Kreative License

Does this post make my butt look big?

2011-04-24T17:08:00.000-05:00

Or maybe its just these cards!

I want to thank everyone who posted such lovely comments on my blog. I do hope you'll come back and visit me some time. Winners of the hop will be posted on Dustin's blog very soon now. While you're waiting, I have a couple more hippos to share with you. I will say that Dustin's dragons are my all time favorite of images, but these darling hippos have quickly found their way into at least the top three. If you're new to my blog, let me say that I am a devoted pencilist. Until very recently, Prismacolors held my heart, coming in as my number one coloring choice. All that changed when the hubs rocked Valentine's day this year. He gifted me with the complete set of Derwent Inktense pencils. I am in love! These darling hippos were done entirely with the Inktense pencils.

Derwent says about them "Pen and ink offers strong, intense colour combined with a translucent effect. Now you can enjoy these distinctive qualities in an easy to use pencil. Inktense has a highly blendable texture and comes in a range of 71 jewel-like colours, plus a non-soluble outliner which allows you to draw outlines that are permanent, even when water is applied. Apply pure, vibrant dry colour then wash the pigment out completely to leave an ink-like effect. Once dry, the colour is permanent and can be worked over with other media. The possibilities are endless, the results stunning." I say, "these pencils totally rock". Mine is a bit shorter than theirs, although, there's has a lot of good things to say about these awesome pencils.

I will say that the greatest impact comes when using a wet brush. The colors seem to leap off the page to give you a big vibrant kiss of color. That being said, these pencils are also amazing when used with Zest-It as I have done here. For someone who thought that 132 colors could not possibly be enough variety, I've been incredibly content with a mere 71 colors. Not that I wouldn't be opposed to a few extra colors here and there. I highly recommend giving these pencils a try. I got mine at Dick Blick, as they seem to have the best price around for the set. I paired them with a nice Global leather case made for 72 pencils. These pencils are chunkier than your standard prismacolors. While they do fit in the case, they are seriously snug for the first five or so uses of pulling the pencils in and out. After that the leather and elastic relax a bit and they're easier to get in and out.

A quick run down of supplies here. Obviously, Derwent Inktense pencils for the coloring. They done on my favorite Gina K. Pure Lux cardstock in base weight. I'm continuing to shop my stash for patterned paper and cardstock. The first card was done with the Citrus Die Cuts with a View stack, the other two are done with My Minds Eye Bloom and Grow collections. I believe both are from the Bloom side. Expect more stash shopping from me in months to come. I've got such a huge stash of papers that it seems silly to buy new! I'm learning to be frugal with my supplies for a change. Not to mention no local store to browse through!

Hip Hop to the Blog Trot!

2011-04-21T07:00:00.004-05:00

Welcome Dustin Pike fans to our second blog hop. This is a party you will NOT want to miss.

If you aren't arriving from Jenn's blog, be sure and go back to the beginning so you don't miss anything.

We are delighted to share with you some of the amazing images Dustin Pike, Illustrator of all DoodleDragon Studios designs. This day marks the anniversary of Dustin's 2 years on his blog and we, the DoodleDragon Crew want to show you some of the fabulous Blog-iversary images you can get for a fantastic price, offer is good for a limited time, so go look. Dustin is so generous with his images. If you are new with digital images you will be happy to hear that they are easy to use, store and print out. You can resize them and then print on your favorite paper. Dustin not only gives you Black and White images but sometimes even throws in the colored versions too. You can locate these images HERE, as well as many more. 200 images plus for ONLY $20.00 USD during the blog hop ONLY. See Blog Hop details below.

This is what I have created with a few of the images.

***If you purchase the Blog-iversary images BEFORE Saturday midnight (MTN TIME) you will receive over 200 digi's for $20.00. AND if you bought the April 7th release there is a 50% off code in the file that would make the blogiversary 10 bucks...Thru Saturday ONLY. After Saturday night they get split into sets and will be available at a different price. Don't wait, get in on the Blog-iversary NOW.

Hop Details:

Comment on EACH one of the stops along the way for 10 chances to win. Each one of the Design Team will be drawing a name and announcing a winner from our commenters. We will post the winners on Sunday April 24th and you will have till the following wednesday to email dustin with your name and shipping address for your prize delivery.

Every blog along the way has a special word. Collect the words on each blog to make a sentence and then at the end of the Hop email the sentence to Dustin_Pike@yahoo.com in order to be eligible for the prizes. What is the prize you ask? You will receive an original piece of artwork, hand drawn, colored and signed by Dustin Pike. In all your excitement don't forget to pickup YOUR Blov-iversary images at Doodledragonstudios.com. Blog Hop starts today and goes until midnight on Saturday, April 23rd, mountain time.

My special word is "DRAGON", as in Dudley Dragon is my favorite of all the DDS images!

Thanks for stopping by. Now hop on through to your next stop, Ri at Coconut Lounge Creations!

Lost? Miss someone along the way? Check out everyone's blog:
Dustin http://dustinpike.blogspot.com
Jane http://janesboxofcolours.blogspot.com/
Ginny http://my5bratzcreations.blogspot.com/
Lelia http://greengoddescreations.blogspot.com/
Kerri http://bigsmilesfromkbear.blogspot.com/
Gramma http://grammascards.blogspot.com/
Charlotte http://designsfromwithin.blogspot.com/
Jennifer Dove http://just4funcrafts.blogspot.com
Veronica You're here!
Rikki http://coconutloungecreations.blogspot.com/

How Old???

2011-04-10T06:37:00.001-05:00

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you know that I like pretty cards with very tongue in cheek sayings on the inside. This time, I went for a slightly different angle. I laid it all out right on the front of the card. These silly little “no evil” frogs caught my attention as soon as Dustin put them up for the March Membership. Why most No Evils keep their tongues in their mouth, mine come right out and say what they're thinking. They are shocked and amazed at the age of the card recipient. There are times when, of course, we should speak no evil and other times when we should let it all hang out and just tell it like it is.

For this card, I combined and reduced the three frogs so that they would fit comfortably on what turned out to be a 6” x 4” card. This won't fit a standard envelope, which is fine for me. I prefer to tuck my cards into the ribbon on a package or basket of goodies rather than hiding behind an envelope. If you want something more standard, you'll want to keep in mind the finished card size when you group the images and text.

So now it's up to you to tell it like it is, either nicely or with a bit of sass. Hop over to Dustin's blog and join in the Birthday Card challenge! It's his blogaversary month, so check his site regularly for fun new releases and exciting things this month.

Supplies this time once again came straight from my stash. I've come to the realization that I have too much stuff and it's time to use some of it up rather than buying new. The striped patterned paper is from a DCWV fall stack. The glitter and ribbon, courtesy of Really Reasonable Ribbon, add a bit of pretty to an otherwise sassy card. The image and scalloped mat were cut with Spellbinders Long Rectangles/Scalloped Long Rectangles Nestabilities dies.

Let's Talk Coloring!

2011-03-04T19:47:00.000-06:00

You may have seen this on Dustin Pike's blog. If you've wandered over from there, welcome! If not, go check him out!

There are so many different media choices available to paper crafters these days. Copics are one, but frankly, I'm not a fan. I like my pencils and I like to think I get pretty decent results with them. During a recent DT discussion, one of my DT Peeps complained about his choice of coloring medium:

“I have Prisma watercolor pencils and I use OMS. For some reason, the edges of the images always have more of an outline look to them (does that make sense?) Not a nice blend like the Copics. ”

It is the number one complaint I've heard about the wet blending technique with colored pencils, also known as Gamsol Technique on Splitcoast Stampers. I tried it when I was first looking at pencils and decided I didn't care for the way the final image looked either, so I went back to early art classes and mixed what I knew worked from watercoloring with the OMS techniques I found online. Now I love the final results. You can love your results too. Getting from here to there is as easy as one, two, three! Check out these monsters.

The first is colored straight, no blending. The second is blended and the shadows scribbled in, the third is ready to cut and make into a card. I missed a spot when I blended out the last monster. See it? I caught it before I made it into a card, though. The totally cute Monster is from Dustin's December Membership offering. He's a Members Only image. Membership totally has its privileges! Check out the membership information here.

When broken down to three simple steps it looks pretty easy, right? Think about it this way. I treat my pencils something like...well...copics. :) I lay down a light even layer of color in each section, blend that smooth, then go back with a darker tone and scribble a bit into the lighter areas, blend that out. Repeat if I'm using a third, darker tone. I find that this style of coloring and blending gives me something that falls about half way between watercoloring and copics. Easy as 1, 2, 3! Let's take a closer look at each monster.

Monster 1 here was colored over the entire surface. Nothing fancy. Just go back to your grade school coloring roots and dig in. It doesn't have to be smooth and perfect. The blending will take care of any rough patches. You do want to make sure that you have an all over color.

Monster 2 has this layer blended out. Notice how smooth and even the color looks when compared to the first one. I've picked out a pencil tone that is darker than my original color. Working just in the areas where I want shadows, I just add a couple of quick lines or a scribble.

Step up to Monster 3. All the scribbles and lines from Monster 2 have been blended out and smoothed into the first layer of color. In this case, complete and ready to make into a card. I will say that I was not at all pleased with how the balloon came out. The colors I chose for it were simply to light next to the vibrant colors of the monster. You'll notice in the final card that I covered them up with heart shaped chocolates.

Before I tackle some of the questions that I've gotten, with the help of the rest of the design team, let me show you the difference just a bit of shading makes. The monsters, colored and blended before I went through and added the shading came out pretty cute. In fact, I left one unshaded just to show you that if you aren't comfortable tackling that part of this technique, you can still get good results without it.

The Monsterlicious Valentine on the left was blended and shaded as I mentioned here, while the monster on the right didn't get any shading at all. The one of the left has that pesky leg still not blended out. Good thing I took pictures or I wouldn't have seen it until I was packing them up! Personally, I like the extra bit of pop that shading gives to an image, but it's up to you on how far you want to go. The design still looks good without it.

Okay, how about some common questions and answers:

1. Do you “pull” the dark color into the lighter color? Or do you just swirl your blending stub in the area?
The answer is "yes". Sometimes I swirl the dark into the light, other times I pull it in. It depends on the area and what I'm blending. With hair I almost always pull in varying length strokes to give that sort of texture to the final piece. For faces, I nearly always swirl. For the rest, it's more of a combination of the two, following the line of the image from where I want the darkest part of the shadow to the lightest part. It's one of those things that takes practice to see how the final product is going to look.

Doing the color on color style of color/blending, you'll want to use a lighter touch on the paper stumps. If you're using a good OMS and a good paper, you shouldn't need to forcefully push the color around.

