Baby Ryan's sign

We finally did another project!! I know you are all excited to see what new ideas we have come up with this time! :)

For our latest project we make a sign for the granddaughter of a friend of Christina's. She met Holly through work and they talk so much a friendship blossomed! Holly's daughter just had a sweet baby girl named Ryan. Her nursery theme is from the Tiddlewink collection at Target. The color scheme is shades of purple with butterflies! This time around we used our new Martha Stewart paint from Michaels. For the center of the canvas we used satin paint, Hailstorm, and for the border we used a pearl paint, Eclipse. The contrast worked really well and made the project both baby appropriate and also sophisticated enough that she could grow-up and still like it! Since the room theme had butterflies Christina free hand cut out a butterfly to place at the beginning of Ryan's name. For Ryan's name we used the cricut machine and cut letters out using white paper. Once we had the letters cut out we used the glitter paint, Amethyst, from Martha Stewart collection to decorate them. This time around we used a repositioning glue to apply the letters and butterfly because of the pieces and it gave us more flexibility to make adjustments. Before adding the ribbon we painted the thumbtacks with the pearl paint and it really brought the piece together.

 Finished product!

 Side view of the matching thumbtacks!

Glittery letters!

We had so much fun creating this name sign! It felt good to get back in the groove of things! We are currently working on a project with another to follow so some more posts are in our future!

Thanks for keeping up with us! Have a blessed day!

Love, Amy and Christina

What is in a name?

So after much thought, we have decide to change our blog name. From here on out, we will now be called Marie Ink. Don't worry, nothing else about this blog will change. We will still be sharing projects that we are working on and tell the story behind the signs and how are ideas came to be.

 Why the change you ask? We wanted to come up with a name to call ourselves, if some day down the road we start a business out of this. Since there was no way that we could pick who's name would go first, Amy or Christina, and using our last name was eliminated long ago, we settled on our shared middle name! Marie. We toyed around a bit about what would follow that, would we go for the traditional "inc" or try something different. It was Christina's idea to use "ink". Much like tattoos ink is permanent, so we hope that our masterpieces will make a lasting impression on those who receive them.

It brings us much pleasure and joy to be a part of people's live! Hope you all will continue to join us on our journey and check out our latest projects. In fact, we just completed one that we will be posting about soon and have 2 others that we will be working on in the coming weeks.

Love, Amy and Christina

Not so brief haitus!

Well, we have been really busy since our last post. With Thanksgiving, birthdays, and Christmas we haven't blogged or worked on any projects till now. Before we get to that, we wanted to share with you what we have been doing.

Christmas is one of our favorite times of year, for many reasons, one being making Christmas cookies/treats! We say cookies/treats because not all the things we make are cookies. We make puppy chow, peanut butter blossoms, magic bars, sugar cookies, candy mold pretzels, snowflake candies, candy cane cookies, chocolate chip hug cookies, fudge and russian teacakes, oh my! I know, I know people are constantly asked how we don't get fat! It's cause we share! Our mom taught us right! :)

Hope all our reader/follower had a wonderful and blessed Christmas & happy New Year!

Love, Amy and Christina

Princess Maddie sign!!!

No words can begin to describe how excited we were to work on a sign for Maddie. We have probably wanted to do one for her since the beginning! Now we are getting ahead of ourselves. First we must tell you who Maddie is! Maddie is the daughter of our best friend Jackie. Although we have only met her once, we hear a lot about her from her mom and see lots of pictures on facebook. She is energetic, adorable, funny, smiley and has gorgeous curly hair just like her mama! So of course when it came to what to put on the sign we put Princess Maddie because what little girl isn't a princess! Or for that matter what girl (no matter what age) isn't a Princess!

For Maddie's sign, for the girliest girl, we painted it pink and sponge brushed white paint. For this one we used my new Cricut machine to cut out purple charm letters for Maddie's name. We used Princess scapbook paper and cut out the word "Princess" as well as the cutesie hearts that were on the scapbook paper. We decoupaged all the things to the canvas and added glitter, lots and lots of glitter and a bow! You'll also notice we drew a glitter line to connect the letters, to give the appearance of a necklace! So cute for sweet, sweet Maddie!

We love Maddie!!!



xoxo Amy and Christina

Mystery revealed!!

Now we can finally share the story behind our latest project that we hinted to a while back!

