Maya Road and Me

some more sharing

so i had a lot of people ask me about the metal embossing and i wanted to share these 2 things which were also created with this technique

the dog tag was something which annette from the crafty scrapper created for me. isn't it so cool? and the brown heart was the demo that i got to do at the store which got me hooked! it is mounted on our chipboard heart which is the perfect base for it.

i am DEFINITELY a novice at this but if you are interested, i would be happy to share what i know in a post later. but if you are looking for a source for these supplies, i haven't seen them around except at the crafty scrapper - carolyn has an online store so you can check out the tools, etc there.

and i also wanted to share this layout i did of noah - again, i used an extra piece of the sheer album to mount over the photo to give it that frosted look.

how simple and cool is that?

i love reading all the comments from the suggestions on what you want to see from MR next! there were a couple of suggestions for a mix of sheer and chipboard albums - and i wanted you to know that we do that already - our skinny round tab chipboard book now has matching skinny round tab sheer album and a skinny round tab midnight black album for mixing and matching. also our 4 ring house chipboard album also has a coordinatin 4 ring house sheer album. so buy one of each and you can mix and match and come up with some cool different, unique albums!

remember you have 1 more day to put your post in for a RAK! good luck!~

this is what chillaxing is

so my son has TOTALLY become a little man - check this photo of him out from earlier this week:

when did my little baby get to be so big? he just tugs at my heart so much!he has really taken to this nick jr tv show called ni-hao kai-lan - it is a show which is similar in concept to dora but stars this little cartoon girl named "kai-lan" who teaches some chinese words.  i am really surprised because noah has picked up some chinse words from the show. even david has picked up some chinese.

so yesterday, lisa and i were down at the crafty scrapper teaching a class. i had so much fun. carolyn (the owner of the crafty scrapper) started showing me all these cool tools and things you could do with 10 seconds studio metal and i walked out of there having bought 2 bags of stuff. i bought metal, tools, molds and more. carolyn had told me it was perfect with our chipboard and once i got a chance to do a demo in person, oh boy was she right.

here is what i made this morning before church (seriously , i had this puppy done in like 20 mins)

seriously this is very cool stuff. i am thinking i will have to do some metal work on some maya road albums.

i also got a chance to play with a bit of luxe's new simply luxe line. and can i say WOW. i love it for a number of reasons:

1. the colors match all their old lines.

2. the papers have the office feel which i can't get enough of.

here is a small card i made for my mom using a leftover photo i had of her and noah. the paper, black stickers are all luxe.and the sweet thing is that we made a set of chipboard letters which the luxe letter stickers fit on perfectly (but i couldn't find them at 11 pm last night - my one sample set of those)

the sheer is one i had left over from deb's album. think again of the possibilities when you are creating. think about what an album can be and not what its name intended it for. that is what creativity is about.

remember, you still have 48 hours to get in on the kit giveaway below! so enjoy!

happy fridays

well i am off tomorrow with lisa to the crafty scrapper to spend some time with 20 lovely ladies as we work on this project - it is entitled "home is where we":

we will be painting and misting and decorating this adorable bungalow chipboard house for a couple of hours tomorrow afternoon. the best part is the album that comes along with it! i am so excited. i love carolyn's store so i do plan on doing some shopping while i am there!

and what are your plans for national scrapbook day this year? well, i am headed up to oklahoma city to scrapbooks from the heart for national scrapbook day! i am so excited to see jennifer's store. jennifer has been a long time customer of ours and i really am excited to get to meet her in person! i will be teaching 3 classes and hanging out for make and takes during their friday night crop! if you are close by, make sure you check out the 3 classes i will be teaching (and yes one of them is this cute house i show above).

we have so many big things going on here at Maya Road. and as promised, i want to share a RAK with you - do you want to win the kit to make the house above? well i have one kit here waiting for someone - it has all the supplies except the ranger crackle and tattered angels mists to complete this album. i will also email you the instructions for this.

here is all i want you to do:

1. post your current favorite maya road product - any of the 600+ that we have.

