Valentine Swap

Hi All -

We haven't even hit New Year's and I was all about Valentine's Day today!! Natalea over at Kandeland is hosting a Valentine's Day Tag Swap and I was lucky enough to get in before it was full!

I picked up a few last supplies today and started coming up with ideas. I was planning a rich velvety red/cream theme, but what overcame that was pink hearts, red accents, and pastel cupcakes! AND HOT PINK GLITTER!! I will take a photo of them tomorrow in good light and share. I also need to reaffix some of the embellishments, the tape runner I used was NOT so strong.

So glad to get these done though since they need to go out by January 16th, and I am traveling the next two weeks. Well I suppose I should work on my Christmas Cards tomorrow now that I have the Valentines done right?!? Christmas is over you say?? OK, I need to finish my Happy New Year Cards tomorrow, and FAST!!

I'll leave you with a LOUD......GOOOOO BIIIIIIG REEEEEED!!! Go Big Red!! Huskers in the Holiday Bowl tomorrow, so exciting!!

Happy New Year's,

Rach

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas,

Rach

More Rach-ology Designs

Hi Everyone!

Getting close to Santa stopping by!! Well that is if he can make it through all the wind and snow we have out here in Nebraska! YIKES!

We are warm and cozy inside, spent the day baking cookies, opening a few presents, and having some fresh shrimp my parents' friend and neighbor Rex brought back from Padre Island, really tasty.

I thought I would share with you a few more of the Rach-ology Designs!

Here are the "Fly Above the Clouds" Earrings:

Here are the "Day to Night" Earrings:

Here are the "Johnny Appleseed" Earrings:

Hope you are all having a wonderful time with friends and family!!

Thanks to all of my blog supporters!

Rach

Rach-ology Designs Preview

Happy Christmas Eve Eve!

Here are some of my designs I promised to share this past weekend!

Aren't all these beads so wonderful? What inspirations from French General!

Here I am putting together bracelets, and earrings....

This is one of my favorites, blues are so soothing! This I call the "Blue Moon" Bracelet.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the red and turquoise color combination especially with an accent of silver! These are the "Hot to Trot" Earrings.

"Happy USA" Earrings:

Here is the "Elizabeth" Bracelet, made for my oldest niece - we opened them last night!

The "Alexandria" bracelet, made for my youngest niece:

The "Snazzy" Earrings, I just love these black/grey sparkly beads in the middle, and I added the little black and red beads at the bottom.

So many more to come! Hope you are enjoying your Holiday Season!!

Rach

Time for a Slow Down...I hope!

Hey Ya'll-

I've been swamped at work. Lots and lots of hours spent on my laptop, on a plane, in airports, but it should be slowing down for at least a couple weeks!

I really want to share with you want I have been doing in the spare minutes I have to create, to decompress, to relax! I will share some pictures of my Rach-ology Designs this weekend!

In the meantime, I had to share the quirky photo at the top that my friend and talented photog Ali took while we shopped at Brass Armadillo before Silver Bella!

She also took this photo for me with Jo Packham, Editor of Where Women Create!! She gave such a lovely speech, we all wanted to listen to her go on and on, but we were sad it was so brief! Jo is such a sweet person!! She made each of us a gift of a beautiful metal bookmark with a charm on it! How sweet is that?!

Have a wonderful weekend!! Hope to be back soon sharing my creations!!

Rach

Inspiring Kaari Meng

I was so excited to meet Kaari Meng at Silver Bella this year since I signed up to go with her to The Chateau Getaway in the South of France next July! I met Kaari the evening of the Vendor Faire and she was kind enough to introduce me to Jeanne who is coming to France too!! Now I am even more excited knowing a couple of the ladies that I'll be able to spend an amazing trip with!

I had purchased a number of bracelet kits from the French General previously, but never knew how to start making them. So I waited for Silver Bella to take the Bracelet class Kaari taught on Saturday.

I was so happy to have Kaari show me how to create such cool pieces of jewelry. Here is the piece we made in class.

Since then I have made 4 more bracelets, a necklace and earrings!!! I just ordered a slew of new beads and findings from French General this week so I can create more pieces!!

I bought this cute holiday bracelet kit at the Vendor Faire Friday night at Silver Bella.

I can't wait to make some more! Below is a Rach-ology Design Original :)

My friend Jen in Chicago is planning on having a Trunk Show for me to showcase my creations next March, so I better get busy!!

Time for more mashed potatoes....

-Rach

Silver Bella Hat Attack!! - Charlotte Lyons

Another treat was a class with the wonderful Charlotte Lyons. She had a fun class to make felted sweater hats. We each brought a thrifted wool sweater that we felted in the washing machine. Then we sewed it from the pattern Charlotte provided to us, and embellished!

Thanks to my mom and dad who picked up my sweater for me at Goodwill as I ran out of time beforehand with work travel!!

It was amazing to see all the different variations and designs that each person made! Each seemed to fit everyone's varied personalities.

My SB Big Sis Shea Fragoso made an adorable baby hat!! Cute.

What a fun class Charlotte Thanks!!

-Rach

More Silver Bella - Jennifer Murphy

Happy Thanksgiving!

