Leo Archives - Eileen Hull

Anna-Karin Evaldsson is a very special member of the Eileen Hull Inspiration Team. You can see her work on her blog Layers of Ink. Last year there were a lot of changes in her life, including a move from one continent to another and just a few months later, a new baby! Leo arrived weeks ahead of schedule (and just 20 minutes after reaching the hospital!) but thankfully he and Anna-Karin are both doing well.

I first met Anna- Karin several years ago. It seems she can do it all- she is not only a super-talented designer, she creates amazing projects, takes beautiful photographs and writes great tutorials. She is always on top of deadlines and every project is more amazing and detailed as the next!

Here’s how dedicated she is… a few weeks ago, the team was doing a collaboration with our friends at Stampendous! on the blog and Amy Bowerman (our fabulous Inspiration Team Coordinator) and I received an email from Anna-Karin saying that she might be a little late with her project because she was having contractions but that she would post the project as soon as she could. That night Leo was born! Doesn’t that make us all his aunts?

Baby Shower Sizzix Projects | Eileenhull.com

We want to show Anna-Karin how special she is to us, so we are giving her a virtual baby shower today to celebrate Leo’s birth! Even though we can’t be with her, we send our love and a special crafty surprise. We invite you to visit each team member/shower guest’s blog to see what they created for this new little guy.

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If you have a message for Anna-Karin, please leave your well wishes in the comments- then she can read them all at once. Thanks for being part of our celebration!

Here’s a list of the “shower” participants. You can click on each link and hop from blog to blog to see all of the projects:

My project is a mini-album. Anna-Karin can use this for whatever she would like- it would work for photos, his first words, funny things he says as he gets older, or a mom journal. I wish I had written more down when my kids were little.

This was a fun album to make because I used the new Homemade Thinlits alphabet to emboss the cover of the book. Such a fun feature of the Thinlits dies when used on matboard- if it were paper, it would cut through, but on matboard it just leaves a nice crisp impression. I inked over the front and back albums covers using Clearsnap ColorBox Blends in soft pastel colors (in honor of Anna-Karin’s fondness for ink) I put twenty-four pages in the book and used the Sizzix Mini-Album die to cut the pages. It’s so easy! Fold a sheet of 12″ x 12′ paper in half, then in quarters. Place the big fold just shy of the first score line on the die and roll through your Big Shot. You will get two double fold page signatures and each page fits perfectly inside the album. Tie the pages into the book spine with green and white twine.

The baby’s name was spelled out with letters die cut from matboard and popped up with foam squares. I also added a tiny layered lion (Leo the Lion) from my Cherished collection using burlap to cut the mane and background.

Please feel free to leave some comments for Anna-Karin. Any advice for a mom going from one baby to two?

Anna-Karin, we wish you and your family health and happiness always in your new home!

Thanks so much, friends, for joining our online shower…