2. What do you recommend for blending stubs?
These are the pencils and stumps I used on the monsters. I just got a pile of the more grey toned stumps that are stamped China instead of Taiwan. I've read people saying one is far better than the other, but to be honest, I can't tell a bit of difference. I'm pretty sure that if you browse through my blog of images, you can't tell the difference either. They feel the same to me and the results are identical.

3. I’d like to buy the stumps in bulk, but it seems my Michaels just has three or four in a package.
Up until a Valentine's extravaganza from the hubs, I bought my stumps like you. They arrived in bits and dribbles whenever I was in Hobby Lobby or Micheal's. For the white, Taiwan made ones, that is the only way I've seen them sold. If you want to try the grey ones, they're available in bulk from Blick Art Store.

The only thing I've noticed with them is that because they are a different, cheaper paper than the white ones, they soak up the OMS faster. Not a problem, just a note. On the up side, the small ones from them are smaller even than the collection of Tortillions I have and they work far better for blending in those tiny little spots that seem to crop up in just about any image.

4. What do you use to clean the stumps? I’ve been using a nail file (sanding block type thing).
Nail file. :) I have a collection of 4 I bought at Sally's Beauty Supply nearly 2 years ago. They're wide, 1 1/2 inches or so, made for filing acrylic nails, so they have a coarser grit on one side than you'll get on a regular file. After 2 years of hard use, I'm just now getting to the point of having to replace them. When they get clogged with paper fibers, I rub them on a piece of denim. A scrap of jeans my oldest monster put a bunch of holes in before she managed to out grow them. There's something about the surface of denim that grabs the paper out of the sand paper, leaving you with a clean surface on your files without wearing down the file.

5. What do you use to blend? I've tried OMS but it gives me a headache. (I've also heard that some people say it has a faint, unpleasant smell)
There are lots of alternatives to OMS for blending. You can use baby oil, mineral oil, I've even tried olive oil. What I prefer and use is a product called Zest-It made of orange oil. It's eco-friendly, which OMS is not. The same goes for little monster friendly. You shouldn't go and drink it, but I'm far less worried about the occasional finger dip than I would be with OMS.

I buy it out of England. They don't sell it in the US. I bought this one 2 years ago:

http://www.jandtsartandcalligraphy.co.uk/online-shop/proddetail.php?prod=250pb

Expect it to take around 2 weeks to arrive on their standard shipping offering. Shipping isn't cheap, but as I said, that's lasted me 2 years and I still have quite a bit in the bottle. Also, expect your post people to be grumpy about receiving it unless they've updated their MSDS labeling in their shipping documentation. It is worth the wait and the displeased post carrier. There's no chemical smell, only a faint orange scent and it is the very best thing I've used to blend out my pencils.

I store it in this adorable container:

http://www.stanleysupplyservices.com/product-detail.aspx?pn=121-647&ref=base

Which is manly enough for even my DT pal Ted while still being cute enough for me. Add a strip of paper and up the cute factor. Not to mention the fact that it's easily $10 shorter than most glass pumps on the market.

To use, just push down the top. The Zest-It puddles up in the top for dipping your stumps. The Zest-It will gradually drain back down into the container. No muss, no fuss. I had a wooden basket I bought on after Easter clearance a few years ago. I took the flimy metal wire handle off, gave it a coat of paint and added in some paper and a cute dragon. Not a Dudley, but one of the oldest stamps in my collection. That little guy is at least 15 years old!

The box neatly holds all of my blending supplies. The solvent pump, stumps and files. The stumps are tucked into a baby food jar too keep them from wandering all over the box. It's a tidy solution to keeping everything together and the little monsters know not to play with the stuff in Mama's Toybox. Here's a top view with the solvent pump open.

6. I've heard the new Prismacolor pencils made in Mexico don't blend. What other pencils should I try.
Okay, I've heard this and frankly, I've had a very hard time believing it. I've tried quite a few brands and types of pencils and I have yet to find a pencils that would not blend. That includes watercolor pencils and your standard #2 graphite writing pencil my monster uses for school. I don't have any pencils manufactured in Mexico so I can't say for sure what the problem is with the people who have reported it. I know it has scared a few people. If you're concerned, try Derwent pencils. They're very proudly made in England and I've had great results with them.

That being said, I do have a couple of pencils that do not blend as nicely or as smoothly as others. One in question is Mahogany. The purple tone on the monsters at the top. It blends, but often reluctantly. To get the results I want, I find myself using more Zest-It and a lighter touch. If you're hearing a rubbing/squeaking sound of the stumps on your paper, you're rubbing too hard. Go back, get a bit more blending agent and try rubbing not quite so hard. You might be surprised with the results.

7. What paper should I use? I don't want to invest a whole lot of money.
The paper you use will make all the difference in your results, particularly when you're starting out and unsure of how to get the results you want. That being said, I've colored and blended on everything from good Gina K cardstock to watercolor paper. The smoother the cardstock, the easier it is to blend.

Best bang for the buck is Georgia Pacific cardstock available at Wal-mart. It's a decent paper with a good surface. While it's not my go to paper, when I'm doing something like 22 Valentines for the oldest monster, it's worked out fine. For my day to day and go to paper, however, you just can't beat Gina K's Pure Luxury Base Weight cardstock. It's smoother and I really like how the color seems to float on the paper when I add Zest-it. Remember that mahogany pencil I mentioned above? I have far less problems when I'm using Pure Lux stock than when I'm using anything else.

8. What about printers for digital images?
Okay, here I'm going to stop. I use a laser printer so I print and go. I don't have any experience with ink jet printers. Some inks may need to dry over night and be heat set before blending. If heat setting doesn't work for you, take your sheet of printed images to a copy shop and make a copy. Copy machines, like laser printers fuse toner to paper at around 600 degrees as part of the printing process. This pretty much takes care of your heat setting. Even with my laser printer, I occasionally run into problems if there are lots of lines in an area I'm trying to blend. You're blending with a solvent. If you have problems, try staying away from the lines as best you can and if the image still gives you fits, try a spray fixative over the image or a quick burst of hair spray to seal it off.

I hope this addresses any questions you may have with wet blending colored pencils. If you want to know something I haven't covered here, post a comment and I'll do what I can to get you an answer. My best piece of advice is to try it and play around with it. Most of all, have fun. If you don't enjoy it, then it's probably not for you.

Spring has Sprung?

2011-02-27T09:05:00.000-06:00

I only have to step outside my door in the chilly, misty, blustery day and I don't believe that Spring is anywhere close to Oklahoma. To be honest, I don't mind at all. I'm a bit of a polar bear. Give me a couple more weeks of snow and I'd be one happy camper. Sadly, the gusty winds that signal Spring in this neck of the plains will be blowing in any day now. They were here last week and are only taking a brief break to remind us that Spring is not yet here.

For those of you starting to feel the first itches of Spring Fever, be sure to check out the February Doodle Dragon Studios Membership. Not only is it a great deal, it's loaded with delightful bunnies and chicks to bring out the Spring in even the grumpiest of Polar Bears. One of my favorites is this fat little fellow. I went very non-traditional bunny with him, decking him out in cheerful pastel colors. Inside this bright card is a cheeky “Dye your Hare? I never would have guessed!” Needless to say, the charm is all on the outside.

Speaking of charm, what do you think of this fellow? As soon as I saw him, I knew it was time to do a reprise of my favorite bunny card. Inside, the card says “Don't worry. It's only a grey hare!” Two of my favorite people will be getting these cards. We've been trading such sentiments for years and they know they're sent with just as much love as laughter.

Feeling the need for a bit of Spring in your step? Why not jump over to Dustin's blog and check out the newly revamped challenges. Spring is in the air over there and I look forward to seeing what you produce. I might even catch a bit of Spring Fever browsing everyone's creations.

Supplies this time around came straight from my stash. In this case, from the scrap bin. The patterned papers are a spring line of Imaginisce from three years ago! I still love them and regret I didn't buy extra. If anyone has these papers languishing in their stash, send them on over! I can't get enough of that sweet daisy paper! The cardstock this time around is Prism and my much loved Gina K. Pure Lux base weight for the images. Nestabilities, of course in deckle, scallop and label shapes. The ribbons and rickrack are all from my stash. I lost my LSS a couple years ago, so I've been shopping my office lately for supplies.

Tune in later this week and I'll be sharing my version of Dudley Grows Up! I ran a bit late due to a dead camera battery, but they're definitely worth the share.

Once upon a time...

2011-02-09T21:56:00.000-06:00

I made a card!

Yes, you should be impressed. This is the first crafty thing I've made in nearly a year that didn't require a sewing machine. I've made aprons, started placemats (no, I don't want to talk about it), a collection of burp rags and swaddling blankets along with one totally rockin' Christmas dress for my daughter. That's not saying my pencils have gone neglected. Not by a long shot! I have a fine collection of colored images, including some totally cute monsters and bugs. I have not, however, managed to put them onto a card. I have even managed to add to my collection of pencils, after a couple of trips through the pencil isle at Blick Art store in Chicago. That's a story for another day.

Today's story is all about Princesses. At the heart of the best fairy tales are princesses. Tall princesses, short princesses, and even princesses stuck in towers. Such stories should always end "and they lived happily ever after". I honor of princesses everywhere, along with a few princes and even a gnome or two, Dustin has offered up a fine collection of princesses, even a self-rescuing princess who slays her own dragon. It's the Ever After collection being released on Thursday. You'll want to check it out and take a look at the new, improved Doodle Dragon store!

This card is my favorite of the images being released. Growing up, I had two very favorite princess stories. One was a tale called "The Practical Princess", the other was Rapunzel. My take on the long haired girl is considerably less pink than my own princess wanted, but since I was doing the coloring, I got to pick the colors! Given a choice, my princess would be pink, pink and, oh yes, pink.

I leave you today with my other princess crafting endeavor in her pretty pink princess costume I made for Halloween. I will say that she's the coolest craft project that I will probably never finish.

Card supplies are shockingly enough, a DCWV stack and a Creative Cafe button. The image was cut with long rectangle Spellbinders nesties dies and backed with scallop rectangle nesties. The lace edge is courtesy of my one and only Martha Stewart edge punch. Coloring was done with Prismacolor and Derwent colored pencils on Gina k's Pure Lux Base-weight cardstock.

Miss Me?

2010-03-04T11:29:00.001-06:00

I don't know if you've noticed, but I've been gone. In the last few months, I've discovered that my children can easily consume my day. During a quiet moment yesterday, I took a bit of time for me. I printed off some of the new Doodledragon images being released today. I have a special fondness for bunnies.

I surprised myself by not only getting the images colored, but managing to make them up into cards. I love the new bunniez images Dustin put together for this release. I know quite a few people would just use them for the upcoming Easter holiday, but these two in particular are so multi-functional.

The first is a great "big things" card. I love the giant sized carrot. You can wish someone congratulations on a big announcement or tell them you hope big things are in their future. Since we're gearing up for round 2 of fire babies, this card is going to find it's way to one of the wives to congratulate them on their "big" news.

