inspiration is everywhere ... and one thing leads to another ...

It's been a busy week in my studio ... so much inspiration and so many things on my "to do" list now that the kids are both in school.

I have been so inspired by an idea in Real Simple Weddings magazine (2010) ... in one article they showed chalkboards being used as props in a "photo booth" at the wedding reception. Our friend's daughter Breann is getting married next summer and I'm working on her wedding stationery and a few other things for the reception. I bought a bunch of old frames at the second hand stores and started painting them this week..

I painted all of the frames a flat white and added wood inserts that I painted with blackboard paint. I found a beautiful fabric that we are going to use as the backdrop for a "photo booth" at the reception ... the fabric is also my inspiration for the colours and design of the wedding invitations, etc. 

 I'm going to store the glass from the frames in a safe place so that after the wedding Breann and Kyle can pop out the blackboard pieces, add the glass back and use the frames for their wedding photos.

This week I created the calling card for Terri Smith ... the winner of last week's contest! I made the card to promote her blog and etsy shop as she requested. I did a couple of changes to my original design to work with her blog colours and font ... Terri and I are both pleased with the way that they turned out.

You can visit Terri's blog at here .

While I was working on the card for Terri I realized that I could use one of my existing invitation designs to complete a mixed media piece that I had started a looong time ago.

 The invitation became the piece I needed to complete the "i" block in this 6 piece series. With the series completed and no where to hang it in the house, I decided to add it to my etsy shop yesterday.

 

The "f" canvas is my favourite part ... I made a bunch of these little fairies a couple of years ago and have been looking for ways to use them!

Do you like my new photo frame? It's a freebie from Shadowhouse Creations and I got it from here . I talked about Shadowhouse Creations in my last post. I spent a few nights this week with the tutorials and textures from this site ... it is so much fun and it was great to just play with some of my pictures. Here's some of my fall inspired photos that I created ... I also made the photo frame above into a square for these pics ...

 

Don't these just make you want to get out your fall sweaters and pack up your summer linens?

Speaking of summer linens ... I started tearing up some of my daughters old linen dresses last night ... ones that they have out grown years ago and I couldn't part with because I love the fabrics so much ... yep, found another use for them when I was reading one of my GreenCraft magazines yesterday ....

there was a great article by Maize Hutton on how to make frayed flowers ... here's mine so far ...

I checked out Maize's blog and she has a tutorial on how to make these here if you are interested in creating some yourself! I still have to add some ribbons and scraps to these ... I think that I'm going to tea dye some newer ribbons to make them look old and add pin backs so that I can add the flowers to couple of my purses.  These frayed flowers are a great way to use up some of those vintage buttons from my collection. I think that I will try to find some pictures of the girls wearing the dresses that I'm cutting up. I want to make hang tags using the photos and add the tags to the flowers that I'm going to make for gifts ... my Mom and Mother-in-law will get a kick out of these!

Hope that I've given you some inspiration too ... have a great weekend!