2. post what you would like to see us make in the future.

and that is it! i am keeping this chance to win open until we make a special announcement probably tuesday of next week my time.

so looking forward to seeing your post and good luck!

this is what scrapbooking is about

so yesterday was david's birthday. i know he isn't big on BD celebrations and he is finally the same number of years i am again til my BD but i wanted him to have something special for his day.

a couple of months ago, i had found this share album (which i believe bazzil makes) - it is this 8" cloth album that comes complete with a beautiful storage box and 10 sets of printed pages for you to send to friends and family to complete and send back to put in the album. the layouts are simple with things that encourage you to journal and they also come with ideas for inspiration.

so over the course of the last month or so, i had send out the different packets to david's parents, his 3 siblings, my parents, deb and some friends. david had no clue we were doing this for his BD. and some of it was a bit like herding cats - LOL. david's family said that a lot of them were up til 2 am last thursday trying to get it all finished up and sent to us in time for his birthday. they all decided that scrapbooking couldn't be a continuous hobby for them since it was so stressful to complete this.

but i finished this up the morning of david's birthday. i was so excited at 1:30 am that i woke david up to present this to him.

and david absolutely loved it! his sibilings had all put personalized funny notes in the album - lots of jokes since david is the oldest one (who i suspected did a lot of their torturing growing up).

and all of them did such a great job - i mean this album will be cherished by us for a long time to come and it doesn't matter if it isn't going to be publishable in the latest magazine, what matters is that it comes from the heart. because that is waht scrapbooking is all about.

you can check out this album here. everyone did such an awesome job with putting this together. i know that david has already looked at this album 3-4 times in the last couple of days.

it is projects like this that remind me what this hobby is truly all about!

and i am really excited - tomorrow i am going to catch up with jen at lunch. we usually try to grab some sushi at a nearby place as we talk about business. it is nice to be able to be friends with someone in the industry who you can also work with on products. i know that some people find it a shock that we co-market products with luxe and produce some products for them. why not? we find it a win-win-win situtation.

i also wanted to share this one last layout tip:

if you don't want to spend the time to color or cover chipboard, try stamping it!

i used our foundations journaling lines and made a grid. it is really easy. just ink and stamp in 1 direction, then turn the stamp 90 degrees and stamp in that direction. you get some pretty striking chipboard when you are done!

and i hope you like the new theme to my blog page - we are headed to NYC for the national stationery show and i am super excited! we have lots of friends and family still there who have not met baby noah and i want noah to see the house where we lived and the neighborhood we used to play in.

new week

it is a new week and this week means another arrival of a container which means a lot is going on here at MR.

i hope that everyone had a great weekend. we got out as a family and went along with carlos (one of my friends) for a run around a local lake. david biked, noah chilled in the bike trailer and carlos and i ran 7 miles. it was a great way to start a saturday morning. we then spent some time hang out in the yard and finally Easter church services and an egg hunt for noah. weekends are always too short but i am thankful that i look forward to mondays!

i wanted to share this album i had made a couple of months ago for the trade show - it is using one of our new sheer binders - it is a very cute 6" size one.

i love how the chipboard scrolls turned out with some ranger crackle paint, glossy accents and some shells.

you can see more of the album here.

and check back in at the end of the week! i found one of my bungelow class kits which i want to share with someone out there!

wish you and yours a very HappyEaster - we had a mini egg hunt today in our backyard and noah loved it! he especially loved the eggs with the m&ms in them (a boy after his momma's hear - LOL)

hoppy easter!

hope you all are having a very nice and beautiful friday - if you need an idea for a quick and easy easter card, check out this bunny i made (notice that the eyes are MR rubons and the nose is a MR chipboard heart!)

i am also counting down to my first class i am teaching at a LSS this year - i am headed next week to the crafty scrapper to teach a class (and shop a bit too - LOL) - i cannot wait! i will tell you all next week about some other places i will be teaching coming up!

common ground

so i went to get my hair cut yesterday (my twice-a-year event) and i decided to use the stylist i had last time. he had done a good job with my hair so why mess with good results?  i remember the first time i went to get my hair cut by him, we chit chatted briefly. he had just moved into town from northern cali. and i think in passing he had mentioned styling like a former ms universe's hair.

we chatted a bit about my hair that first time and i was tired of the length (too long), how much time i spent styling it (2 mins), and that i wanted some bangs. after that the conversation sorta went dead but he did a great job with my hair which made me decide to go back to have him cut my hair again.

