Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all you Mothers and Grandmothers out there!  Today is your special day to do whatever you want! :)

My mom has grown to expect handmade gifts from me.  Store bought gifts are not real gifts- she only seems to like the ones I make.  I decided to book a last minute flight to spend Mother's Day with mom this year so I knew I had to make something special for her.  Here's what I came up with...

I realized that out of all the frames I've made for craft fairs, I don't believe I ever gave one to mom!  Since this one was made with her in mind, I decided to personalize it a bit and added in foam stickers to spell "grandma @ akemi". 

This photo was taken the last time mom visited us in Hilo.  We had her sleep in Akemi's room since that's our only other bed in the house. Normally Akemi sleeps with us when we have visitors, but this time she slept with my mom. It was rather cute that I could hear them talking and giggling together just like two girls at a sleepover.  I didn't have the heart to interrupt their "girl time" by making Akemi go to sleep, so I allowed her to stay up and bond with mom.  I know years from now they will both look back on those "sleepovers" with fond memories.  So now whenever we go to visit mom on Oahu, she tells Akemi to sleep with her!  I think its funny that when I was Akemi's age, I was getting kicked out of mom's room, but now that she's a grandma, she's inviting my daughter back in!!!

Decided to use the Miyono stamp to decorate the frame since she's named after my mom.

Here's a close up of Miyono.  Don't know if you noticed, but I cut off her bow in her hair and replaced it with a flower since my mom is always wearing flowers in her hair.  Accented the frame with some sakura die cuts from my Wikicaps die and added pink pearls by Kaisercraft for some bling.

I hope mom likes this frame!  Happy Mother's Day everyone!  If you didn't already call your mom- go ahead and do it now!!

Graduate Yoshi

It's graduation time again... has the school year really come to an end?  So fast, I can't keep up sometimes.  So I found out recently that my cousin Yoshi is graduating from college!!  Yay!  He worked really hard, so this is a big deal for him.   So what could be better than a Yoshi graduate spinner card for Yoshi himself?

Got the graduation hat from Island Scrapbooking.  Originally it was white, but I used my distress ink and blender tool to color it black. Now why didn't I think of using my distress inks like that before?  Duh!  Had to trim down the cap a bit since it was a bit large for his head.  Then I colored Yoshi's kimono up to look like a graduation gown.  I colored the gap between his legs so that it looked more like a gown than pants.

The star stamps used are from a PTI set I just got.  I am so happy with this set!  The other stamps have cool sentiments as the star trails, but they were more about friendship, so I decided to use the regular one.  Decided to emboss it using my glitter embossing powders.  I like how it came out- couldn't use black since Yoshi was in black and didn't want to use white, so the kraft was a nice compromise.

See how Yoshi spins?  I guess it would be better illustrated on a video, but I'm not that high tech yet.

And here's the inside.  I used a larger star for the inside and the same star trail but facing the other way.  I embossed the star and the Congrats sentiment using more silver glitter embossing powder. 

Congrats Yosh!  We're so proud of you!