I just got back from CHA and I’m exhausted, but I had to share all these lovely photos of the My Mind’s Eye Booth. Particularly the line that I designed called Lost & Found. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll have noticed that I took a bit of a break from blogging. The reason was because I was working my tail off getting this gorgeous line designed! I am so in love with it – but photos just don’t do it justice. It must be experienced in person! The glitter is amazing and the designs are timeless and beautiful.

Here is me standing in front of the display — I should have taken this photo on the first day of the show — at this point, I just wanted to go home and see my hubby.

Lost & Found has all sorts of goodies — including acrylic stamps, layered stickers, 3-d embellishments, trims, brads (epoxy, pearl, flower), chipboard album covers & rings, buttons, alpha stickers, and all sorts of glittery bits and pieces.

My most favorite project at the MME booth was a mini album that Amber Packer created using the “Union Square” papers and pieces. It’s all black, cream, and red — and 100% gorgeous. Don’t forget the amazing red glitter that is already on almost everything in the Union Square collection.

There was another lovely mini album – created with two sets of album covers from the “Market Street” collection. I’m not sure who this one is by, though Amber will probably let me know.  My Most favorite part of this album was the use of my banner acrylic stamps. She must have stamped different colors on cream paper and then cut them out to create these adorable banners inside the mini album.

Here are those stamps — also you can see the awesome coral glitter that is all over the Market Street Collection.

Here are some photos of each of the sides of the display so you can get an idea of how much product is in this line (and why I’ve been missing for so long). I’m tired just looking at it all! That’s 40 double-sided papers folks!

And here are a few little close-ups – hopefully you can see some of the foil glitter detailing.

I can’t believe I didn’t get any close-ups of the buttons! They are one of my favorite items — all the sets look like mixed vintage sets of buttons like you would find in an antique shop – and they are sewn to little unique button cards. So fun!

Here are some of the amazing Lost & Found layouts by the Design Team:

And a few close-ups – notice the crepe paper trim in this one — thats part of the line!

I keep hearing over and over again how easy it is to build layouts with this line. I love to hear that!

And here is one of my favorite photos… if you squint hard enough you can see my teeny little name there by the logo. Love it!

Well thats all the photos I have for Lost and Found. Hopefully you can get a good idea for what the line looks like. It will be in stores VERY SOON — 2-3 weeks! This is a great time to ask your LSS if they are going to carry it though — if they get their order in soon then they’ll get it right after the shops who ordered it at CHA.

Of course this wasn’t the only line that My Mind’s Eye debuted at CHA. There were lots of other goodies too!

First off we have Zoe Pearn’s Alphabet Soup. This line is so adorable! My favorite part are the matching decks of ABC cards. I can think of a million cute things to do with those! The chipboard and epoxy brads are fabulous too.

Next we have Halloween. These two lines are done by Deena Rutter (top) and Carina Gardner (bottom). Blackbird is all illustrated and such a cute line. Haunted is kraft paper that has white printed on it as well as black flocking which feels like velvet. It’s beautiful and such a unique Halloween line. I love both of these lines and hope that they jump off the shelves!

Last but not least, here is Christmas! This is actually my Christmas line called Holly Jolly. I am so happy how it printed out. The colors are very vibrant without looking garish. I think I’m going to cover some wood blocks or something with it. I can’t wait to play! Also I need to get started early this year on neighbor gifts — now that I actually know people here.

Here you can see both Christmas releases from MME – Holly Jolly & I believe.

And finally here is a shot of the booth from the outside… This was at the end of set-up so it’s a bit candid and you can see everyone taking a load off and resting. My favorite part is the vacuum cleaner.

This one is less messy — from the front:

Sorry about the bad quality of all these photos — I’m not the best photographer and the lighting is horrid inside convention centers. Hopefully you got a good feel for Lost and Found and also all the other fun lines that My Mind’s Eye released at CHA Summer 2010! Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom! Maybe next CHA you can come meet me at the show!

To download the kit you’ll have to go to Design House Digital’s Blog and download it there, but its free and easy, and in the end you can pretend to be Steve, so it’s totally worth it.

