Mob Museum - Las Vegas!

When we went to St. George for my upline's event in March, Susan and I also took a day to visit the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas...

FASCINATING!

Here we are as we entered the museum...

Before you even start your "tour", you have to go through the line up.  We had a museum guard take our photo...

Book 'em, Danno!

And I just noticed we have the same number - maybe that's good?  They'll get confused as to which of us they really want?

Here are Susan and I in the "Hot Seat".  

Of course, it wasn't really hooked up to anything, but sitting in it was a little freaky...

There was SO MUCH INFORMATION in this place - interactive, hands-on, written, videos, lots of photos...

This is the most fascinating museum I've been to in a long time.  I LOVE museums!  So much to learn in each and every one of them!

It took us SIX HOURS to tour this museum - but worth every minute!  If you're ever in Las Vegas and want something to do other than casinos, gambling, shows, etc, check it out.  Senior rate was about $15 as I recall - and believe me, I can blow $15 on a slot machine (a penny one at that!) in about 5 minutes!  So, SO worth the money.

And the museum is about a block away from Fremont Street and the Fremont St. Experience.  By the time we'd finished, it was dark and the Experience was going full blast!  We saw some psychedelic music from the 70's and some Heart from the 80's while we hung out for a while.

A fun day in Vegas!

Thanks for stopping by - come back again soon!

It's Spring!

I've been a little under the weather for the past week...  Not sure if it's "the flu" or allergies, but whatever, I have spent almost NO time outside - and the weather has been beautiful!

The other day, I happened to go outside for some reason and look what I found!

Aren't they beautiful?  Cymbidium orchids! 

I have several - they tend to do really well on my patio, and if something does well (i.e. thrives from neglect!), then I tend to gather more of them.

And why not?  Why would I NOT have more of these if they're very little work for the beautiful output!

Here's another view:

This shows their colors a little better...

I also have a lot of California poppies blooming right now, along with some roses and some geraniums...  Those California poppies have planted themselves all through my "yard" (which is 99.9% WEEDS!) and I need to mow those weeds down - but in doing that, I'll also be mowing down the CA poppies - what a dilemma!

I have transplanted quite a few back into the flower bed, and I've given quite a few that I dug out of the yard away, but I've still got TONS of them!  I LOVE IT!

When I first planted that flower bed about 20 years ago, I struggled to get the CA poppies to grow - I laugh now when I think of that.  No problem these days!

Hope you've got spring where you live - has to be one of my favorite seasons!

I'm supposed to get my new This N That Smash book kit tomorrow - can't WAIT to play!  Once I get a little bit going in it, I'll post some pictures!

Have you thought about purchasing this kit?  It's a Sneak Peek from the new catalog, which will be released to you June 1st.  Want to get something from it sooner? 

Contact me if you do!  Maybe we can compare photos of the progress we've made with our This N That Smash book kits...

Thanks for stopping by - come back soon!

Jill's StampAThon

About a month ago 3 of my downline and myself made the trek up to St. George, UT to MY upline's annual stamping event.  It's always fun, and we always get so many great ideas to bring back and share with everyone.  We look forward to it every year as our "Girl's Weekend".

While we were there, I realized that we had SIX generations of Stampin' Up! demonstrators in attendance, so Jill had her daughter, Jenn, take a photo of all of us...

Here we are, from left to right:
Colleen, who is Roxy's DL,
Roxy, who is Susan's DL,
Susan, who is MY DL,
Me, who is Jill's DL,
Jill, who is my UPLINE, and
Janet, who is Jill's Upline!

It's a great picture of all six of us!

Before we left St. George, we HAD to go to the Cracker Barrel - not to eat, mind you, but to purchase SHIRTS!   They have the BEST shirts there, and I try to stock up when we're there.


And while we were there, I found these two old geezers playing checkers outside on the front porch!  They looked like they were really "into" the game!  Not sure who won...

Since Stampin' Up! announced the GREAT FABRIC SALE this week (just about ALL of our fabrics are on sale for 50%!!!!), I thought I'd share some of the projects made from fabric that Jill had on display. 

You may remember, she's a quilter and has been going crazy with SU fabric since it was introduced several years ago. 

