Today's a Great Day...

... For slipping and sliding!

Gallery A La' Krull

I love love love a good shadow box, but I'm really not too fond of super traditional ones. I saw pictures of an artist's exhibit of her personal memorabilia in shadow boxes, and just fell in love with their eclectic, modern, and nostalgic feel. I took some things from around our house, and created our own little gallery of memories.

1) I took a ton (well, 48 or so), of those flat clear marbles and modge podged faces of family members on the back. I used up a bunch of those reject photos, from the non-digital age mostly, that had at least one "good" face on it. Then I traced the small circle around it, cut it out, and modge podged. I then hot glued them into a square.

2) I used a cute picture of The Crazies, mounted it directly onto the glass of the frame from the inside, then mounted several pairs of the their sunglasses onto foam core as the background(a couple I supplemented with party favor glasses, still cute, but I had to at least leave them each with one useable pair!)

3) Goofball is in his impressionist phase of artistry, so he so graciously allowed me to frame this masterpiece. Next, I hot glued the actual water color paint box to the front of the mat that came with the frame. The paint was just about gone, so it would have been trash anyway.

4) Sweetpea, my own self-appointed princess, posed with a gaggle of her many necklaces. I used an exact-o knife to cut her out of the picture, mounted her directly to the glass on the inside of the frame, then filled up the shadow box with most of her necklace collection. Bonus, they are now not strewn about the house, but contained in one adorable piece of art.

5) These two photo-booth picture strips are from our blissful dating life. We actually used them on our wedding invitations too. I took the strips, headed to Kinkos, enlarged and color copied them. Next I cut them out carefully, spray-mounted them to black foam-core, and hung them from the inside of the shadow box at the top with small ball chain links and eye-hooks.

Maybe I'll add more boxes over the years, maybe not. But I just love how they turned out!

p.s. The frames were pretty affordable, because I got them from my favorite place to buy frames :) FYI

Easter Celebration 2010

Another great Easter! Besides spending time with these two Crazies, my brother was in town from Detroit. My kids ADORE him, and we were able to spend most of the weekend with him.

Second Annual Egg Toss at my parents house... it has definitely become one of the favorite events on Easter. Gary and my cousin Bryce won for the second year in a row. My dad and I came in third, after I was the recipient of the splat and egg goo.

This boy is crazy and smart and ridiculously busy. And yet not so much of a pro at the art of the egg hunt. He stopped to look at each egg or prize to decide if that was one that he really wanted to put in his bucket... he actually passed up some because they apparently didn't meet his stringent quality standards.

Sweetpea on the other hand, was an egg hunting fiend. She took her Uncle Michael's advice that quantity was the goal, just run and grab. I was literally running to try to get ahead of her to get a picture of her face but she kept dodging in and out and this is the best I could get!

I'm starting to feel much better and can see the light at the end of the all day sickness tunnel. I'm actually starting to feel crafty again and hope to share some pictures soon!

"The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things." -Luke 24:46-47