Christina has been friends with Jackie since college. She recently moved into her new house a couple weeks before we moved into ours. She told Christina she was going to have a cross wall and she wanted us to contribute. Christina rushed out immediately searching for the perfect cross! However the search failed because nothing really spoke to her like "I MUST HAVE THAT ONE!" Finally Amy says why don't we just make her one. We went to Michaels to pick up a canvas that we think will be just the right size. We stare at said canvas for weeks not knowing what to do. Finally the inspiration comes in the form of Jason Gray's I Am New video.

Then the ideas start flowing. Christina try to explain to Amy what she want it to look like. Amy doesn't understand so Christina did this drawing.

 We make another trip back to Michaels to get supplies. When we see they have a new Martha Stewart line of paint! We get some Martha Stewart sponges and brown glitter paint and got  to work!  Christina took our tiny paper cutter and start folding and cutting paper. She piece it together and got this...

We show our mom and she is like "WOW you really did that!" We then paint the canvas sage green and use our Martha sponges to sponge paint blue over it. The hardest part of the whole thing was piecing together the cross and decoupaging it onto the canvas. Add a little glitter...OK a lot of glitter! Jesus loves glitter right? Write in the lyrics around the cross. It really does take your breath away. In addition to the lyrics on the front a personal message was written on the back to inspire Jackie on her journey with Jesus!

Finished product!!

We are happy to say we mailed it to Mama Jax and she LOVED it! We are so glad because we LOVE her too and worked really hard on this one! We don't know if we can say it was our favorite project because we love them all but it was for sure fun to work on!

We love Jesus! We love Jackie! We love all of you reading this too!

xoxo
Christina and Amy

Much love to Mama Jax

Remembering 9-11

On September 11, 2001 we were still in high school, believe it or not! Many people will reminisce where they were this year 10 years ago. But we aren't going to do that here. We are going to tell a different story, one that involves a craft project of course!

The second semester of our sophomore year of high school, which was 2002, we took a fashion design class. In the class we made wall hangings from different pieces of cloth. We had planned a trip to New York, both Rochester where our mom's family lives and to NYC. We decided to make a wall hanging for the FDNY in honor of their heroic efforts on 9-11. In the end, we didn't end up going to a fire station while in NYC but this wall hanging we made so many years ago now hangs on the wall in our parent's house.

We will always remember. Where terrorist sought to divide, God used to Unite! United we stand! God Bless America!

Although we don't really remember how we put it together. It is beautiful just the same and we love it!

~Amy and Christina~

Emily and Evann's signs

First off we must say that this one holds a special place in our hearts. We have know Emily and Evann's mom, Tiffany, for several years now. Tiffany is like a sister to us and Emily is our Goddaughter! The idea for this project, yet again, came from being invited to another baby shower!

The first sign we made was for baby Evann. Weeks before we actually started working on the project we thought about what to put on it, after several ideas being tossed around we found it. The "it" in this case was a set a stickers that had a little gift tag looking one that said "You are my sunshine" with a butterfly on it! Perfect! Next was the matter of the lettering. So far we have painted them on, we have used a Sharpie paint pen, and we have used die-cut letters.  For this one, we decide to use the die-cut letters the we used on the Parrott family canvas, but for Evann we just used the bright girly letters. We went through and selected all the ones that we like and would fit on the canvas. We couldn't decide on an "E" and second "N" that we liked so we picked the one that were white and you could doodle on them. Christina took the "E" and with the Sharpie paint pens drew on a dotted navy blue line and pink hearts. Amy did the "N" and colored in the border pink with green dots and pink lines in between. We decided to paint the border purple and used sage green for the background. Instead of just doing a straight line border, we scalloped the edges. We decoupaged the letters on and added glitter! We used this adorable ribbon that had Ric rac printed on it.

We got a cute light yellow basket with floral cloth lining from Home Goods and put all the baby clothes, blanket home made burp clothes (courtesy of our mom) and name sign in it and wrapped it with a bow!

Of course we didn't forget about big sis Em! We wanted to make them similar cause they are sisters but different enough to be unique. For Emily's sign the theme was a easy. She likes cupcakes, so we put cupcakes on it! We painted hers the same sage green as her sisters, but with a pink border. Instead of a scalloped border, we put a loopy border. We used a picture of a cupcake sticker and a sticker of the word "cupcake". For the letters we got a piece of scrapbook paper with pink cupcakes on it. We used the die-cut sheet were he had already punched out letters as stencils to cut out the letters for her name. We used a single cupcake from the scrapbook paper to dot the "i". We applied glitter and the same Ric rac ribbon as her sisters and it was completed! Our goal was to make Em's a little more grown up so that it would fit with her big girl room. Mission accomplished!

We love Emily and Evann!!

~Amy and Christina~