A dish towel and some pot holders.  They would totally fit into my kitchen, which I decorated with cherries and roosters!  Should have tried to convince her I NEEDED them!  Ha ha

A onesie and several purses.  I did get one like the smaller one on the right.

Another set of dish towel and pot holder.  I'm not sure I'd have ever made either of these with this fabric, but they sure came out cute!

So - do you need some fabulous fabric - at 50% off?  Our fabric comes three designs to a package and all three designs are "fat quarters".  Haven't purchased one yet that I don't like.  AND, it's good quality fabric - straight bias, which, if you sew, you know is important.

Contact me before March 31, 2013 if you'd like to purchase some!  Sure can't beat the price!

Website: http://www.stampinup.com/ECWeb/default.aspx?categoryid=560

Phone: 858-271-1924

Thanks for stopping by - come back soon!

Here's what THEY did!

Ok - in the last post I showed you some of the dresses *I* made using the Dress Up framelits  - and I mentioned I had a BLAST playing with all the DSP.

So I decided I'd give my Stamp club ladies the opportunity to "play paper dolls" at their February meeting - and they LOVED it!

Some of them didn't leave until 4 PM - and we start club at 10 AM...

So...  wanna see what they did?

Here ya go...

This was clever - top from one DSP, bottom from another.

Scallop punch makes the apron for this one.

The heart is a piece of the Artisan's Embellishment Kit.

Another piece of DSP makes the apron on this one.

Bottle cap for a belt buckle!

Scallop punch again...

Lace and a button!

This was Linda's idea of Beaver Cleaver's mom's dress.

The "Little Black Dress"

All dressed up with glitz and glitter!

So, there are a few - everyone made 4 or 5, and I tried to photograph them, but obviously I didn't get them all.  And, a few of them took them home to play with there.

As you can see, we used a LOT of different embellishments to make these dresses - but we all had so much FUN!

Do you need to order the Dress Up framelit so YOU can play "paper dolls"?  Give me a holler to my email (stampinsamsgarage@gmail.com) or go to my website and place your on-line order. 

Thanks for stopping by!  Come back again, soon!

Say Yes to the Dress

I've been having an absolute BLAST playing paper dolls with the new dress form framelit!

I'd seen a couple of posts on others' blogs and got out my framelit and and a LOT of DSP and started cutting!

And then I started decorating!  It was so addicting!!!

Look!

Here's my first piece of art!  Found the frame at a big box store on sale for $5.  I didn't even take whatever was in it out - I just layered my art over top.  Guess I COULD have taken off the corner protectors before I snapped the photo, though, huh?

Here's a close up of several of the dresses.

Decorating them was SUCH FUN!  I used narrow ribbon, the new Delicate Details Lace Tape as an apron on one, and one of the doilies as an apron on another, added one of our wonderful new lace flowers on another, and a piece of the Embellishments kits to another.  There are just TONS of possibilities, once you get started with all of our embellishments!

I put these dresses up on a pedestal!  The holders were really easy to make - a spool, a small wooden block and a piece of CS cut using the dual square die.  Then I glued a skewer to the back of the decorated dress form, and VOILA!  We have a dress display!

Here's a close up of my pedestal.  It's really quite small, but I didn't think to put something into the picture to give you some sense of size.  Well, yes, I did - that square scallop is 2 inches square.

Next post I'll show you what my stamp club ladies did with the dress framelits - these ladies are AMAZING!







Thanks for stopping by - come back soon!

And finally - The End!

Here are the last three months' photos from the family calendar.  Next post will be something else, I promise!

For some reason, I can't access the bottom of this post so will say (right here) Thanks for stopping by - come back soon!

My brother found these on Ancestry.com!  Guess one of my aunt's relatives posted them, but I didn't recognize the name he supplied.  Anyway, that's my Grandfather top left; my Uncle Bob middle left, Uncle Bill top right; my mom in the center, and my Aunt Jeannie bottom left.  I TRIED to draw a family tree for my nephews, who never met any of these people - it was pretty lame!  LOL  So I did one in Word and sent it along with the calendars.

Jim & Laurel like to do cruises, so these are photos from at least one of their cruises last year.