The second card is actually my favorite. I loved the image the first time I saw it. It is so evocative of how I feel some days. Between job hunting and being a mom, there are days when I feel like the bottom of a dog...er....chick pile. All this image needs is a lot of little "cheep" words written in around the chicks. I would have added them in myself if I'd thought about it before I printed. It was one of those things that leaped out at me only after I'd gotten it colored.

Check out these images and others in today's release. There are more bunniez, some cool lucky leprachauns and some sweet love images. Don't forget the new challenge blog either! Some of the new releases are going to be perfect for the next challenge! There are more great samples available from the Design Team. Their blogs are linked on the right.

Supplies this time were pretty basic. I used my favorite Gina K Pure Luxury baseweight for the colored image. I used rectangle and scallop rectangle nestabilities for the images. The patterned paper is from Die Cuts with a View. It's an older stack called Pocket Full of Posies. I've seen it in stores though, so I know it's still available here and there. This stack has lots of glitter, but the papers I chose are some of the few that have no glitter at all. The flowers are hand crocheted by me from variegated pearl cotton, size 5. It's a simple five petal flower that hooks up in a flash. The ribbon is a bit of hem tape I found when I was doing some cleaning. Finally, the buttons are Creative Cafe.

No stamping required!

2009-10-21T14:48:00.007-05:00

Sometimes, it is nice to do a card that doesn't require any stamping. Particularly when you're doing 32 of said card. I'm going to a fire wife baby shower this weekend. Yes, another one! If you're trying to figure out the count, we're at 11 in 20 months. Yep, 11 babies and toddlers running loose at this year's Christmas party. Should be a blast.

What started off as a cry for help, to add a little pizazz to the invitation that had already been started, quickly became a complete redo. I wish I had taken a picture of the original. It had potential, but it did need something. After some discussion about ways that we could pump up the design, Kara asked if it would just be easier to start from scratch. Since I had a package of pink baby paper I'd bought to make thank you cards for The Girl, I assured her that not only could we easily do up a new design, we could do it without buying anything.

Let me take a moment to talk about the Cricut Design Studio software. I know people rave about Sure Cuts A Lot, but I've been extremely happy with the rather basic package Provo Craft put together. That's not saying it couldn't use a dramatic upgrade in the features department! That being said, I really like the flexibility it gives me with the standard cartridges. I literally do not make a cut with my machine without it. The paper savings alone makes it worth while! I love being able to weld my shadows and maximize my cuts. This job was no exception. I broke out the Cricut Expression machine I got for Christmas (h'ray for Black Friday sales!), and a 12x24" mat. With one mat and two sheets of cardstock, I was able to cut 90% of the darling little dresses. Another run through got the white shadows. Once more through with got the rest. So three times through the Cricut with a 12x24 mat and I had the makings of 32 baby shower invites.

When doing that many cards, mass production is the best way. I printed the details on white cardstock we used as the card base. That is layered with a pink paper, followed by the baby dresses. To give the cards a little bling, I ran the flowers through my Xyron 150 (the little X one) and added glitter. Another thing you need to be aware of when doing invites or cards that need to go through the mail is to keep your bulky embellishments to a minimum. Simple can have lots of great impact.

This was a super simple set of cards. Just cardstock, glitter and six sheets of patterned paper. The cardstock is American Crafts, Georgia Pacific and Prism. The glitter is from Art Institue and I haven't a clue who makes the patterned paper. I bought a bulk pack of it at Dollar General when I was making thank you cards for Linsey's baby shower. I used the New Arrival Cricut Cartridge for the cute little baby dress.

Back from Blogcation!

2009-09-27T11:33:00.003-05:00

I know, I know, it's been forever since I blogged. I took a much needed blogcation. (laughing) Between stress of hunting up a new job (no luck there yet) and learning to cope with suddenly becoming a stay at home mom for a while, I decided the blog would get the short end of my attention span.

While I haven't blogged, it doesn't mean I haven't done other things. In fact, I've done lots. I find coloring and cardmaking to be quite relaxing. Let's start with a card I did up for Becky over at Page Maps. She buzzed me back in July asking if I'd do up a sketch for her September card maps. Of course I said "absolutely!"

It was a fun sketch, but a bit challenging for me. I took several stabs at it, trying to stay true to what Becky had drawn. It just wasn't working for me. First off, I just don't put sentiments on the front of my cards. It's not laziness, I simply don't like confining my cards to a simple statement. That way I end up with a fine stash of blank note cards ready for whatever I need at any given moment. I can always add one to the front later if I choose, although to be honest, they nearly always go on the inside. Once I let go of the sentiment, the card just fell together!

Even though I'm a huge tool junkie, I've just never been a big fan of punches. This includes border punches. It means I have to be doubly creative when I want things like a cute mini scallop border on one side of some patterned paper. Nestabilities to the rescue! I cut my patterned paper and black mat to size, then lined up the patterned paper, centered on top of the mat while keeping it lined up on the edge I was going to cut. Then I ran them both through with one of my long rectangle scallop dies. when I separate the two layers, I have perfectly lined up scallops on the paper and the mat.

The image is called Peek A Bunny. It's an Elisabeth Bell image from Sugar Nellie, courtesy of Funky Kits. It will make for a cute "Hi" or "Thinking of you" card. I always have a need for those. You'll notice that I filled the orientation of the sketch and made the scallops for the sentiment go all the way across. The card felt more balanced to me this way. A few dew drops and some ribbon finished it off.

The paper is BasicGrey from the Urban Prairie mini stack. I love those little 6x6 paper stacks. They're perfect for cardmaking, leaving me little to no scraps left over to feel guilty about dumping in the recycle bin. I use rectangle nestabilities here, all in rectangles. The image and mat are done with the regular sized rectangles and matching scallops while the outer piece was done with the long rectangle scallops. The cardstock is American Crafts, ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby and the dots are Dew Drops. The image was colored on PaperTrey Ink's Rustic White with Prismacolors and blended out with Zest It. Becky has some great card maps available this month. Be sure to stop and check them out!

The Abbey Road less traveled

2009-08-11T20:01:00.002-05:00

Christmas is my favorite of all the holidays. I can't wait to put up the tree, pull out the decorations and cover our house in snow themed decorations. Oddly, my obsession with Christmas does not extend to Christmas themed scrap papers. This is mostly because the Christmas themed papers are so overly...well...Christmas. The last Chistmas papers I bought were Prima and I ended up using them to make a Halloween layout. I'm not sure how that works out in the scheme of things.

All that being said, I tend to do my Christmas layouts on anything but Christmas papers. I look for papers that suit my photos, or rather photos that suit my papers. When I pulled out the Bo Bunny Abbey Road papers to work on recently, the first photos I thought of were ones I had been going through a few days earlier. The photos are of my daughter, who at just shy of three in these photos, shares her Mama's love of Christmas. Between pregnancy and travel, this was the first year in several that I'd put up a tree. Even though I barricaded myself and the tree away from the kids in order to get the decorating done, it didn't last. As you can see, I relented to a pair of big blue eyes and let a little girl hang a few ornaments on the tree. The title says it all. She was simply enchanted.

The photo on the left is a 5x7, while the ones on the right are wallets. This is a simple layout, using only one sheet of patterned paper, in contrast to the three or more different patterns I tend to prefer. I made up for the lack of patterned paper by using three different colors of cardstock. I did the center pieces of this layout and tried it on several very dark tones before finally settling on the lighter putty tone for the background. I'm finding that my layouts lately use a lot of white space around photo area. I was really wishing my LSS had a better selection of Bo Bunny double dot cardstock when I was putting this one together. The subtle dot pattern would have been a great accent in the background.

I glittered the letters with pale green Art Institute glitter, mounted the stickers on cardstock and then on pop dots to give a bit of extra dimension. The ribbon is more of the Wrights Binding Tape.

Even with all the paper I used on the layout, I still had enough left over for a quick card. This time, I got extra impact by pairing it with a dark chocolate cardstock. I colored up one of my favorite Elisabeth Bell images from Funky Kits called Reflective. I used prismacolor pencils and blended it out with Zest-It. The image was stamped on PaperTrey Ink's oh so yummy Rustic White cardstock. I kept the card simple, rounding the corners with my spiffy new We R Memory Keepers Corner Chomper (seriously awesome tool!) and finished it off with a bit more of the brown hem binding tape from Wrights.

I tend to leave the sentiments for the inside of my cards unless I have a specific person/event in mind when I make them. This one is destined to be a "thinking of you" card, or a nice thank you card. Either sentiment suits the image quite well.

Supplies are simple this time. Prism cardstock, Wrights hem binding tape, Bo Bunny Abbey Road paper and stickers. Not a button in sight and nothing from the Creative Cafe. Simply amazing! :)

Blast from the not too distant past

2009-08-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

One of my goals while I'm being just a mom is to clean out the disaster area of desk. I look back there and while it doesn't feel like I'm making any progress, I know I am. There's definite evidence...like the clear path from the door to the desk that was previously small, uncomfortably positioned stepping stones. Not only that, I keep finding things. Finding things is always good, like this layout...

Four years ago, I found out that after 12 years of trying, I was pregnant. I was excited. I was thrilled! I was also sick, but that just comes with the package. Our vacation that year came along when I was 8 weeks pregnant. On that trip, we visited my parents, the Fire-Rescue International Expo and Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. I love zoos and try to plan one into a trip as often as possible. Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado Springs, Co and is one of the prettiest zoos I've been to. It's on the side of a mountain and the zoo follows the ups and downs that come along with that. Through an accident of "let's climb the hill part first" decision, we didn't come on the giraffes until the very end of our explorations. It was the highlight of the zoo and I couldn't have planned the adventure any better.

Cheyenne Mountain has an impressively huge giraffe enclosure, with giraffes of all ages. But the really amazing part is that they let guests feed them. The upper tier is positioned to be the perfect height to stroke the velvety nose of the giraffe and experience first hand the incredibly long tongue! If you ever happen to be in the area, I highly recommend a visit to their zoo. Take the high road first, the giraffes are totally worth the wait.

Supplies here...more BoBunny. I believe this line was called Fall Festival, or something similar. I fell in love with it and bought twice what I normally would have purchased. This is from the time when Bo Bunny did paper weight stock, so it's great for altered projects. I'm thinking it might grace a fall wreath sometime in the near future. The title is done with the Cricut, one of my first after that purchase. The font is Stamped. I remember working with scraps and the "set paper size" function on the Cricut to get the most out of my single sheets of matching cardstock.