One of the big highlights of Silver Bella this year was meeting Jennifer Murphy and taking two classes with her. One was a snowman class, and the next one was a Shadow Birdie Box!

Me and Jennifer Murphy

This is the sample of the snowman we made.

Here is Jennifer showing our table how to stick the pipe-cleaners through the body to create the snowman's arms.

During our snowman class Jennifer had some of her handcrafted animals on our table to view and fall in love with! Guess who came home with me after the Vendor Faire Friday night?

MAX the CAT!!

This couple of bears are adorable. The blue color is so pretty!

This little bear and mouse holding the xmas tree are too cute!

Jennifer brought her newborn son Claude to the event, and her mom Pat Murphy, of her own bear-making fame came along to help. What a cute family!

Here is the Shadow Birdie Box Class we had on Saturday.

This is one of Jennifer's samples:

This is my finished product! I used a vintage fabric to cover the box rather than paper, but you can use either.

Thanks Jennifer for a couple of fun classes!

Catching up....ALASKA!

Hi Again,

I decided to interrupt this otherwise strictly Silver Bella update to share a few pics from my Alaska adventure a month ago! I went for a work trip and work we did! Below is a pic of a little plane we took for a 15 minute flight from Anchorage to Kenai Penisula. Very friendly people there!

This was a view from Kenai too.

We did have a day and a half to drive down the countryside of Alaska from Anchorage to Seward and saw some really beautiful scenery, not many people, but lots of scenery!

The mountains were a totally different feel from the Rockies that I'm used to! I like how we were basically at sea level with the mountains all around.

We stopped at a Animal Wildlife Conservation, it was really nice to see that people are looking after these animals that weren't quite ready to be back in the "real world".

There were Moose, Bears, Eagles, Owls, Buffalo, Elk, and more.

This bear was tip toeing across the ice testing it!!

It was such a crisp clear chilly day, perfect for the drive.

We drove on down to Seward, which seems pretty closed up for the winter.

On our drive back my friend Pat really wanted to try the 2.5 mile tunnel that goes through a mountain (apparently the longest one around?). So we paid our $14 bucks or so and drove through. It was creepy, being Halloween night, and it being dark and not many people around!! Luckily we timed it right, because since the tunnel is only one narrow road, you have to wait on the other side for it to open in the right direction!! We could have been stuck there for close to two hours, but made it back through in 20 min or so!!

After that, we were ready to get back to civilization and get some sleep to get ready for the long journey home! What an interesting week in Alaska!

Night,

Rach

Silver Bella Recap!

Hi Everyone,

What a great weekend I had at Silver Bella! The weekend started off with Scrappy Jessi's tour bus of fun! Ali, Kara, and Sheila, my roomies for the weekend came up from KC early for the tour of Omaha's Brass Armadillo, Hobby Lobby and Archivers.

It was a fun afternoon, although we wore ourselves out shopping! A quick stop back at the hotel to freshen up and onto the opening night dinner and project with Fiskars. The most fun was after the project we exchanged swaps!!

I hosted the Year of Tags swap, which turned out really great!

What a fun group of ladies that joined that swap!! I will share pics of the swaps soon! I also participated in the Sweetest Treat swap hosted by the lovely Shea and her equally lovely mom Deb. These ladies went so crazy with amazing creativeness on the covers and putting all our pages together it was unreal!! I can't wait to share photos of this book. We all put together two pages that included on each one of our favorite holiday treats. Two of the clever participants even brought samples of the treats to share with each of us!! YUM!

Let's just say, my first year of swaps was wonderful, but made me realize I really need to UP MY GAME!! More is normally better when you're talking sparklies, frills, glittery, velvety, and just beautiful bits!!

More to come on the best part - CLASSES!!

Glittery dreams,

Rach

SPARK WAS AMAZING

Hi Everyone,

My life has been crazy lately!! I was able to squeeze in some creating time this past weekend at the wonderful first year of SPARK in Salt Lake City.

The setting was beautiful, the hostesses were even more beautiful and sweet! Liz, Margie, Jefra and Rhonna.

The day and a half flew by, Friday afternoon there were 15+ different stations with fun make and takes, and demonstrations of new techniques or tools. Saturday there were four classes. The first was an art book class, the second was a photography class...check out this photo I took with a cool lens....

Here was one I modeled for while a Spark tried her photo skills.

The third class was a embellished t-shirt class, here is my creation.....

And finally we had a jewelry class making charms on a chain. More photos to come on that.

The event ended with a trip to the most amazing store I think I have ever walked in!!!

Dear Lizzie! The ladies catered lunch for Spark on Saturday, and also taught one of the workshops making fun junk bows! (Aren't they fabulous?) Can you believe they opened the shop late into the night to let the Spark girls shop?? Thanks so much, we had so much fun shopping!!

Thanks to my friend Annette for entering the world of crafty and fun!! It was such a great weekend !!

Onto Silver Bella in 2 days!!! Oh but not before a work trip to Phoenix tomorrow and Wednesday. Please let me stay healthy!

More photos to come, just need to go to bed now!

Night

Rach