My Mind's Eye

Swab the deck, you scurvy dogs!

December 3, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

Back in 1995 two friends developed the idea for International Talk Like a Pirate Day (you can read the whole history of this quirky holiday on their Web site). Celebration of this day has really taken off since 2002, when syndicated columnist Dave Barry covered the idea in an article. It has now become quite well known, and on September 19th each year you can hear conversations being held in pirate slang.

Our friends, Keith and Katie, have hosted Talk Like a Pirate Day parties for the last few years, and this year we were able to attend! There was good grub and grog, a bawdy limerick contest, great costumes, a sea shanty sing-along and good conversation. We had a great time! And me thinks Matt was born to be a pirate! Arr!

These are fun photos from our friends' Talk Like a Pirate Day party.

I created this layout with papers from the My Mind’s Eye “Mischievous” line and based it on sketch #21 from Sketch Support.

I really rocked this look

November 20, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Yeah, I was a fashion plate back in the day. Don’t be jealous of my pin curls and Winnie-the-Pooh blouse. We’re just not all meant to look this good. 😉

My layout below is based on the sketch provided for blog challenge #29 over at My Mind’s Eye. All the products, except the cardstock, are by My Mind’s Eye.

That's me in 1976, styling in my Winnie-the-Pooh blouse. 🙂

Let me encourage you to break out those photos that show your early sense of fashion and give them some scrapbook love. It was really fun to work on this page!

This is the My Mind's Eye sketch for blog challenge #29.

CowParade

November 15, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 12 Comments

Sketchabilities has revealed its latest sketch, #59, and it’s a great one! Be sure to head over to the site to grab the sketch, then create something and link it up! 🙂

Here’s my Design Team layout inspired by the sketch.

Artist-decorated cows were displayed all around the streets of Austin.

CowParade is the largest and most recognized public art event in the world. These exhibits, held in 75 cities in 30 countries to date, have produced more than 5,000 cow canvases by local artists. The exhibits have been viewed by upwards of a half billion people.

And from July through October CowParade came to Austin!

CowParade Austin included 74 sculptures. Matt and I wanted to be sure to partake of this public art display, so we took a few hours one Saturday in October to see as many of them as we could. We walked up and down Congress Avenue and photographed these big bovine beauties. There were many that we didn’t get to see in person, but the ones we did see were beautiful and clever!

Just this weekend the sculptures were auctioned, raising $1.49 million for The Superhero Kids Endowment at the Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas!

Hand over the candy

October 30, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 10 Comments

Blogtoberfest Day 30

Don’t miss out on my GIVEAWAY (closes 12:00 midnight EST tonight)!

Sketchabilities has revealed its latest sketch, #58. Be sure to head over to the site to grab the sketch, then create something and link it up! 🙂

Here’s my Design Team layout inspired by the sketch.

It's 1976, and I'm the hobo holding up Phil the cop for his candy. 🙂

The year is 1976, and Phil and I are dressed as a hobo and a police officer. Our costumes are from the “things from around the house” school of fashion. Phil’s outfit is basically his school uniform—navy pants, light blue shirt and navy tie. Plus he wore a toy gun and badge. My costume was Daddy’s bandana-patterned fishing hat, one of his old shirts and some makeup to make my face look dirty. Easy and convincing, right?

I think my dramatic side is starting to emerge here, as I stage a hold up for the camera. And I just love that flummoxed look on Phil’s face!

Rosette pumpkin tutorial

October 18, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 10 Comments

Blogtoberfest Day 18

I was in Archiver’s about a month ago looking at new scrapbook products and saw a pretty 3D pumpkin they had made. The store was out of the printed instructions for it, so I took a good look at the sample and came home to try my hand at recreating it. Here is what I produced and what I learned along the way.