Christmas Dustin Style

2009-07-31T13:15:00.001-05:00

I'm one of those Christmas nut cases that decorate their house following a specific theme. I love the sparkling whites and blues and the oodles of snow themed decorations. None of today's projects fall within that theme. :) So, let's start with a card. As soon as I saw this image in this week's collection from Dustin, I knew I would use it. It fit well with my sense of humor and I can easily see sending it out to a friend during the holiday season. Since I had my BoBunny paper bin out, I pulled out their Classic Christmas papers from a couple of years ago. Decorating with a theme doesn't necessarily mean I don't horde Christmas papers in traditional colors.

In addition to being psychotic about my decorations, I also wrap packages with real ribbon bows, tying on gift tags rather than using the prepackaged flimsy tags that are sold in stores. I love making personal gift tags for each package. I think that makes the gifts just that much more special, not to mention looking really cool when they're stacked under the tree. They're also great to tie onto gift bags as an added embellishment.

These tags are 3" x 3 1/2" with a hole punched in one corner for the ribbon. For package use, I would use the bit of ribbon to tie the tag to the package or bag. The images were printed at actual size for these tags. I've also done smaller tags that are 2 1/4 x 2 1/8. Those are done by taking a quarter sheet of standard 8 1/2 x 11 cardstock and cutting it in half, then folding that in half again. Quick easy cutting measurements. For those, you'll want to size the images down, perhaps using the more simplified ornament peekers that Dustin has released this month.

Supplies this time around are pretty cut and dry. I used BoBunny Classic Christmas papers. These are a couple of seasons old, but I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't find them with a bit of searching on the internet. The ribbon is also from the Classic Christimas collection. I also used Bazzill cardstock and a few different Spellbinders Nestibilities. Check out Dustin's new release for this week and don't forget to stock up on the Christmas images he's released the rest of the month.

I hope you dance

2009-07-27T15:10:00.003-05:00

How do I go from a directory of digital photos to a finished layout? My process is pretty simple. I frequently start by deciding what paper I want to use. I know this is the reverse from most people. Paper inspires me, though. Once I have paper picked out, I go hunting for a sketch that I think will go well with the patterns on the paper. My sketches come from either something I've found online, or one I've drawn myself. I get inspiration for my sketches from magazines and layouts I've seen in galleries or blogs online. My sketches tend to be more basic than the ones you might find at Page Maps or one of the other sketch places online. They're more of a reminder of the initial inspiration than a true map.

Once I have my paper and sketch, I decide what photos from my files will work best. Usually, I have several options to choose from. I pick my favorites that seem to suit the paper the best and print those. I usually print my favorite photo as a 5x7 to serve as the focal point of my layout. The others get printed as 4x6 or wallet size. Don't be afraid to choose several sizes!

At this point, it's usually a matter of just putting everything together. Every once in a while, however, it just doesn't work. When that happens, I struggle. I spend ages trying to "fix" the problem. That's what happened when I started working with these photos. The paper, Bobunny Alissa, I felt was perfect for the photos. My problem was in the sketch. I had done something I never do. I had tied myself to a sketch, so much so that I even spent time in the Cricut Design Studio recreating the side element. I use sketches as a jumping off point, more inspiration than map. The linear design of the sketch became limiting and stifled the flow of the pictures. I couldn't find the unbridled delight of my daughter dancing in the design, so I stopped. I put the layout aside and worked on a different group of photos.

When I went back to the layout, I saw how stifling the design was and set to work trying to salvage what I could of the paper and photos. In the long run, it was mostly a lost cause. My photos ended up stuck to one another and the paper had been cut in long lines, which doesn't salvage well. The only thing I managed to save was the base cardstock, which was a nice chocolate brown and the pink letters I had cut for the title. I tucked the brown cardstock away for another project. The only thing that remains from the original layout is the pink letters.

I think you'll agree that this layout works very well with the photos. I like the airy feel of white space in the layout paired with the illusion of movement the circles give. I managed all four circled and mats with a single sheet each of the papers. The pink mats are just rings on the back sides of the solid blue circles. This let me do the mats, the lettering and the journaling block with a strip of paper left over.

When it came to embellishing, I wanted something that would add to the light feel of the layout without overwhelming it. I bought a pack of acrylic Bobunny swirls a few months ago as an impulse buy. I wasn't sure what I would do with them. I thought they would be perfect and was fairly happy with the effect when I placed them on the layout. I thought they still needed something however as they seemed to fade into the background. Pink glitter did the trick. I used Making Memories Glitter Glaze to coat one side of the acrylic swirl and dumped on a thin coat of Art Institute Pink Glitter. The glitter gave me the pop I needed while keeping the swirls from being too heavy for the overall feel of the layout.

For those of you who prefer single page layouts, here's a close up of the left side. You'll notice that even though the horizontal bars in the double page layout tie the to pages together, they can be a simple stand alone element in a single page layout.

This little moment happened when my parents came to visit back in April. They brought with them a leotard and skirt. My daughter was in heaven. She loves to dance, and ballet is a favorite. She would pull on her the skirt from her Halloween fairy costume and do "balallet". I thought that using my daughter's word for Ballet was the perfect finishing touch.

Supplies for this layout are primarily BoBunny. I really love their papers. Such diversity and charm! This is from the Alissa line. I used my EK Success circle cutting system for the jumbo circles, BoBunny acrylic swirls and Art Institute Glitter. The title is the Alphalicious font for the Cricut with the fun chaotic styling on the shadow done in the Design Studio. More BoBunny coming up in future posts. I found a layout from when I first got my cricut while I was doing some cleaning. It's a fun, no kid layout, so stay tuned.

Packing my bag...

2009-07-18T13:57:00.004-05:00

With chocolate and good wishes. I don't know if you have noticed or not, but it's been over 2 weeks since my last blog post. It's been a roller coaster of a month so far, but things are getting better. You see, on July 1st at 1:30pm, I was knocked off my feet. I was informed that my company was moving to a new eCommerce model and my position and skills were no longer needed. I think that's a ongoing thing in this world today. It's difficult and frustrating and there's not a dang thing you can do about it. I floundered for a bit, as would anyone in my position. I lost my center, my balance.

It's taken me a while to find it again and find me. Sometimes I'm harder to find than my center, but in this case it was the other way around. I've got an awesome husband who reassured me that this too will pass and a firm faith in the Big Guy that through him I can do all things. So I've put myself on the market, sent out resumes and cover letters and, frankly, I'm seriously looking forward to being just a Mama for a while. We have a game plan that is already in place and kicking. As of Friday, well...I have a bit more time on my hands. Although, wrangling kids is as much of a full time job as the wrangling cats (programmers & designers). Oddly, dealing with programmers has been excellent training for dealing with 3 year olds. :)

So I've packed my bag with chocolate and good wishes. It's a pretty cute little bag, don't you think? I used a template from Splitcoast Stampers and Cosmo Cricket Dutch Girl. It's my first go at this particular template, but I quite like how it turned out. Next time I will tweak it a bit to suit me more. I think that the flaps are a bit overwhelming and can be scaled back. Folding and cutting was pretty straight forward. I found that it worked best for me to print out the template and attach it to my patterned paper with the Herma dot repositionable adhesive. Once stuck together, I could trim it out and score all the lines without any guess work.

After everything was trimmed and scored, I removed the paper, scrubbed off the dots and started assembly. My beloved Crop-A-Dile came into play to punch all the holes, however, I wasn't able to use it for the eyelets on the top flap. It just couldn't get into that spot for crimping. I ended up digging out my old Making Memories took kit for my manual eyelet setter.

I have a small collection of Wrights hem binding tape. I like the bold vivid colors, but the Wrights brand tends to be a bit stiffer out of the package than I care for. When I got to restock, I'm going to be hitting etsy as I've found several places there that sell bulk tapes that are silkier and softer. Still, Wrights is handy and you can pick it up in the fabric notion section of Jo Ann's, Wal-Mart (if they have a fabric section) and Hancocks. So lots of local sources. On a positive note, the stiffness really worked well when I gathered it and tucked it behind the flower button.

I've pretty well covered all the supplies in the post, but here's a recap. The paper is Cosmo Cricket Dutch Girl, the last in my Cosmo Cricket run for a while. The ribbon is Wright's Hem Binding Tape, but eyelets are Making Memories while the button is (gasp) Creative Cafe. Seriously, if you have a Creative Cafe store near you, go play with their buttons. The butterfly is also Creative Cafe, from their new release. I've been waiting forever for these cute felt flutters!

Take Note!

2009-07-01T15:17:00.000-05:00

One of the things I have discovered as I get older is that I have a growing dependence on lists. If I don't write it down, I don't remember it. It's like the act of writing something down logs it into my memory. I don't go shopping without a list. It is a complete disaster. If an item is not on the list, it doesn't get bought. That being said, as a paper crafter, I have an obligation, to myself at least, to not go out into the world with a shabby note pad. Since I rarely create things for myself, when I do, I tend to go a bit overboard.

In the past, I would just buy a notebook of the size I needed dress it up. This time, I decided to go out on a limb and make one from scratch. I have a Bind-It All that I got for Christmas that I hadn't used yet, so I figured it was high time to put it to use. I picked up a junior legal pad and proceeded to take my heavy duty Tonic Studios craft knife and cut it down to 4 1/2 x 5. This takes a bit of muscle and a lot of patience to keep the edges straight. Once I get the pages and back cover cut down, I run it all through the Bind-it All. I have decided that this handy dandy piece of hardware is one of my new best friends.

I divided my pages up into sections and fed them through the Bind-It All. I used a single sheet, folded in half as my initial centering point and set the guide on the side so that all my holes would line up. After I did the pages, I did the back cover. I used the thick chipboard back off the notepad. I figured it would hold up well to the wear and tear the notepad was going to get from being chunked into my purse. After the base and the pages were punched, I decided the bottom corners needed to be rounded for a more finished look. I pulled out my other new very best friend, the Crop-A-Dile Corner Chomper. This little beauty rounded the corners of the super thick base chipboard without even flinching.

Because I wanted durability for the cover as well as the base, I knew just covering chipboard would not give me the results I wanted. After some thought, I pulled out a sheet of grungeboard. Now there are lots of wonderful things you can do with Grungeboard, but I didn't do any of them. Instead, I used it as a base for my cover. I wallpapered over it with Cosmo Cricket's Girl Friday papers. I used a dry glue to preserve the flexibility the grungeboard was bringing to the cover. I like Kokuyo Dot'n'Roller permanent. It stands up to all sorts of abuse. I regularly use it on altered projects and have never had anything glued together with it, come apart. Just make sure you get adhesive out on the very edge of your paper.

While I liked the look of just the Cosmo Cricket papers on the front, I wanted it to be a bit more...girly. I added one of my favorite stamp images from Sugar Nellie, Windswept by Elisabeth Bell. She's done on PTI Rustic Vanilla. I love how vibrant she came out. She was sitting in a pile of images I had colored a couple of weeks ago and just happened to match the colors in Girl Friday. I trimmed her out with Labels 3 Nestie and mounted her on a black tag I had in my stash.

