Fill That Sucker Up!

Hi Y'all. I've had some pictures of my Smashbook up on Pinterest for a while now, and I finally have a blog to link them to. So, if you clicked here from Pinterest, you are in the right place! I'm Erin and I loves me some Smashbooking.

This is by far my most repinned page. Probably because people want to see what all that chicken scratch on there actually says. I know I click on pins all the time hoping for a closer look at what is there, so here you go, satisfy your curiosity pinterest viewers!

This was one of the first Smashbook pages I ever made. The third one, to be exact. What I like about this page is that there isn't much on it but my scribbles and ideas. And, of course, pictures of my kids.
You'd be hard pressed to find a page in my Smashbook that doesn't have them on it somewhere.

I wrote everything on here with the pen that comes with the Smashbook. It is one of the best pens I've ever had and I use it for everything. It is especially great for doodles and little line drawings. I'm not much of an artist, but I do think it's fun to sketch little pictures and visual aids. I also have the SmashStick in pink and blue, but the black one is the one I use the most. If you're wondering if you should buy the other colors, I'd say skip them. The pink and blue are very light and do not stand out well against most of the pages in the Smashbooks unless they are white like this one.



 I am a huge fan of the Smashbook polka dot washi tape. (yes, technically I am a fan of all washi tape, but still!) I use it for everything all the time. These pictures were glued down, but I thought they looked better with a little bit of tape holding them down. Nowadays, I cut my tape thinner a lot of the time, but I almost always leave the ends ripped instead of cut. A Smashbook is supposed to be messy, after all.

When I made this page, I had just moved into a new house that was twice the size of our old place, and I discovered that we had a lot of empty walls. So I spent a lot of time scouring the internet for cute and inexpensive things I could make to brighten up our home. As you can see here, this was the first time I discovered Pinterest! Oh boy, was it a revelation! I've never been one to dilly dally on the internet much, but Pinterest sure changed that. It's such a wonderful time sucking, soul stealing creativity inspiring site, and I've wasted many an hour endlessly scrolling like some kind of craft zombie. Me need ideas for gifting! Me hungry for recipes for laundry detergent! Me must click more more more. Oh pinterest, I love you.

Anyways, I think at this point I didn't actually have an account, so I had to scribble down all my ideas in my Smashbook. And add visual aids. And instructions. In the end, though, I did end up making a bunch of the things I jotted down here. The ruler growth chart is one of my favorites, because it is so cool and such a great conversation starter, and it was SUPER simple to make. Here is a link to my pinboard featuring a few of these things: http://pinterest.com/eyessocruel/we-made-these/. 

Super close up, in case you actually want to read all the little notes I wrote.

I want to make the rest of these!

I tried to make the kitchen sunburst mirror thing too, but it was a complete bust! My own personal craft fail. I bought all this plastic silverware and tried to spray paint it blue. But I didn't realize that spray paint wont stick to plastic unless you prime it first, so basically I just covered my garage in globs of old spray paint. Then I tried to paint a platter silver instead of using a mirror... oh boy, that was a mess. And ugly. But I had bought all the stuff, so I kept going. Perseverance! I then tried to hot glue the plastic silverware to the platter and ended up melting half of it and having the other half pop off ten minutes later. So many lessons learned in a single project, the best way they can be learned: through tons of mess and frustration. Ugh.

Well, I derailed a bit from the topic of this Smashbook page, but I hope it was mildly entertaining. I'd love to talk to you about Smashbooking or failing at your projects or how to make  things or about my grammatical errors. Please feel free to comment or send me a message. I will continue to add posts about the other Smashbook pages that are up on Pinterest in the days to come. Thanks for reading!