Bellarific Friday

Hello! I'm finally back! It's been a while. Thanks for the lovely comments of encouragement. I'm at 2/3 workouts this week and have my eye on a ferny collage stamp from Magenta. I hope it's still there.

I made this card for Bellarific Friday, theme is Aquamarine this week. I was clearing off enough room on my desk to stamp and found this lovely scrap of Ecoline paper in, wait for it, aquamarine! Wow - it was meant to be. Stamping serendipity. It was just a scrap, so it's the little backdrop piece. I used a flower stamp and double stamped it to be able to pop up the flower, embossed it, and coloured it with Tombow markers, accented with stickles. The card base is Cool Caribbean (can never remember if it's two r's or two b's...) with another Bella stamp stamped in Azurite chalk ink. This morning as I looked at it, I felt it needed something else, so I doodled a border around the focal immage. I think that's better, but I still feel like it needs something else. Oh well, on to the next project tonight - this will have to wait. I want to get this sent off to Bella land since I've missed a lot of Bellarific Fridays that I wanted to play along with.

In other news, I have a couple of classes at Heather's coming up: March 19th I'm teaching a class on some new ideas with my all-time favourite favourite Stampers Anonymous stamp. Then on the 26th I'm doing my Distress book again.

Hello

Hello! Nothing new to post. I have been being very grown up and responsible lately which has meant no time for stamping. This has been about as much fun as it sounds. I am hoping to get back in my stamp cave next week, or sooner if I need a mental health break. I did do a little bit of stamping last night, but it didn't turn out and I didn't have any more of that colour and only that colour would do (I'm sure you know what I mean) so I need to get out and get some more. Happily, I also need to make a run to my LSS for a little treat. I am on a self-reward program where I get a little something from Heather's like a Copic marker or a small stamp, etc. if I work out at least three times the week. I'm just back from workout number three and there are some new Crafty Individuals stamps in stock that are calling my name! I've already used up Feb and March allowance, so these weekly incentives really help me get to the gym. My Feb-March allowance is chugging its way here from Australia so I have no idea when to expect it. It can take 3-4 weeks from the States, so I have no notion of how long it will take to get here from the other side of the world. I get freaked out just thinking about it. (freaked out at the enormity of the distance involved, not freaked out by waiting for stamps. I'm not that obessessed with stamps, well I am, but not in this case. I am actually feeling quite patient and zen about waiting for the order, leaving lots of room in my psyche to freak out about transglobal shipping.)

Well, I have taken enough of your time considering I don't even have something stampy to post. Hope you're able to get some stamping in!

Take care and I'll be back as soon as I can.

It's Sweater Day

It's National Sweater Day - time to turn down the thermostat by 3 degrees and put on a sweater. I feel a bit like it's cheating since it's going up to plus 5 today, but still. It's a balmy 15 in the house right now - not too bad so far.

Check out the website:
Turn down your heat on Thursday 150,000. That’s how many Canadians we need to participate in National Sweater Day this Thursday, February 17. Help us meet the goal by turning down your heat by 3°C and putting on a sweater. You will make a big difference in the fight against climate change.For more information about National Sweater Day, visit our website.Other ways to get involved:
Take the National Sweater Day pledge for the chance to win a $500 gift certificate to Loblaw or one of two $250 gift certificates to Joe Fresh Style!
Sweater yourself on Facebook with our app. Dress up your profile picture and show your friends that you’re serious about fighting climate change.
Bid on a designer sweater, donated by leading Canadian designers. All proceeds go to WWF.

Valentine Card - Queen of Hearts

Here's the card I made for my sweetie on Valentine's Day and I thought I would post it to enter the Quietfire Designs Queen of Hearts challenge too. I used my Quietfire Designs butterfly stamp from the Papillon sheet and stamped it repeatedly with two colours of versamagic ink (Oasis Green and Aegean Blue) and silver encore ink. Then I heat set it with a dry iron, whomped with my anti-static bag and stamped the valentine sentiment (Paper Inspirations). I also stamped one red butterfly with some red Palette ink (Moulin Rouge). There is a little heart at the end, from an A Muse sheet of crystal stickers, which I coloured red with a copic. There got to be some smudging from the iron (I didn't use a piece of paper between the iron and the project - bad girl! Lesson learned the hard way there) so I had to stamp some background, so I used a mosaic tile stamp (Judikins) and some light distress ink. The panel is matted on some red metallic paper and a sage shadow card base. I don't know if this is too feminine or too Christmassy for DH. Oh well, that's what I get for leaving it till the last minute - no time for do-overs! On the plus side, I realize how much I like this layout - very quick and easy. I could see it working for lots of purposes, with lots of options for changing up the colour scheme. Paper Inspirations has a bunch of sentiment stamps like this too for many occasions (but I only have this one - so far!). Still, any vertical message would do, I would think.