Gather your supplies: cardstock, adhesive, hot glue gun, scoring board, stamps and inks

Rather than use printed patterned paper for this I wanted to create my own with cardstock and stamps. For one thing, I really don’t use this technique very often, and I wanted to stretch myself creatively. Second, I wasn’t at all sure how many pieces of paper the pumpkin would take to finish (it ended up being 5), so I thought it would be a good idea to be able to make more as I needed it. I have amassed quite a collection of doily stamps since that trend began (but haven’t used them as much as I’d like), so I decided to pull them all out for this project. I selected a number of beautiful distress ink colors and set to work creating my patterns. Aren’t those doilies yummy?

Cover your cardstock with stamped images.

This pumpkin is made of stacked rosettes, so I knew I would be doing a lot of scoring. To save myself time I scored each whole 12×12 piece of paper at one time (every half inch) and then cut it into strips. To make this stack into a sphere shape requires making rosettes of graduating sizes. I have listed all the strip sizes below. Each rosette is made with 2 strips of equal width, so cut 2 of each size.

Score the whole 12x12 page at once before cutting the strips you need.

Number and size of paper strips needed to complete the pumpkin rosettes

Strip width	# Strips	# Rosettes
2 inches	2	1 (for the bottom of the stack)
2-1/4 inches	4	2
2-1/2 inches	4	2
2-3/4 inches	4	2
2-7/8 inches	4	2
3 inches	2	2

Accordion fold all strips and create your rosettes. I figure that rosettes are so common in paper crafting these days that many of us have made them before, so I’m not including instructions for that part of this project. However, there are probably hundreds of tutorials out there on how to make these little beauties—both in video form and still photo/text—if you haven’t yet tried your hand at them.

Cut all your various strips and accordion fold them.

Once you have a stack of rosettes, apply hot glue to the center disk of cardstock on each one and adhere them together. Start with the smallest rosette and stack gradually larger circles until you’ve used the largest one, and then start decreasing again. Once you’ve used all your rosettes, you’ll have your base pumpkin shape completed! Here is the order to follow:

Bottom of the stack: 2-inch rosette
Next up: 2-1/4 inch
2-1/2 inch
2-3/4 inch
2-7/8 inch
3 inch
2-7/8 inch
2-3/4 inch
2-1/2 inch
Top rosette: 2-1/4 inch. I preferred to leave off a top 2-inch rosette to avoid making my pumpkin look too much like a pineapple!

Stack the rosettes to create the pumpkin shape.

Cut two 1-1/2-inch strips of paper for your pumpkin’s stem. Apply wet glue to one side of the cardstock and start rolling it into a tight cylinder. When you’re about to the end of the first strip, slide in the second and keep rolling. Wrap rubber bands around the roll until it dries.

Apply glue to 2 long strips of cardstock and roll them tightly.

Now it’s time to add some flair to the stem. Cut another 1-1/2-inch strip of the same paper and snip fringe along its entire length. To make sure that I had enough room to apply my glue to the bottom of the strip, I drew a line to guide my fringe cutting. Then wrap the fringe around the bottom of the stem. Bend, curl and primp that fringe until it suits you.

Cut one more 1-1/2-inch strip of paper to use for the fringe.

I used my Silhouette to cut some maple leaf shapes. To add texture I ran them through a crimper then spritzed them with a few colors of Glimmer Mist. Pretty!

I cut out some maples leaves, ran them through a crimper and misted them.

Add the leaves (I used three) with glue dots. I also cut some very thin strips of paper, curled them and glued those at the top center.

Use glue dots to add leaves and curly-ques to the top of the pumpkin.

Use hot glue to secure the stem to the base. You’re finished! And you have a beautiful fall decoration to add to your home. 🙂

Once you add your leaves and stem, your pumpkin is complete!

It occurs to me that one last step that could really add a lot to our little pumpkin is to spritz it with a few hits of pearl Glimmer Mist. I may still do that to mine!

You know that if you make one of these I need to see it. Please leave me a comment with a link to your version. I really enjoyed making this little guy, and I hope you’ll give it a try.

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