my this month, I decided to use the extra from the first paycheck to do just that and be able to get out camping at least once a month, which I mentioned in the last post. We've got many nights of camping planned and that makes me happy. Gettysburg will be the end of April and mid-October. Elk Neck will be in May and Cunningham Falls in June. July is our trip to the beach and then the annual WV tubing trip at the end of July. I think we're still trying to plan a Lancaster/Strasburg Railroad trip for sometime in Sept also.

I think only one trip so far we'll be alone. One or possibly both Gettysburg weekends will be with Reece's parents...others will be with our MAC friends and our week at the beach will be with the Magees. Hopfully my brother and Amy will make it for a weekend out with us and if we can get Lancaster in there, maybe mom and dad will come too.

Happy trails to all our camping friends out there. Here's to a great season of nights under canvas!

March-ing on...

So, has March come in like a lamb or a lion? I guess we'll go with lamb, because of the sunny days, but the wind was roaring over the weekend. If it's planning on going out like a lion, I'd appreciate it being back to nice weather before we head to NJ for Easter. Also hoping for a warm Easter day so I can wear my favorite blue summer dress. :-) I'm looking froward to our NJ visit, becasue we'll be celebrating mom's 80th birthday too. Now we just need to decide on a place for dinner....some place nice that accomodates mini monsters, ah, I mean children. LOL

Well, other than having the inspection done (keep your fingers crossed for a good report) the new truck is at home in our driveway. That made for a very long week last week. We did get alot done this past weekend...laundry, cleaning, clearing the dining room table of junk, getting rid of some baby toys, taking out trash and recycling from the basement and taking care of a few errands that needed to be done. Whew!

We've been getting some additional camping dates on the books. If we don't do it now, sites will be booked full and we won't get anywhere. So far, we've got Elk Neck State Park in May and the Ocean City trip in July. Trying to get spring and fall weekend in Gettysburg also and possibly Cunningham Falls SP in June. Looking forward to doing some more camping this year!!

I haven't posted too many craft things lately, but there are projects in the works. I'm currently working on a baby blanket for my friend April. She's having a baby boy this month. For years now I have collected Harley/motorcycle theme paper and embellishments with the thought of doing a book for my brother. I plan to try and get that done for his birthday in April...I hope. I started my Christmas and Vacation scrapbooks at the last 2 crop days at Karen's. The vacation one is a Milestones album, which I've never used before. It has pages that hold 5 photos/papers (3 horizontal and 2 vertical), instead of the full 12x12 page. So far, I like it for the vacation stuff. I also have on order the scrapbook that I'm going to do our wedding photos in, again a Milestones album, and have ordered copies of wedding photos I didn't have printed. Now I need to get in the closet and get the box out for hings like programs, invites, stuff from our honeymoon, etc.  I also found a pattern on Pinterest for a small purse I'd like to make using fat quarters. Something for spring. Speaking of sewing, I need to consider anything I want to make for faire this year and maybe get a move on that before August (trying to not have a last minute, down to the wire, finish it for final day of faire project this year).