It still wasn't quite girly enough for me. I dug out my stash of Prima Say it with Crystals (and pearls!) swirls. They didn't fit like I wanted, so I took a pair of scissors to the pearls. I trimmed off the bottom of the swirl and relocated some of the strings of small pearls until everything fit like I wanted. I finished off the front with a new Creative Cafe felt butterfly and a bow I found when I was digging for the pearls. I love unexpected finds and my craft area is loaded with them!

I punched the cover and after some muttering at the micro size of the photos in my Bind-it All instruction manual, managed to get it all bound. The rings are "quite" round, but round enough that the cover moves freely. A bit of ribbon tied along the top adds a bit more girly fluff and pulls it all together.

I've pretty much covered the supplies list through the post, but here's a quick recap. The paper is Girl Friday from Cosmo Cricket, the stamp is from Sugar Nellie, the cover is Tim Holtz Grungeboard. Tools used are the Bind-it All, We R Memory Keepers Corner Chomper, Spellbinders Nestibilities and Tonic Studios craft knife. Ribbon and tag are from my stash, while the pearl swirl is Prima. No buttons this time, but the butterfly is Creative Cafe.

Smile Mr. Campy

2009-06-30T16:37:00.001-05:00

You didn't think I'd given up scrapbooking for card making did you? I may have been a stamper and card maker before I ever found my way to scrapbooking and altered projects, but I love all three paper crafts equally. So for a change of pace and to get back into a more versatile blogging format, I give you a scrap page.

With all the amazing paper companies out there, I have a couple tried and trues that no matter what they release, I seem to just love. I may not have a clue what I'm going to do with a particular line when they release it, but eventually I'll figure it out. Cosmo Cricket is one of those paper companies. I've loved them since their early releases, but it was Souvenir and then Wanted that really pulled me in. I never was able to find either in a store where I could stock up on it. I noticed they had Wanted in stock in the new online store setup, so I may have to get a few pieces soon.

These days as soon as my LSS gets the latest release, I do my best to stop in and snag my favorite pieces. I still miss things. I got Girl Friday, but missed Snorkel entirely through 3 restocks. They had not ordered in Early Bird when I stopped in today, but the owner was planning on ordering it this afternoon, so I still have a chance at it. I tend to OD a couple of times a year on Cosmo Cricket layouts and projects. Last year, I got lucky with my LSS kit club and I went nuts with Hello Sunshine. I ended up with two of my all time favorite projects out of it. The clear acrylic tag book and the This Man layout. My mom still carries the tag book everywhere with her, even though the pictures are well over a year old now.

Still, occasionally, I fall in love with paper and then spend forever deciding what I want to do with it. This was the case with Mr. Campy. I loved the colors and the awesome plaids and while I'm an in doors, what do you mean you left the microwave at home sort of camper, I figured, "heck, I've got a boy, I'll use this in no time." So it's been happily sitting in my stash gathering dust. Thankfully, I couldn't see the dust through the haze of my F5 Tornado-Ridden-Certified-Emergency-Disaster-Area of an office.

If you've stuck with me this long, you're probably wondering what the point of all this is. Well, it's it never judge a paper when you buy it. I was determined to put the paper to good use and the perfect pictures for the paper turned out to not be of my boy-o. A paper like Mr. Campy may be fantastic for outdoorsy, camping, boy pages, but that doesn't mean It can't be flat out great for little girl pages. Like this one -

Pretty cute, isn't she? She loves cameras, so she was over the moon I gave her my old junk Avantex one. The journaling reads "An old junk camera and a two year old makes for smiles on both sides of the lens."

I've noticed a trend in my scrapbooking lately. While the majority of my layouts are unified two page layouts, I have one page of the pair that can comfortably stand alone. Check out the right side page by itself (prior to me adding the date!). There is even room to tuck in a bit of journaling. The page could also have easily gone masculine, just swap out the flowers for buttons. In this case, I probably would do trios of buttons in the same locations and changed the velvet scalloped ribbon to a twill in the same color tone.

Want to add some stamping? There's even areas that would work perfectly if you have the right image. I have a cute Penny Black image of some mice playing with a camera. That could be the perfect accent to the SMILE! title.

The supplies are pretty simple for this one. Mr. Campy papers from Cosmo Cricket, flowers from Prima and the buttons, of course, are Creative Cafe as is the velvet scalloped ribbon. The title and tag were done on the Cricut using the Design Studio software with the Alphalicious font and Tags, Bags & Boxes cartridges. Solid color cardstock is Prism and the twine is Rustic White from PTI.

Family Ties - Laced in Cosmo Cricket

2009-06-29T09:33:00.001-05:00

Have you ever done a project and fallen in love with it, even though you knew you were going to give it away? Then, just past the half way point of being home after hand delivering said project, realized you forgot to take a single picture of it? So you figure, once you get home, you'll just call and have them snap some photos and email them to you? There in lies my lesson to you. Always, ALWAYS take your own photos. Seriously.

I am truely blessed to come from a family that loves hand made gifts. At least, they love mine. They rave about them, display them in prominent places in their home or at work and really suck at taking good photos of these projects. I adore my family, really I do, but I seriously need to work on their photography skills. That being said, between my mom and my sister, I have a fairly decent collection of photos of my project.

One of my very favorite alterables is Cosmo Cricket's Lacing Cards. I believe these are still readily available from a bunch of places. If not, you should go and hound them mercilessly until they release them again. They are the best thing since possibly sliced bread. Unless you're hungry, as I don't recommend eating them. They come four to a package. For my projects, I used three packages. I needed 6 cards per recipient to spell out the word FAMILY. So first, a view of the finished project. This one belongs to my mom.

Not a bad photo overall (thanks Photoshop!). So let's talk details. The letters gracing the front of each card are not at all what they appear to be. In person they have the look of tooled leather. They are something rather less than that, however. The letters started life as Crayola Model Magic. This is a very light weight modeling compound that dries to the consistence of fun foam. I rolled it out to around 1/8" thick and then stamped it, covering the surface. This can be done with would mounted stamps, but I've found the best and easiest way to do it is using acrylics. Don't worry about a block, just press the stamp into the foam, pushing firmly across the surface. The variety of pressures you apply using your fingers helps give the finished piece just that much more texture.

Let the Model Magic dry for a good 24 hours. Flipping occasionally to help it dry. It may crack, that's okay. Again, more texture for your finished piece. I roll it out on tinfoil using a brayer with an acrylic insert. After stamping, I transfer the piece to a double layer of paper towels. One large package of Model Magic is generally enough to do all six letters. I ended up using three small packages and had enough for both sets of cards.

While the compound is drying, alter the cards. I used Cosmo Cricket Gretel papers. The tones worked perfectly with the sepia tint I used when ordering my prints. Plus, I knew it would match the decors in my sister & mom's house. I use Aleene's Tacky glue in the gold bottle. After drying, I used my crop a dile and repunched the holes down the sides of the cards. the outer two cards just get holes done on one side. I used the large side and followed up with We R Memory Keepers big eyelets in their antique gold finish. I edged the cards and all the photos in gold paint.

Back to the compound. I wanted a good chunky letter, so I pulled out my cricut and cut 5" letters using the Alphalicious cartridge set to chunky shadow. All the letters save the F are lowercase and cut from scrap cardstock. Here's a good use for that paper you can't remember what the heck you were thinking when you bought. I lay out the letters on the compound until I have them so that I can get all of them cut out of the piece. I use a craft knife with a fresh blade on a glass mat and cut around each letter. This stuff cuts like slightly soft butter.

Time to paint. The tooled leather look is achieved by layers of paint. I base coat in a nice cream, then apply a dark antiquing medium. I use Folk Art's antiquing medium in the darkest I can find. I want a rich look. While the antiquing medium is still wet, I use a paper towel and start wiping and dabbing it off. Once I get a nice look on all the letters, I immediately follow with the same gold metallic paint I used on the edges of the cards & photos. I use one a chunk of kitchen sponge. The ones with the big open pores that come like 6 to a package for little of nothing. I cut them into quarters and use them for all my painting on this project. I do a lot dry-ish sponging (dabbing mostly) with the gold onto the letters, then follow along behind dabbing with a paper towel. Just keep at it until you're happy. You might want to try on a scrap piece of the dry Model Magic first if just winging it is intimidating.

At this point, it's all assembly. I layer, move, tweak, move some more until I have my photos and letters where I think they look best, then I glue it all down. From there I go back with embellishments. Flowers, rubons, buttons. After everything is embellish, THEN I go about lacing everything up. I just tie my way up the cards with a basic knot and then do up a bow in the top hole. A bit of tweaking to get it all standing just so and you're done. Most of the close ups I've shown are courtesy of my sister, who does better close work, but forgot to take a picture of the Y card at the end.

The stamp I used for my letters is the two giant swirls from the Fancy Pants Designs Pollen Dust set. The flowers are from Prima. The buttons are from Basic Grey, I think. One of their first button releases. The ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby. The lacing cards and Gretel paper are from Cosmo Cricket. Crayola Model Magic can be found at Wal-Mart and Target as well as Hobby Lobby and Michael's. It comes in a variety of colors, but I tend to stick with white as I'm going to paint it anyway.

As a side note, the trick to doing great photo gifts for your family and surprising them is to tell your sister that you're doing something awesome for your mom and can she send over her favorite photos of her family and then tell your mom that you're doing a great project for your sis and can she send some photos. Works like a charm!

A little challenging

2009-06-26T16:10:00.002-05:00

Lately, all I seem to be coloring up is Dustin images, so when The Greeting Farm started up their Farm Fresh Fridays a couple of weeks ago, I snagged my Greeting Farm images out of my image box and took a break from dragons and monkeys. The first is one of the few digital images available from The Greeting Farm. The 50's couple. The challenge was to use only black, white and grey. I wanted to create an old 50's photograph and felt they'd be perfect. I used a whopping 4 pencils for this image. It was definitely a change of pace! I blinged it up a Prima Say it with Crystals swirl and a bit of American Crafts ribbon. I think it will make an excellent anniversary card!

With two littles running loose in the house, I don't always have time to stamp. In fact, I rarely ever sit down and make a card from ink to embellishment. I just don't have that sort of solid block of time at my disposal. I frequently just color in between work, diaper changes, dishes, sippy cup refills, laundry, tuning the DVR to Space Chimps, cooking, more diaper changes, cleaning, and any of the myriad other chores that come from being a full time working mom. I craft and create in snippets. One day I may stamp out a couple of sheets of images, another time it's printing some digital images, maybe the next time I'll have a few minutes to make up a card. In between all of this, however, I always have a spare few moments to color or play with my Cricut software making scrappy page titles. Those two activities relax me.

