After moving up from the city to the country, getting pregnant with our first country baby and welcoming Harlow into the Fournier Farmhouse, it seemed only natural that we celebrate her first birthday with a farm party.

Although it was hard to accept the fact that she was actually turning one, it did help that we celebrated before her actual birthday, because then I could still live in denial and pretend that we were just planning a fun party.

I am a huge sucker for tiny party details (you know, those little things that no one else notices but take a long time to make?), and I am really happy with how everything came together for this theme. So, I decided it warranted a blog post all of it’s own!

But despite a lack of inspiration from Pinterest, we managed to pull off a classy, rustic fishing/camping themed party to celebrate the bride-to-be! It was a lot of fun pulling together the different elements for this theme, and so I thought it would be fun to share a couple photos from the day with you here.

Being new parents, we understand that babies get a lot of great stuff from friends and family, and don’t necessarily need a ton for Christmas. So when we decided to do a Secret Santa gift exchange for the babies in our baby group (comprised of five other couples that we met through prenatal yoga), we knew we wanted to make something more ‘out of the box’ for whomever we drew.

Since posting my experience at Crop and Create and my intentions to use Project Life to document our first year of marriage, I have received a number of questions from friends and readers on what Project Life is and how to start. I’ve created this mini series to help those interested in Project Life learn more and perhaps start a book of their own.

Whether you’re a graphic designer, scrapbooker, artist, crafter or musician, I believe it is important to immerse yourself in your art to improve and grow within your medium. In my opinion, part of this essential immersion process is becoming a member of a creative community either of your making or by participation in an existing one.

Every day when I leave from work, Will reminds me to have a #productive day. As embarrassing as it is to admit that we actually say the word “hashtag,” it really is a wonderful way to send me off to work, as it reminds me to be on the ball and make the most of my time in the office.

Yes you read that correctly! My super talented husband and I put our heads together to come up with the best DIY bridal shower present for my sister that we could think of and this was it!

After recently losing my grandmother last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role a grandmother plays in the lives of her grandchildren, the unconditional love grandmothers (and grandfathers) have for their grandchildren, and the special bond that is created between grandmother and granddaughter as she grows from childhood through to adulthood.

As any proud Irish citizen would, I celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a fun green craft. This year, I decided to dust off my paints and try something new. With my trusty Silhouette Cameo, I made a Subway art table runner template and got to work painting my way through the muslin runner.

Once again, it’s that time of the year when I break out my knitting needles and get to work knitting up a storm of dishcloths. For a cause so near and dear to my heart (check out my original post on it from last year here), it’s a way to not only raise money in memory of my Grandpa, but give back to others living with MS.

Since I just finished watching the last episode of Gilmore Girls this week, I’ve found myself with more time to peruse the pages of the World Wide Web, 

I always thought I was a bad procrastinator in university, when I would be up all night the day before an assignment was due, hopped on energy drinks just to keep my eyes from shutting.

For those who don’t know, my husband Will is a super talented photographer. Although he makes his living shooting commercial and product photography, he has recently re-introduced himself to the family, wedding and newborn photography scene.

With the colder fall weather making an appearance here in Toronto, Will and I thought it might be time to start looking into jackets for Oliver-Sebastian (our Great Dane puppy)

Inspired by my list of 25 things, I have decided to choose one word of motivation a month. The word I have chosen for October is ...

As of last week, I can say that I have officially completed the 100 Happy Days challenge! It took me a while to write this post because I wanted to take some time to process the end of this challenge and how I felt about it.

There’s a wonderfully quaint doughnut shop up the street from us called Glory Hole Doughnuts that Will and I have absolutely fallen in love with. They have the tastiest doughnuts in Toronto, and provide nice weekend treat for when we are in the mood for indulging.

At Christmas time, it’s a tradition in Will’s family to wrap all the stocking gifts with brown kraft paper, and so when the time came to wrap a gift for a family wedding shower, I immediately decided to re-work the excessive amounts of kraft paper in our house to make something special for my cousin’s bride-to-be.

Since I haven’t had my wedding yet (and because Will actually reads everything I write), this post obviously won’t be very image heavy. Regardless, I thought it was a post worth writing before the wedding, so that the dress shopping experience was still fresh in my mind.

This Canada Day, I have decided to celebrate like an American on Independence Day! I am a proud Canadian, and I know how lucky we are to live in this multicultural nation of ours.

If you’ve ever had a long conversation with me, chances are the topic of my craft room has come up! I am absolutely in love with how this room has turned out, and although it becomes a dumping ground for wedding crafts and storage at times, it is the one place where organization is key.