anyhow, i was sorta expecting the same thing yesterday - a lull in the conversation - it seemed that we were people with nothing in common except my head of hair. LOL. but we started talking a bit, i found out he had moved here to chase after a girl who now was his wife (how sweet) and then we got to my hair. and i think he was a bit appalled that i spent no time styling it. so i decided to explain why - i play a lot of soccer and run a lot and i am in that "i-have-a-21-month-old-and-i-am-happy-to-get-a-shower-each-day" and then suddenly, i saw that spark of common ground in his eyes.

turns out he was a soccer player too! he told me he had just joined some indoor teams here locally and was so excited about it. we talked about cleats, leagues, places to run bleachers, running shoes. in the end i still got my excellent haircut and i think we both learned something. that it only takes one thing to have common ground with someone. he was not someone i expected would be into soccer and i am sure i looked more like a soccer mom than a mom who played soccer. but that was a good reminder that we as people have more in common than we probably think. i am as bad as the next person not to seek that out and this was a good reminder for me to do so.

i am super happy with my hair now and my long bangs. it looks good. i just need to make the effort to style it sometimes rather than wash and run.

anyhow, we are excited it is Easter weekend. we are looking to spend a lot of time together as a family and for us, Easter has great meaning for our place in this world.

but i leave you with this inspiration - here is a quick and easy card that you can make. i made this for one of our friend's son - do you recognize all the maya road?

(there are 8 different MR things on here! can you see them all?)

check out this fancy album work

so as you all know we try to have fun at MR (along with working our butts off) and one thing that our DT challenged my DH was to create an album. they made suggestions of products he should use and he thought about it and came up with this (must say that he didn't use any of what they suggested). anyhow, he stayed up til like 3 am on saturday morning to finish this album up. he printed his own stylized photos, he decorated and chose the chipboards and he added the rubons himself. i only helped with some photo trimming and some suggestions for products (not that we don't have a bunch just sitting around the house).

so check david's album out - you will notice he exercised a lot of restraint in NOT using vellum (his medium of choice). every time he starts to create, i always here "c, where is your vellum stash ?" and i think to myself "um, i gave that all away like 2 years ago". david swears just like justin timberlake is bringing sexy back, he is bringing vellum back!

so without further ado, check out this album that david created. and please leave him some praise in the comments b/c i know he reads my blog.

what i am grooving to now...

i was dusting our towers of CDs the other day and i realized it has been a long time since i have dug out some music to listen to. music / CDs used to be a hobby of mine in college. but with the arrival of ipods, the real world, a baby and this business, i had sorta swept my CDs and music aside a bit.

so i dug out some music this week and started listening to them in the car, on the computer and i realized i miss this element in my life. my energy and emotions are different when i hear a song. i miss it not being a song from a cartoon that noah likes to jam too (LOL). it is time for me to get my music back.

so here is what i have been listening to this week:

the fray - how to save a life (how did i miss them in 2006? must have been the fact that noah arrived that year and most of that year was a blur); i just bought their CD a couple of months ago.

michael buble - it's time - i think that i first saw him in a starbucks commerical and it struck me that he couldn't have been an actor b/c he sang well but, well he was there for the singing - that led me to figure out who he was and buy his CD.

kenny chesney - just who i am: poets and pirates - i don't think i started liking country music til i moved to texas but count me in! this is the first kenny chesney CD i have purchased but have liked his music for a while.

frente! - marvin the album - this is an album i purchased in 1992; the first time i heard them they had done an amazing cover of New Order's Bizzarre Love Triangle and that is what had made me go out and buy this album. i went to a couple of their concerts in atlanta. it has been years since i had listened to the album - the words came rushing back as well as memories of some of my first days of college. a nice trip to remember where i was at that point in my life and how far i have come now.

so i am on the hunt for new music - do you have any suggestions? i listen to pretty much all music.

and i had to share this:

this was a canvas i made about 2 years ago when i was 7 months pregnant at the time. so easy to do - just print your photo on transparencies and then attach them to a canvas.

it is hard to believe that this was baby noah - LOL.

looking forward to some suggestions for music!