Photos of my nephew Jon - first one in Brazil, the other two in Philadelphia when he ran a marathon this past year. In the top one he's posing with the Rocky Balboa statue.  He's big into marathons, so I generally have at least one photo of him finishing one.  Wish I liked to run! But I do NOT!

7, 8, and 9

Here are three more calendar pages....   Then 3 more after that - and then we can move on to something else.  I've been playing with the dress framelits and have made some REALLY cute dresses - I'll show them to you soon, I promise!

Brother Jim and all his silliness at Walt Disney World during their family vacation last June.  It was great to have enough pics of him for a whole page.

The Princesses "doing tea" with Prince William and Princess Kate; in front of Sleeping Beauty's castle; posing with a fairy at WDW; the whole fam-damily posing in WDW; Maurgen (in orange leg warmers) during her middle school's production of "Fame".

 

 

Maurgen & Zoe in their hats at Disney World; the whole fam-damily sporting their rain gear at some point while there (it's Florida!  It rains!); riding a roller coaster; Zoe, on several occasions, espressing herself!

Most of my pages were made by printing the photos in 2 x 3 sizes.  In some instances I was able to punch out 1-3/8 squares that were the focus of the picture.  After I placed all the photos, I started embelling with 3-D effects of some sort.

As I mentioned earlier, last year I did the whole calendar using My Digital Studio (MDS). It came out beautifully, but I wasn't happy with how flat everything looked, doing it that way.  I LIKE having the 3-D effect - so I elected to put a little more work into it this year and add things like the ticket punches, mouse ears (a punch I'd bought YEARS ago!), scrunched up tags and logos of the places we'd been.

I went on-line and looked up the various places we'd all been and copied the logos into a Word document . Then I printed those out and then trimmed them to fit the pages.  Helped give the pictures more of a feel of the places we'd been.

Thanks for stopping by - come back again soon!

More Calendar Pages and the Mob Museum

Sorry I've been MIA - went to my upline Jill's stamping event in St. George, UT this past weekend, and of course, it wasn't just for one day!

Several of my downline live in Pahrump, NV, so that's always the first place we go - it's a little more than half way to St. George and room and board are very reasonable!  Besides, they were going with us, so we had to stop...  Ha ha

After Jill's event, we drove back to Pahrump, and the next day Susan and I went in to Las Vegas to go to the Mob Museum (downtown).  It's FASCINATING!  It took us 6 hours to get through it, and by the end, I'm sure we weren't really retaining anything we were reading.  Great museum - interactive displays, lots of photos, some film clips...  If you're at all familiar with the Mob's past, it was basically Prohibition that created their syndicates.  They were running booze (while it was illegal to do so, thanks to Prohibition) and developed their syndicate initially to accommodate that.  They have just branched out in to other avenues since then.

During the Kefauver hearings (mid 1950's) one of the hearings was held in Las Vegas, and the actual courtroom the hearing was held in is part of the museum.  We got to see and hear photos and dialog from the hearing.  They also had the actual wall where the Valentine's Massacre occurred many years before that in Chicago.

Just a fascinating place - you NEED to visit it one of these days!

Oh yeh - there are supposed to be photos of stamped items here, aren't there?

OK - here ya go...  more calendar pages...

Jim, Laurel, & I in Old Town San Diego; Jim & Laurel at the Fish House at the Embarcadero to help me celebrate my birthday; the last two photos were taken in Balboa Park near the water lily pond.

Jim had requested we go to Croce's - he's a big fan of Jim Croce.  We had brunch there - nice quiet little restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego.  The other two photos are from Safari Park, which is a branch of the San Diego Zoo.

Laurel and her sister, Cathy, at dinner somewhere up around San Jose; Cathy, Laurel & Jim in San Jose;  Jim with a huge cannon in San Juan, P.R. during one of their cruises last year; Laurel and the grand daughters (Maurgen & Zoe) out and about enjoying nature.

We made a lot of cards and other things at Jill's - I'll take pictures and post them soon.  Next time will be more calendar pages - still have 6 to show you!

Hope you enjoyed seeing how I do my family calendar.  Would love to see yours!  Just add a link to your photos or blog, if you're willing to share with us!

Thanks for stopping by - come back soon...