That being said, I keep a small box in my "crafty bin" of supplies that sits tucked safely in the No Kid Zone in our living room. It's not for their safety, it's for my sanity. :) I can happily curl up on a corner of the sofa and color out an image while keeping an eye on the kidlets. In return, they can run up to the fence line and tell me of their latest adventure with our imaginary puppy or ask for a new show or a snack. It keeps all of us happy.

My daughter is a huge fan of dragons and fairies. So she frequently hangs over the fence when I'm coloring one or the other. Fairy Chloe from The Greeting Farm is one of her favorite images. I get regular requests from her to stamp a few out so she can color too. Hers tend to end up as rainbow blobs that serve to decorate my refrigerator. Mine end up like Miss Chloe here, on a card. This was for the recent Three Images on a Card challenge. Tiny Tink and Chloe have shimmery wings, although you can't tell from the picture. I used water color glitter from Stamping Bella on their wings and my daughter's nose. She approved.

Roses on Paper is getting ready to release some Elisabeth Bell stamps. E. Bell is one of my favorite artists. Her little girls have such a wonderful charm to them, so when I saw they were doing a call for a few guest designers to work with Ms. Bells images, well I just couldn't pass up the opportunity! Check out their Guest DT call on their very own challenge blog. There's still a few days left to enter!

The images are all from The Greeting Farm. Paper is a variety here. The black and white is Teresa Collins, while the pinks and yellows are BasicGrey Urban Prairie. Nesties are Labels 1 and Scalloped Rectangle. Flowers and bling are from Prima, Grey/White ribbon is from American Crafts, Aqua ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby and as always, buttons are Creative Cafe.

You're old

2009-06-25T11:59:00.002-05:00

My mom had a birthday yesterday and one of my best gal pals has a birthday today. Happy Birthday, Mom & Jenn! I made totally rocking cards for both of them, that are still sitting on my table. Even though they didn't get cards, they did get quick personal messages from me. I'm not totally lame! In honor of them aging, I have two cute cards to show you today. While I can't actually confirm that my mom wasn't around when dinosaurs roamed the earth (Love you, mom!), I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt. Still, I find that dinosaur cards, particularly Dustin's Dinos, are excellent for birthdays. I believe I have pointed out that I have a twisted sense of humor already. :)

Right off I'm going to say that this isn't the best picture of the Bronto. The image is totally cute and goes well for boy or girl. I was trying some new cardstock, which has more "tooth" or texture than my beloved Pure Lux. This means when I color it puts more pigment down and sucks up more Zest it. Since the Zest-it is a solvent, it wants to eat into the laser toner I use to print my images when I get too much on there. I had to stop and set the image aside a couple of times to let it dry when I noticed some smudging on my lines. You can't tell on the final piece, even if the photo had been better. It's just something you have to be aware of when you're working.

I do find, as on Miss Steggo here, that the rougher stock makes the final piece a bit more vibrant. This is because there is more pigment on it, but I do like the effect. She's a scrapper, as is the card. She's one of the last cards I put together this week, so she ended up with the scraps from the rest. I used them in a window pane effect behind her and the pink circle was a left over bit from the sheet I used on Miss Bronto.

So what paper did I use for my coloring? This is the new Rustic Vanilla from PaperTrey Ink. Do I like it? Overall, yes. Will it be my regular go to paper? No. I enjoy using it and will do so frequently, but I prefer the smoother surface of the Pure Luxury cardstock. So how does it rate overall in my paper sampling? I'd give it a definite 8. This is in comparison to a 9.5 for the Pure Luxury base weight cardstock. I got both the Rustic Vanilla I used here and the Rustic White, which I'll show more in another post. The vanilla is a very light cream tone and the two look near identical in the package. I actually thought I'd gotten two of the same thing when I pulled them out of the box. Out of their wrapper, however, there is a discernible difference.

While it does have more tooth than the Gina K Pure Luxury cardstock, it is still a nice smooth stock. If you haven't read about it on Nichole's blog, the "rustic" aspect of the cardstock is that it has flecks and bits that make it look more handmade than standard pure cardstock. My printer took to it well and the toner fused to the surface. I mention this because I have had problems with Bazzill cardstock where the toner did not fuse because there was just too much texture. I can't tell you how it rates against the regular PaperTrey cardstock as I haven't tried that. I feel a bit silly ordering up plain white & vanilla cardstock when I have a good selection of Pure Lux ready to use.

I mentioned earlier that I have to use more Zest-it when I'm using the rougher cardstock. The cardstock is more porous and absorbs it quickly while I'm working. It does fine if I'm working in small spaces, but large spaces like my dinos here, were challenging. I used probably twice to three times as much on these images as I would have on the smoother Pure Luxury cardstock.

Okay, I know some of you use the Georgia Pacific cardstock. I do have a supply of this that I normally use for card bases, but I have used it for coloring. In comparison, I rate it at a 7 to 7.5. The PTI Rustic cardstock has slightly more tooth than the GP, but makes up for that in thickness and visual appeal. I found the PTI stock to be thicker and more resiliant to my pencil work. The Georgia Pacific worked, but I tend to have more issues with image smear. The combination of solvent, GP and toner just doesn't "stick" as well as on the other papers. Additionally, the other issue I have with GP is exclusively with my digital images. I do not get a true black when I print on Georgia Pacific cardstock. It prints a very dark grey. This should not be an issue if you're using an inkjet, but it's something to be aware of if you're using a Laser Printer or copier for your digital images.

I promised in the last post that I was going to set the DCWV papers a side for a while and I have held to my promise here. I broke out my new Basic Grey Urban Prairie pad and used a good 75% of the pad across a stack of cards. You'll see more of it in upcoming posts. I used circle, rectangle and rectangle scallop nesties. Flowers are Prima, colored cardstock is American Crafts, ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby and buttons are once again Creative Cafe. The Rustic Vanilla cardstock and twine in the buttons are from PaperTrey Ink.

Get your dinos at Dustin's Place and don't forget to snag yesterday's freebie! It's a great background for the dinosaurs.

Are we there yet?

2009-06-18T12:07:00.000-05:00

Sunday is Father's Day and in honor of that great day, I have two cards. One of these is going to my dad, the other to my husband. To all dads out there, Happy Day!

Growing up, I got to travel quite a bit courtesy of the US Army. I have lots of great memories from the various places we lived. In between the big trips that often crossed oceans, my Dad made sure that we got to see as much of each place we lived as was possible during his tour of duty. My Dad is a big fan of road trips. We would load up into our car and off we'd go. Sometimes it was just day trips to local sites, other times it was grand adventures that cross state and country borders. In all my memories, I never remember saying "Are we there yet?", although I'm sure at least one of us kids uttered it. I do, however, remember "I gotta pee!" and "I'm going to be sick!". As the shortest child of three, I inevitably got to sit in the center of the back seat. My siblings learned to dread the second phrase.

So, for my father, and the wonderful memories I have of a small cream colored station wagon, cruising across Europe, Happy Father's Day! Thanks for the amazing memories.

For my husband, I have a different card entirely. I have been with this great guy for nearly 23 years and in that time I have bought exactly ONE curling iron and TWO hair dryers. Do the math. The second hair dryer was only a couple of months ago. I swear my husband can fix darned near anything. Before he was a fire fighter, he was a mechanic, so my vehicle runs in tip top shape. The great man even makes sure it is full of fuel each week before I head off to work on Monday morning. In addition to cars and small appliances, he remodeled our house. He even cooks, although the guys at the fire station eat his cooking far more often than I do.

For our cute children, he fixes run down batteries, kisses boo-boos, discretely disposes of shredded books or broken toy boxes, changes diapers and is a particularly awesome Mr. Mom on his days off. I love this man! Yes, they do still exist! For those of you wanting to know, I didn't find him. He found me...but that's another story. Happy Dad's Day to the very best dad my kids could ever have!

While I'm not going to make any promises, this should be the last of the Citrus pad for a while. I used the circle nesties for the turtle and a Provo Craft Embossing Folder on the dragon.. Flowers are Prima, Cardstock is a mix of American Crafts and Prism. The ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby, eyelets from Making Memories and the buttons are once again Creative Cafe. The images are from Dustin's Place. Grab them while they're hot and check out today's new release while you're at it!

Twisted Humor

2009-06-15T13:26:00.002-05:00

I have a rather twisted sense of humor. Some of it comes from working with geeks and some of it from being married to a fire fighter. Most of it, however, I attribute to genetics. My entire family is "blessed" with a similar mind set. For example, my parents once picked up my Aunt & Uncle at the airport dressed as a hooker and her pimp. My Aunt & Uncle in return picked them up a few months later at a different airport dressed essentially as the Clampets, complete with pick up truck equipped with a rocking chair in the back. This is my family and I love them dearly. I know them well enough that we drive when we visit. It's just safer.

Any one of my friends or my family would love today's cards. They have just that sort of sense of humor to them. The first is from a recent freebie over at Dustin's Place. I started giggling as soon as I saw it. It made me think of the saying "Friends help friends move. Really good friends help friends move bodies". Currently, the card doesn't have a sentiment with it, although I've debated adding "Need a hand?" to the front and following it up with "I remember where we buried some".

Another favorite saying of mine is not "The Early Bird Gets the Worm". Most of my family is extremely punctual. Growing up in my house, if you weren't on time, you were left behind. I tend to be almost psychotically early to this day. My sister, on the other hand, is generally late to everything. Between us, if you base things on averages, we're on time. So while I'm habitually early, I've often thought the early bird saying was annoying until I heard a much better version of it. A version far better suited to my sense of humor - "The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese". Personally, I think the second mouse made out better, but then, I'm not a big fan of worms. :)

I know, I know! You're thinking, what? More Citrus Pad? :) You can definitely get one heck of a lot of cards out of a small 8x8 pad! I used the circle nesties for the bird card. Flowers are Prima, Cardstock is a mix of American Crafts and Prism. The ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby and buttons are once again Creative Cafe.

Beware of flying poo

2009-06-10T12:30:00.002-05:00

Shortly after getting on Dustin's design team, the man himself asked us for image ideas. What would we like to see? I asked for two images in particular and was rewarded, nearly immediately, with one of those images. The Code Monkey. He's a rockin' little critter. Happily hacking away at his laptop (banana inside). I fell in love with him as soon as I saw him, but I wasn't sure just how I was going to use him.

In real life, outside the blogging word, I work as a project coordinator for a team of internet people. It's like herding cats...or in this case, code monkeys. I have met and worked with some really great people. Many of those have since moved on to other things, in other towns far and wide. A few of those I have managed to keep in touch with. We talk regularly through instant messaging and internet chat rooms. We make an effort to stay in touch. Recent events at one of their work places meant that his office was going green. Going green apparently meant doing away with their hot chocolate.