Have a great April Fools!

Disguise kit is for Personal Use only.

You must see this fun tutorial on decorating a cake:

And if you’ve got a party coming up, consider printing digital designs on transfer paper to make T-shirts:

And if that all is WAY TOO Crafty for you, Melissa Esplin has come out with some beautiful blog kits to help you beautify and customize your blog:

We’re constantly updating the DHD blog with fun project ideas, inspiration and tutorials, for scrappers and non-scrappers so be sure to check it out!

I was checking out a blog that I stalk on a regular basis – design.wash.rinse.repeat., and noticed that a few days ago she posted an awesome halloween freebie that would be a super fun project to do with kids! I’ve been trying to get my halloween projects up and running but in the mean time figured that I would pass along a link to her site so you could download & print these great pumpkin pops!

It also is featuring MME CHA Summer Sneak Peaks! You know you want to see these. Such beautiful lines! Here are just a few of my favorites:

Abbey Road (Deena Rutter)

Ooh La La (Zoe Pearn)

Boo To You

There are tons more sneak peaks on the MME blog, and they should be all popping up at your local scrapbook store in July!

A friend of mine is having a baby so of course I wanted to put together something really special for her shower. So I was digging through my MME stash and came across this Chipboard Crown Album Kit that I designed for Hobby Lobby Craft Stores. Its such a great kit – I thought that before I made the album, but as I was making the album, I actually KNEW it was a great kit! So many cute detail pieces. My favorite are the mini frames that fit perfectly on the crown shape.

It was super easy to put together because all of the papers in the kit are pre-cut and very accurate. So Just grab your glue and get going! The whole kit took about 3 hours and was a huge hit at the party.

As promised, I have taken pictures of the MME goodie bag that I’m giving away for NSD. I went through my statsh and found a complete set of Penny Lane Papers! So beautiful, all double-sided textured cardstock with lovely illustrations by Deena Rutter. The Complete set has 40 Sheets of paper – I think that 12 are die-cut. I tried to take pictures that did the papers justice, but they didn’t turn out really well. You can check out all the designs at the MME website.

To take that shot that I had to stand on my bed and hold the camera over my head. Haha sorry again about the quality!

To win this lovely prize, be sure to leave a comment through Saturday May 9th on this post or the NSD post. I will randomly pick one lucky winner next week. Be sure to tell your friends!

Thanks for stopping by!

xoxo Jen Allyson

Here are a few of my etsy favorites right now:

Kimmy at Shy Fox Lane has the most adorable items. She is meticulous to every detail including her packaging. Which we all know is so important. Look at this adorable paper-crafted cupcake! cute enough to eat!

I found this lovely while searching for bridal jewelry. Am I fabulous enough to wear it? The world may never know. All I know is that I want to just look at it for days and days.

Back to paper crafting… I am completely in love with layered buttons right now. Or any buttons. I love buttons! Here are some fabulous embellishements from Evalicious:

And last but not least… Are you kidding me?! I love this kind of stuff. Felt food for the kids to play with. How much fun is that! Buggabug’s shop only sells the patterns, but heavens to betsy, they are so stinking cute! I want to have a small child just so I can play with them and not look like a dork.

When buying homemade whether its from etsy or another store, there is always something for everyone, I’m sure you’ll find many many somethings that  you’ll adore too! Share your favorites with me, I’d love to see them!

xoxo Jen Allyson

I have the cutest little pantry in my kitchen. It is about 4.5 feet tall and has a little glass door and a nice wide ledge. Ever since I moved here, I have been wanting some fabulous and large glass canisters to put on top. I was so happy a few weeks ago, when I found these beautiful 2.5 gallon canisters at Amazon:

My birthday just happened to be this week, and I asked for three of these puppies (I put a few more on my wedding registry because I love them so much. I want to do one for Rice and one for Bread Flour).