As we inch closer to the wedding, our planning focus has shifted from the bigger items (venue, date, dress) to the smaller details. Now that we are making decisions on decor, one of my main deciding factors on what to DYI for the wedding is whether I will be able to use the items both at our reception and afterwards.

I’ve always known that when I got engaged, I would DIY our invitations. When it finally happened, I immediately started designing and testing out different styles, and within the first couple months, we had our design finalized. We placed the order for the invitation pocket folds and envelopes, and forgot about them for a couple months until we had more details confirmed.

Since getting my Silhouette Cameo, I have been more than a little intimidated by all the possibilities. I was very excited to try a couple different mediums, and so during my Buffalo trip, I purchased a vinyl starter kit (on sale from Jo-Anns).

As we inch closer to our special day, I feel as though our to-do list just keeps growing bigger. I always thought that the more you do, the less you will have on your list; but I have discovered that the opposite is true in the wonderful world of wedding planning.

Busy weeks are good weeks as long as they are productive, which is exactly what this week was. It was also a very fun week. Will and I celebrated the beginning of June, the 9th year anniversary of our gym Krudar Muay Thai, and spent some (much needed) quality time together.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Canada and am a very proud Canadian, but there is no country that loves their crafts as much as America does – and if you love crafting and scrapbooking, I love you!

My girls’ weekend in Buffalo could not have come at a better time. I’ve never been so grateful for such an amazing weekend than I was after my super busy week on Friday. I got to spend some quality time driving down to the states with my Mom and had countless laughs with my mom, aunt, sister and cousins throughout the entire weekend. I didn’t realize how much I missed spending time with just the 6 ladies until we were all together again. 

It’s been almost 3 years since I started taking gymnastics, and only less than a year since I started taking classes regularly. I have a deep love for the sport and an insane amount of jealousy towards young gymnasts and their amazing abilities.

Now that I have my Silhouette Cameo, I have been looking for some great fonts and files for some new designs and projects I am working on. After going through a bunch of free font files, I thought I would share with you my top ten summer fonts from Font Squirrel.

To celebrate what might be the best made-up day in the world, I have made an exciting addition to my craft room. Can you guess what it is?

And it wasn’t exactly what I had imagined.

On Friday afternoon, after a week of flexing at work to make up for the extra hours away from the office, Will and I packed ourselves into our (new) car and headed over to the Creativ Festival at the International Convention Centre in Mississauga.

On our drive up to Ottawa this past weekend, we rocked out to Lorde, Fun, and Mumford and Sons, among many other artists. It was an amazing playlist for our 5.5 hour road trip, but one song in particular got me thinking. That song was Below my Feet by Mumford and Sons. In case you haven’t heard it before, here are the key lyrics:

Short work weeks really are a catch 22; it’s great that we get to enjoy a long weekend, but it means we have less time to get more things done. Luckily for me, after a short but productive week (thanks to my awesome to do list and some scrapbooking time at work), Will and I headed east to Ottawa.

This week was pretty wonderful. I spent a lot of time at work, but nothing can replace the feeling of a finished to do list and a job well done. I also had a wonderful bridal shower with family and friends and could not be more appreciative or feel more blessed to be surrounded by so many people who are supporting me and Will as we take this huge next step together.

So I have completely fallen in love with this blog Something Turquoise. She has tons of awesome DIY crafts for weddings that Will and I have already jumped into. Here is a link to the tutorial that we used to create our toothpicks we will be putting in our cupcakes at our wedding.

As a continuation of my previous post Making pages for other people: Part One, I am posting some additional ideas for when you are making pages for events that you weren’t there for. One go-to idea is to create all the design elements of the page and leave space for personal journaling. 

I am always perusing pinterest and other scrapbook blogs for page inspiration. This week, I came across a great post called Welcome, August on WriteClickScrapbook.com. Since I have been working on our Florida scrapbook lately, I was excited to see so many summer page layouts.

If you’ve never heard of Ali Edwards, you are definitely the one missing out. Ali is a scrapbooking and crafting guru who also happens to have a great blog that I highly suggest you check out at aliedwards.com. I specifically love her Project Life pages that she has been posting. 

In this post, I will outline some ideas for re-doing pages. Now, normally, I would never suggest going back and re-doing a page, since scrapbooks not only tell the story of the pages, but also represents who you were at the time they were created. That being said, I do believe that there are some cases where re-do’s are acceptable (mostly because I am a perfectionist and I want to LOVE every page).

Whenever I am starting a page, I usually take my pictures and play around with the placement before I find something that fits. When I was creating these pages, I wanted to try something different, and so I started by cropping them into circles before placing them on the page.