Thanks for stopping by!

Birthday card

I made this card for this challenge at Card Positioning Systems #203. It's sponsored by Stampotique, and there are free stamps to be won, so I thought I would give it a whirl. I didn't have an appropriately sassy/snarky sentiment stamp, so I hand-wrote in, "And how old are you???" I remember when our little was small (like 3) everyone would ask her how old she was, and she would tell them and eventually she started asking them back. It was quite funny to see their discomfiture. To her it was a very common conversational gambit, so why not ask back? She didn't know that little kids aren't supposed to ask grown-ups how old they are. Anyway, that's what I think of when I see little Marci here.

The background papers are BasicGrey (Indian Summer collection) and the card base is More Mustard. Marci and her crown (both Stampotique) are embossed in black and coloured with Tombows.

Sorry for the long silence. I had a wicked 'flu and was in bed for a week. Next year I am getting the 'flu shot. I forgot this year, and I really got hit hard. Our whole family has been knocked down to varying degrees, and unfortunately I was hit the hardest. I hate being home sick and totally lacking the will to stamp. I see them there, I know they're there, and I just don't have the wherewithal to do anything about it. Luckily I am on the mend now, and have come up with two batches of ATCs for the Darkroom Door February swap, featuring the colour red. I also came up with some extras since if you send extra original ones, they will pay the postage back and save me having to figure out international reply coupons, etc. I haven't made too many ATCs so it was fun to experiment with that size of creative space. I made quite a few really hideous things, and eventually stumbled on some treasures. AND my parcel of January allowance arrived in the form of a box from Fred B Mullett, including some gorgeous embossing powders, an enormous Bluegill stamp, and some other marvellous rubber goodness. Can't wait to play with those!!!!! All that ep.... so much fun! Can't wait.

Serene Birthday Card (or How to Hide Mistakes)

Hello! I made this card for the January challenge at Inkredible Stampers, which was to make a "golden birthday" card. Your golden birthday is the one where you turn the same age as the date. I passed mine a while ago, so I just used a birthday theme with gold elements.

I started off with the black panel, stamping it in Memories Soft Gold using the Cornish Heritage Farms Spanish Script backgrounder. Then, I added that beautiful leaf stamp (Wild Raspberry, Fred B Mullett) and embossed it in gold. Fred B Mullett has beautiful stamps from nature prints, lots of botanicals and vegetables, as well as fish and other sea creatures. They're gorgeous. Anyway, back to the card. I stamped the happy birthday (A Muse) and embossed it too, and mounted all on a gold mat. I thought this mossy tsumugi card base was nice, but when I folded it, it cracked, so I covered it up with some tissue tape (Tim Holtz). I stamped the card base in versamark with the same wild raspberry leaves, and added a strip of plum textured paper. I like to keep strips like this for accents, and not just because I can't bear to part with the smallest pieces of my favourite paper. Now, having introduced purple, I felt compelled to follow the rule of threes, so I added some eggplant dimensional pearls. Have you spotted them? No? Well, that's because they really blobbed out into enormous blobs in the top left corner, so I applied a Tim Holtz metal corner. (Two actually, another on the bottom left, but it was too much so I pried if off, with some difficulty I might add). During all this, the other smaller dots of eggplant dimensional pearls under the happy birthday got smudged, so I scraped them off too and covered up the damage with mushroom dimensional pearls instead. Take that rule of three! Take that.

Thanks for stopping by!

Clean and Simple Birthday Card

Hello! I made this clean and simple birthday card for a friend using a brand new stamp (Local King) that I got for Christmas. (Thanks Mum!!!) I love how it stamps - I used Fresh Ink here, in Slate, and heat set it with the iron. I had used chalk inks for a few tries, but settled on this one, for a more muted colour scheme. They say on design shows on tv that you should look at what people choose for their clothes to see what colours they like, and my friend wears a lot of black, charcoal, grey, slate, and white. I didn't go black and white (though I think that would look amazing with this stamp), rather with shades of grey. I was unable to resist a splash of colour, added with some red embroidery floss. The image is matted on silver cardstock, the lone nod to sparkle on this card. I am going against the grain here - no big experiments with colour, no distressing, no stickles, no colouring, just simple stamp+ink+paper (+thread). I can see making a few like this in various colours - would make a good gift set. I haven't tried Local King stamps before, but they seem quite good quality rubber. They come on cling cushion and they're a Canadian company, with a variety of styles of images.

Thanks for stopping by!
Wheeee - it's Friday!!!!