Over the years of working intimately with Code Monkeys, I have learned that there are certain basic essentials to keeping them going. Those being coffee, sodas with excessive caffination and hot chocolate. You should never take hot cocoa away from an internet programmer. It just isn't safe. All of these events came together just a couple of weeks shy of his birthday. A plan was hatched and grew into, well, this:

I printed off five monkeys, four in the standard size and one I scaled up to created a larger version. I had the lunch tin tucked away in my stash, gathering dust. It had been on sale at the time that I needed one, so I bought two. This was my spare. Using a templates I found on one of my blog hops, I adjusted the measurements to make it deeper and embellished it with a monkey, creating a holder for hot chocolate. It neatly held 6 packages of Swiss Miss cocoa with marshmallows. I made simple sleeves for the remaining 4 packages of cocoa.

Using an empty Stash Tea box as my guide, I created a second box and filled it full of a variety of tea. The Code Monkey in question quite likes tea, and has to make due with Lipton (shudder) at his office. I finished the box off by boxing off a package of Wrigley's Extra gum in Strawberry Banana. The card was a collaboration with another programmer. I requested poorly written code that if it had been used would return one of two things. The first was a Happy Birthday sentiment, the second was "Banana, banana, banana. Reboot Universe". The inside of the card reads -

if (!world.EOF && jeff.Sane)
{
Console.WriteLine("Happy Birthday!");
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("Banana, banana, banana. Reboot Universe");
world.Break();
}

The card is quite large, at 5 1/2 x 7. I figured the monkey might need a warning sign for his office cube and the card front will double as that nicely. All of this was packaged in a suspicious pink bag and delivered via two different couriers. The first, I paid in large quantities of coffee. The second got paid by getting to watch the recipient open the bag. I had arranged for a photographer to capture the moment, but sadly the events transpired without a camera. All in all, it was good. The recipient responded -

This will prolly break your heart a little.
LadyPatsFan wasn't available to take 'pics.
The pink sack was a nice touch.
I'm currently taking many pics for the blog.
This is awesome stuff.
And the monkey is PERFECT.

Simple rewards is what it's all about. Happy Birthday Code Monkey!

A change of pace here. The papers are all from Imaginisce, in their Wild Things line. The bamboo and tropical leaves are the perfect accompaniment to the little monkey image, or any of Dustin's other monkeys. The cardstock is a mix of American Crafts and Bazzill. The monkey images were cut with Nesties Labels 2 & 3 and the Circles. The images were colored out with Primascolor pencils and blended with Zest-It. The monkeys in the photo background are part of one of my son's blankets. :) Get the code monkey for FREE from Dustin's Blog.

The Lazy Days of Late Spring

2009-06-08T11:19:00.002-05:00

In the last few weeks of Spring, before Summer rears it's oven baked head, Oklahoma settles into a pattern of "quite pretty, and wind" and "Cut the humidity with a knife, and wind". The trees, even the stoic pecans have finally leafed out. It's been a quiet year for us for Tornadoes, for which I am very grateful. I have this thing with small dark places and a tornado shelter is pretty much a small, dark place stuck in the ground. My husband has done what he can to make it "livable" for me, but prefer not to go down there if I can at all avoid it.

Today is cracking up to be one of those "Cut the humidity with a knife, and a bit of wind" sort of days. It rained last night, so the humidity level sky rocketed. It's one of those sorts of days that you wouldn't be surprised to see the ants bypassing the picnic and going straight for the iced down lemonaide. These ants make me smile. When I look at it, I have to wonder if the poor ant on the bottom isn't going to get a lemonaide shower when the first ant gets the suction going on the straw. :)

Yesterday, my husband had two tasks he wanted to get done. He wanted to mow the lawn and he wanted to wash out the central AC unit that sits to the East side of our house. He managed the mowing hands down, with my son and daughter watching and waving from the storm door when he did the front yard. During the accompanying weed eating, our not so great neighbor decided he should water the three that sits just a few feet inside his property line. This was about 10:30 am. By 3:30 pm, after a visit from my best friend, his wife and their foster daughters, he discovered a fine lake surrounding our AC unit. By 7 pm, the lake was encroaching on the back patio. The sprinkler was still running at 8pm when we moved inside to give the kids a bath. Needless to say, the AC unit still hasn't gotten cleaned out. On the other hand, we've got a nice spot to launch that Ark we considered building a few weeks ago!

This fine little bear would have had a grand time on the East side of our house yesterday. He would have been up to his ankles in water and mud, but the boat would have gotten a good sailing. Sadly, I doubt the tree got any of the water. So the end result is our neighbors get an outrageous water bill, we get a lake and I get a story to go with a card I made. Both images are available over at Dustin's Place individually and as a set with other great summer images.

Yep, I'm still working my way through the Die Cuts with a View Citrus Pad. I love that their stacks have such a great variety of patterns and papers. I used the Rectangle and deckle rectangle nesties for these cards, more of that hemp twine and a flower dot Cuttlebug embossing folder from Provo Craft. Flowers are Prima, Cardstock is Real Red from Stampin' Up and buttons are once again Creative Cafe.

It's complicated

2009-06-01T14:55:00.003-05:00

Three weeks ago, Dustin gave us a sneak peek of some very cute party animals. I fell in love with the rough sketch of one of the animals in particular. I checked our files several times a day waiting for Dustin to send the finals along. I wanted to color these festive critters! Once I saw the final images, I knew just one critter was not going to do. I needed a card full of them. One of the fun things about digital images is the ability to group two or more images without the use of eclipse tape, post it notes or any sort of masking. I don't need a stamping aligner or anything more complicated than Photoshop Elements. To be honest, I really don't even need that as Picasa and other free software would do the trick. I happen to own PSE for my photo editing and scrapbooking, so it's a nice multifunction tool.

I started by taking the standard .jpg image, duplicated the layer, trashed the original layer and using the magic wand, highlighted and deleted the background. I converted the image by saving them over to .png format. This allowed me to do a transparent background for each of the animals. After I had them converted, I started combining. Why would the party turtle be content to hold a simple balloon when he could have a fish balloon instead? And what respectable fish goes to a party by himself? Once combined, it made for a great card.

But if two's company, then five is an all out party. I picked my tallest animal and resized the canvas to 6" wide. I saved this to a new name to make sure I didn't muck up my original. I opened all the animals and duplicated them as individual layers into the new wide file. I flipped and layered all of the animals until I liked the grouping. Having them each on their own layer allowed me to be very flexible. Plus, the layers let me turn off an image if it was distracting me from getting the results I wanted with another layer. After I had all the animals just where I wanted them, I resized the entire group to fit the card size I wanted and then printed them out. I made sure to save the final file as I knew this was a grouping I would want to use over and over.

So for about 15 minutes worth of work, I have an image I can print any time I choose without having to mask and ink each time! I realize that I just took fifteen to twenty minutes worth of work (not including the coloring and card making) and condensed it into three short paragraphs. For those of you who aren't gibbering and may be going "how about a tutorial....", I'm going to decline. I spent a couple of years in technical support and I'm very familiar with the nightmare that different programs, heck even different versions of the same program can cause when trying to create a decent software tutorial. I can tell you step by graphic step how to do this process in Photoshop Elements 5 as that's what I use. I can't, however, tell you how to do it in Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor or even Picasa, because I don't use those programs.

Since I've gone technical and complicated on you with this post, I'll round out with what I use for printing. I have a monster multi-function color laser sitting on a filing cabinet in the death trap that is parading as the office. My husband's 3/4 of the room looks like it's recovering from some gale force straight line winds. My half looks like an F5 tornado hit it. The printer is in one of the few clear spots in the room. Which makes it easy to get to when I need to load it with a sheet of Gina K. Pure Luxury cardstock. Since the laser printer fuses toner to the cardstock at high heat as part of the printing process, I don't have to worry about bleeding. When I first started using Zest-it with my printouts I had some issues where it would try to disolve the toner (it is solvent, after all), but the new solvent pump I got for Mother's day has me using less Zest-it, eliminating that problem.

I have a nice Epson 785EPX that's sorta ancient and has been buried on my desktop for over a year. I really need to put it out on the curb and see if someone will come by and give it a new home. So I don't have any point of reference for inkjet printing in combination with digital images and coloring. I can pass on a few tips from others that I've read. If you're having bleeding problems, try heat setting the image or print your images a day or so in advance giving them time to dry and cure before coloring.

All that being said, if you're still with me, I'm still working my way through the Die Cuts with a View Citrus Pad. The bright, cheerful paper makes me feel like spring even when it's pouring rain outside my window. I used rectangle and scallop rectangle nesties on the party turtle with his fish balloon. Flowers are Prima, Cardstock is Bazill this time and buttons are once again Creative Cafe.

Knot tying for papercrafters

2009-05-29T09:38:00.003-05:00

I'm really trying to stretch myself on the masculine card side. I rarely give cards to men, but many of Dustin's images lend themselves well little boys and perhaps even the little boys that are hidden away in my favorite men. Yesterday's fabulous release was loaded with great boy images, including a Cow Monkey.

Today is my daughter's best buddy and cousin's birthday. She's three and today he is four. They are at that wonderful age that lets them run loose, squeal like little lunatics and generally act like monkeys. On his own, he tends to be a fairly quiet little boy who loves TV, Pixar's Cars and Wall-E in particular, and has an OCD tendency to want things in a very specific order. When my daughter is around, however, the pair turn into raving loons. Cute raving loons, but still, you get the picture. Yes, my daughter is the instigator. One day, in the not to distant future, that little girl is going to lead three little boys (her brother and her cousins) into a great deal of trouble. But for today, well, it's Logan's day. This cute little monkey card is just for him.

Like a good aunt & uncle, we bought him a toy that make an insane amount of noise and has a bazillion little parts and cars. It almost makes up for the Laugh and Learn lawn mower they got our boy-o for his birthday last month. Almost.

It's difficult for me to embellish guy cards. I really want to cover them in flowers, ribbons and cute little bows. So when I sit down to embellish boy cards...I have a hard time resisting the call of the floral bling. About a year ago, I did a mini book on my guys. I bought a big card of various colors of hemp. I use it quite a bit to tie up the buttons I put on my cards and scrapbook projects. I just like the finished look of something through the holes of my buttons. It didn't occur to me until yesterday that it would also serve as a great embellishment for my guy cards.

I was inspired by Paula's pelican card from two weeks ago, adding just a couple of simple knots to my little Monkey. Even then, I couldn't resist adding a button. I think if I'm going to try this again, I'll see if I can dig out my husband's information from his rope tying classes. Part of Fire Rescue is knowing the right knot for the right job. I never knew it also applied to card making!

I'm back to working my way through my Die Cuts with a View Citrus pad with this card. You can't see in the picture, but that red background has gliter in the white areas. Glitter isn't very masculine, but I figured the bold red made up for it at least a little. Cardstock is American Crafts, Gina K. Pure Luxury for the images, Nesties, Hemp and Creative Cafe buttons.

