Patriotic Hair Bows

Hi everybody,

This is Jamie and today I want to share some easy to make hair bows with you all. These bows are perfect for 4th of July!

Here is a list of the things you will need to make these bows:
Alligator clips (one per bow)
Hot glue gun
Hot glue sticks
Scissors
5/8" red wired satin ribbon
11/2" navy blue mini stars wired ribbon

It took me less than 30 minutes to make these bows start to finish. I made a (hopefully) easy picture tutorial for you just in case.

Step 1.
Cut ribbons to size. I cut the navy star ribbon at aprox. 11 inches and the red approx. 3 inches.

Step 2.
Take your blue star ribbon and gate fold until the ends overlap (make sure to have them overlap enough for a line of glue to hold them together).

Step 3.
Hot glue a line across one of the edges and then press the two edges together to make a continuous piece of ribbon (it should look like a circle or bracelet shape once unflattened).

Step 4. 

Flatten the ribbon you just glued together and grab in the center of the ribbon and pinch together.

Step 5.
While still pinching the center of the ribbon, use your other hand to fold the top and bottom of the pinched area to the back (so that the center now makes a "W" shape). At this point you can hot glue to hold it together or use some twine/thread and tie it in this position if you like.

Step 6. 
While holding the center in a "W" shape (you won't have to hold it if you've tied the center in this position) take your red ribbon and wrap around the center to hide the fold. (The 3 inches is enough to wrap around 2x. If you only want to wrap around once cut off the excess now).

Step 7.
Now secure the red ribbon with hot glue (making sure your ribbon seam end is on the back side of your bow).

Step 8.

Now hot glue your alligator clip (or hair piece etc. of your choice) to the back side of the bow. Make sure you line it up in the middle so that you can't see the clip from the front.

See, I told you easy! I hope my tutorial was easy enough to follow.  Thanks for taking the time to view my project today!

Thanks for stoppin' by and have a great day!

Happy 4th card

For this card I used some timeless bakers twine the red white and blue kind, I used embossing ink, powder, and gun to make the fire works.. it's glittery white and blue embossing powder. I also used an embossing ink pen to write the sentiment. All the papers are from my stash. I followed the sketch at Artful Delight. I cut the banner on the bottom (that the sentiment is on) with my Cricut Expression 2 and gypsy using the Martha Stewart All Occasion Cake Art cart.

I'm entering this card into the following challenges:
Artful Delight - June Card Sketch
Cut It Up - #21
DL.ART - June Anything Goes

Don't forget to enter my giveaway HERE! (it will go until we get 100 followers on FB)

Thanks for stoppin' by and have a great day!

Imagine Help & 4th of July

So.. let me start with the most important part of this post. I got an Imagine for Mothers Day and will sometime this week finally get to open it (YAY im so excited!!). I just kind of jumped into my expression.. which worked.. but it took me forever to figure it out properly. So, I was wondering if any of you have any suggestions of blogs, or sites or anything like that where I could go to get all the info I need for starting to use the Imagine.. Im at square one.. I seriously have NO idea how to even begin to work the thing. I dont even know if I have to use a special type of paper for it lol. So any sites or blogs that have helped you out or any tips or info you can give me that helped or anything like that would be great!! thanks so much in advance for your help.

Now, onto my 4th of July. We spent it with my husbands family.. well we spent a lot of it getting ready to go lol. I for some odd reason ended up making a cake (with tons of help from my husband.. actually he did most of it lol). My pics aren't the best.. I took all of them with my iPhone since our Nikon was already packed and ready for the evening.

Adam got up at 6:30am (he couldn't sleep it wasnt like he had to or anything lol) and ended up having to go shopping to get a few things like.. oil and flour. We don't have a lot of stuff that we should have since we're still unpacking etc. He ended up baking all of the cakes and cutting them too.

How we made the flag cake:

We made 1 box of white cake (makes two 9inch circle cakes), 1 box of white cake that we dyed blue with gel food coloring (makes two 9in circle cakes, and 1 box of strawberry cake and added some red food coloring (makes two 9in circle cakes.

We cut the red and white cakes in half (to make each 1 cake into 2 cakes that could be layered.. not in half like a pie), then we stacked them (from bottom to top) white, red, white, red. With the top red & white layers we took those off the cake and stacked one blue cake with them and traced with a knife the lid of a sour cream container... then we took the middle of the blue cake and put it to the side.. and the outter circles of the white and red cake to the side.

I made a filling from cool whip and mashed up strawberried and filled between each layer.. and in the circle of the blue layer. Then we frosted the cake with cream cheese frosting that I made from my better homes cook book.. its the best frosting ever! lol.

We actually made 2 of these cakes.. one said "Happy 4th" and had fireworks and the other was covered in strawberries and blue berries. I only got a pic of this one cake because the other one was gone already and of course I didnt have my Nikon so its not the best quality of a pic.

The cake pops I made with the left over cake and left over cream cheese frosting. I just kind of eyeballed it.. no recipe or anything just added what needed to be added. I had got some of the melting candy from Michaels the day before.. one bag of white and one of red. I dipped lollipop sticks in the melted candy and then shoved them into the middle of the cake balls. Then I put them into the freezer for about 10-15 mins.. my cake balls were so heavy that it was the only way I could keep them from falling off the sticks into the candy. Pretty simple, I must add this was my very first time doing cake pops and for a first time they turned out pretty good. :)

Hope you all had an amazing 4th of July weekend!! Thanks for stoppin' by and have a great day!

Red, White & Blue Thank You!

I made this very simple red, white & blue thank you card for a few challenges.

The Pink Stamper - September 11th

Paper Cutz Challenge - #58 Tags

Get Sketchy Card Challenges - Sketch #55

ABC Challenge - D is for Distress

The large star is also a tag. I cut the stars out with both punches and Sure Cuts A Lot with my Cricut expression. I used blue & red ink to distress the main card background.. around the white 2nd layer and the stars. I used a red Zig marker to write "Thank You!"

Like I said a very simple card.. but I like it! :)

Thanks for stoppin' by and have a great day!