As soon as I got them, I filled them up with flour, sugar, and rolled oats. But what I really couldn’t wait to do, was to make labels for them! Here they are looking adorable on my pantry:

The glass on these jars is a little wavy and imperfect, and I love the dark lids – they definitely have an antique feel. So I made some cute distressed labels (available for download at the end of this post). I printed and cut them out and they were super cute…

… but I really wanted them to have an older feel than just flat printed paper. So I pulled out some supplies:

> a moist/wet paper towel

> distressing ink – Tim Holtz Antique Linen & vintage photo

> emry board – fine sand paper will do

> A flat clean work surface that can get wet/messy.

I printed my labels on regular bond paper. I recommend testing your distressing process on some test paper before going at the printed items. Also if you get water on an inkjet print, it will run, so if you want to get really down and dirty, print your labels with a laser printer. I didn’t worry about the ink running on the lighter parts of the design, but I did try and keep the paper away from the letters since they are so dark.

Step 1: Crinkle your labels. I recommend bigger, deeper folds and creases. As long as the paper is dry, you can be pretty rough with it. I bent and tore and creased quite a bit so that the ink would have a lot of fun detail to hold onto:

Step 2: Wet your labels. I used a wet paper towel to dab water around the edges. You definitely want the paper soaked, but not so much that it tears or bleeds into the center. You have to work fast at this point because it needs to be pretty wet for the next step. You may want to do step 2 & step 3 to one side at a time to keep your paper from drying too fast.

Step 3: Once you have a wet edge, go ahead and use the lighter ink on the wet parts. The ink should bleed as soon as it hits the water and create a “dying” effect as opposed to an “inking” effect. This will make it look aged and not just inked. After a little light inking, I applied just a tiny bit of dark inking on some of the edges:

At this point your paper will be pretty wet and your wrinkles will have disappeared, but they will come back. Just finish each label and set them aside to dry. I let mine dry about 30 minutes. Here is how they looked after I let them sit for a bit:

I love how aged they look and how stiff they feel after drying. I will definitely use this technique on more projects in the future.

If I had printed them on a laser printer, I would have made the entire label more “dyed” looking, but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

Attaching the labels was really easy, I used a large glue-dot in each corner. I don’t recommend this if you have a lot of people accessing your canisters, but I know its enough adhesive for my uses with the upside being that I can change them out pretty easy when I get bored of the look. You could use spray adhesive or run them through a larger xyron after they have dryed completely. If you printed on a laser printer, I imagine you could use Mod Podge, just test it on the glass first to see if it drys clear enough.

Here is a before & after shot. I really should have taken a before shot when the pantry was covered in half-empty flour and sugar bags, paper plates & food boxes.

I love how they look, how big the labels are, and just the overall vintage styling with the large black lids + the aged labels. So yummy.

You can really see the variety in the glass from this photo. I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out!

As promised, here is the label file. I did have to make it just a smidge smaller than the one I used in order to fit all the labels on one 8.5×11.

Download this label file and enjoy (for personal use only ). Please tell your friends to come visit the site and download their own labels. I would love a comment if you do download!

Each of these files are a 8.5″x11″ PDF. Use Acrobat Reader to open the file and print as many as you like! Happy project-ing!

If you are another blog or crafting site and would like to link this project to your site, please contact me. Thanks!

xoxo Jen Allyson

The next step in my organization was to make some cute labels! My second favorite thing is to make cute labels! What a good day! So I designed these labels (Available for free download at the end of this post), printed and cut them out:

Once they were all cut out, I ran them through my xyron 250 machine. If any of you don’t know what this is — its the most amazing invention to come to paper crafting. you basically slide your paper (or buttons or ribbon anything thin enough) through the front and turn the wheel, and it comes out the back A STICKER! I’m being completely serious here. You have to see it in person, but whatever you put in, comes out with the perfect amount of adhesive adhered to the back. Get one!

Once the labels were all made into stickers, I just threw them up on the containers! 

And some up-close shots:

I am so so happy to have this done. The closets look amazing and with the labels, everything now has its own little home! Hopefully this will motivate you to do a little bit of spring cleaning and organizing. Be sure to download some labels so that you can keep all your stuff straight! I’d love to hear about your organization methods and be sure to leave a comment if you do download the labels. xoxo Jen Allyson

Download  PDF Labels>> Label Page 1 & Label Page 2