Check out Dustin's design team on the right for other great cards and ideas on this release!

You're just a click away

2009-05-28T13:25:00.007-05:00

On a good day, I can get in a couple of hours of somewhat interrupted coloring. On a good day, I can make and embellish a handful of cards. On a good day, I get to watch Rachel Ray instead of Phineas and Ferb or old war movies. On a good day, I don't run out adhesive.

By mid-morning on Monday, I considered the weekend rousing success. I got in many hours of somewhat interrupted coloring, as there's a 3 year old and a 1 year old doing the interrupting, somethings just can't be helped. I did 'sorta' make a nice collection of cards and that balances out the worst of the war movies. I only watched about 30 minutes of Midway, which I consider a win and I managed to sneak in an hour nap Sunday afternoon. It wasn't until early Monday that things went south. Around 11 am, while the 1 year old was napping and the 3 year old was 'helping' Mama make cards, the worst happened. I ran out of adhesive. Entirely. Which is why I only "sorta" made a nice collection of cards. Worse, the local stores were out of stock of even the worst of the barely acceptable adhesives. There must have been a rush.

After a fair bit of muttering on my part, I did what any resourceful person might do...I made cards without adhesives. Frankly, they're really just stacks of cardstock, patterned paper and images. They're a very neat and tidy stack, with everything trimmed out and layered in place. There is nothing worse to this crafter than being completely out of glue. I managed to get out and snag some adhesive on Tuesday and then spent a rather lovely lunch at a local coffee shop on Wednesday, drinking tea and assembling cards. I'm definitely going to do lunch like that again!

So, while it's release day over at Dustin's Place, my cards haven't been photographed yet. Instead, I'd like to share a card from my My Minds Eye Bloom & Grow Grow phase. One of the wonders of the internet is the blessing of very good friends that I will likely never meet face to face. With two very small kids, my adult conversation can be very limited. Add in Oklahoma's capricious humidity and I tend to prefer to stay close by a good air conditioner, so outings to a park are rare and when they happen, I discover that other mom's have similar outlooks. I know in a few years, when the kids are in school, my circle of face to face friends will expand once again. For now, I depend heavily on my online friends when I can't handle discussing the merits of the various episodes Secret Agent Oso with a 3 year old any longer. Miss Clickabella was one of the first Bella's I put in my cart when I discovered Stamping Bella. Between work, and online friendships, she epitomized my life at this point.

When I bought the My Minds Eye papers, I also bought the elements sheet. I know some people feel the driving need to use all the elements on a sheet, but my tidy gene and lack of storage space keeps me from being that sort of mental. Once I use all the elements I like on the sheet, the remainder goes straight into my recycling bin. I do not make any attempts to salvage the bits. If my daughter is nearby, she will latch onto the sheet and proceed to destroy all physical evidence until I take it away and toss any remaining bits into the recycle bin. Which is the same result in the long run, but at least she gets some enjoyment out of it.

This particular sheet came with a nice collection of flowers, tags and a great bracket looking journaling block. As I had not intention of scrapbooking with this paper or elements, the journaling block made the perfect background for my card. Just because an element is designed for one thing, doesn't mean it can't be used for something else. The printed "dots" on the sheet were also used. They fit perfectly into my Creative Cafe flower buttons as button centers. I really liked the finished look.

For those of you who want to know...I haven't done away with the rest of the sheet just yet. I still have enough patterned paper left for several cards or one layout, and there's still some pretty cute elements on the sheet to round it all out.

As always, the image was stamped with Memento Tuxedo Black on Gina K's Pure Luxury Baseweight in white. The image was colored out with Prismacolor pencils and blended with Zest-It. I used Prism cardstock and My Minds Eye Bloom & Grow Grow papers & Elements. The buttons are Creative Cafe and the ribbon is American Crafts.

Standing out in the crowd

2009-05-18T16:18:00.001-05:00

While I have to say that Dustin's dragons are my favorites of his images, occasionally he does a non-dragon that makes me smile even without color. This little chameleon did just that the first time I saw him. I knew i would have to have him. In my obscure facts reading I discovered that the chameleon's name has nothing to do with his color changing abilities. Wikipedia has the complicated translations, but it all boils down to "ground lion". Not at all what I think of when I hear about chameleons!

You might think my color choices for this little guy are a bit off beat, but according to Wiki their colors can include the orange and blue I used along with pink, red, green, black, brown, yellow and turquoise. Some chameleons use their color changing for camouflage, others use it to communicate. With a card as bright as this, there is no blending in. My little guy is telling the world to Cheer Up!

One of my fellow DT members, Michelle Redman, turned me on to Digital Stamp Tuesdays. It's great challenge blog for using your digital images. Last week's challenge is to use a non-traditional fold for your card. Since my bright little fellow here was standing out, I figured he should go non-traditional as well. He's mounted on a traditional gate fold card that's gotten rebellious and turned on the side. If you look very closely (click for a larger image), you can see the seam running horizontally across the middle of the card.

Non-traditional apparently translates to "difficult to photograph". I tried several angles and different setups, but every time I stepped away from the card to take the picture...it fell over. I finally gave up and stuck it in the scanner. So it's a bright, friendly card that's fun to open and impossible to photograph without at least four hands. Still, I think it's the perfect card to brighten someone's day.

Check out Michelle's blog for a fun non-traditional fold and a sneak peek and new Dustin images!

As for me, I'm still working my way through my Die Cuts with a View Citrus pad. I do love it's bright, fun, glittery patterns! Cardstock is American Crafts, Gina K. Pure Luxury for the images, Nesties, Prima flowers and Creative Cafe buttons.

I do mornings

2009-05-16T22:22:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I'm one of "those" people. Before I had kids, I was always up early, often before 7. It was my quiet time in the house. I would curl up with a book and a cup of tea, watch HGTV, maybe do a bit of time on the computer, or even scrapbook. I loved being up when the house was so silent and slowly filling with dawn light. My husband is a night person, so I often had the house to myself for 3 hours.

Then I had kids. And I still get up at the back side of dawn most days although I count it a good day if the day starts after 7 rather than before. Rather than books or HGTV, my days start with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and baby snuggles. It's still a pretty special time for me. I have the kids entirely to myself and while it isn't quiet, there's something to be said for giggles and squeals.

For my sleepy bear, I went bold and bright. He may not be awake, but it's not for the lack of trying on the rest of the card! Can you paper piece a digital image? Sure, why not? I certainly did! It takes a little more work than paper piecing a stamped image, though. I ran a print off of my image on a standard piece of copy paper. Then I used some repositionable adhesive on the back of my patterned paper and adhered it over my printed image. I ran both sheets together through my printer to print the bear onto the patterned paper. I pulled him off, went over him with pencil to shade and highlight, blended and trimmed him out. I went around the pieces with a black pen as I find it makes the paper piecing "fit" better. Otherwise, it stands out to me. All glued together, his striped night shirt and cap perfectly matches the background paper.

So for the overall details, the card was made up with Die Cuts with a View Citrus Pad, American Crafts cardstock, and Nestabilities. Dustin's oh so fabulous image was paper pieced with more DCWV Citrus papers, colored with Prismacolor pencils and blended out with Zest-It on Gina K's Pure Luxury Baseweight.

Oh Happy Day!

2009-05-14T15:08:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's release day over at Pike's Place...Dustin Pike that is! Seven great images including two bears, a pelican, a pirate, a wizard, a sweet little tea party and that adorable Ark I showed you yesterday! You can buy the whole release here for a mere $7! That's just a dollar an image. A pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.

Now I showed you my favorite image, the cute ark, from the release yesterday. When Dustin gave us the art, I knew that one would be colored up first. I printed off a sheet load of images to color and found myself surprised by my second favorite. It wasn't until halfway through coloring him that I just fell in love with the adorable little pelican. Don't get me wrong, he's pretty cute in black and white, but he really comes to life when you add just a bit of color!

Lelia found this silly limerick that is perfect for this guy -

A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill can hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know I'm a tea lover. Some would say "tea snob" and I'm sure they mean it in the nicest possible way. It's certainly true. I'm worse than a coffee addict suffering from caffeine withdrawal when it comes to my tea. I prefer fresh, loose, from Whittard if I can get it and Republic of Tea if I can't. I have been drinking tea for as long as I can remember indulging in a hot beverage. I can't stand coffee. I don't even like the way it smells. I once found I a brew that I liked the smell of, only to discover that it still tasted of coffee.

All that being said, I was delighted when I saw the tea party image for this release. I love tea in most forms and tea images definitely rate high on my list! Good tea images are hard to find. I loved the little girl all dressed up and the bear in his own finery. I can't wait until my daughter gets old enough for her and I to have a tea party of our own.

The Die Cuts with a View Citrus pad had the perfect paper to go with this image. The tiny flowers and loaded with glitter. The ribbon was a total fluke. I did a ribbon swap about a year ago and that ribbon was in my package. It was a perfect match to my paper selection. There wasn't enough to make a bow, but the knot kept me from ODing on flowers like I did on the pelican card and making the whole thing look fussy and prudish.

Now you've seen all my stuff...skip off and check out Dustin's gallery of design team cards for this release. Or browse through the design team's blog with the links on the left.

Once again the cards were made up with Die Cuts with a View Citrus Pad, American Crafts cardstock, Creative Cafe buttons, Making Memories mini-snaps, pinking scissors and Nestabilities. Dustin's oh so fabulous images were colored with Prismacolor pencils and blended out with Zest-It on Gina K's Pure Luxury Baseweight.

Monster Sneak Peek

2009-05-13T14:32:00.004-05:00

That sounds like a big event, doesn't it? All I can say is we got our hands on Dustin's next release and it's delightfully wonderful...of course! But before I get into that, it's Wednesday! Which means another freebie from Dustin. This week is destined to be a favorite of mine. It's a darling little code monkey. I didn't get a chance to work on him for this release, but I can promise you'll be seeing him here soon! In honor of Wednesday Freebie day, I did manage to color and card up one of the freebies from a couple of weeks ago.

I have the hardest time with masculine cards. I always want to doll them up with flowers and such. Monster trucks, however, do not lend themselves to anything but lots of dirt and dust. I managed to resist loading it up with flowers and such! I stuck with some simple Making Memories mini snaps and was reminded why I never ever use these. They were a right pain, even with the crop-a-dile! I had to keep my unpleasant words down to mutterings as my daughter was fascinated with Mama's tool usage. To her delight, I let her help crank the Deckle Rectangle Nestabilities through the Cuttlebug. Courtesy of my mom, she's got her own Kids Cuttlebug, but at 3, she's still a bit young for it.

I knew from the moment I first saw the Monster Truck that I was going to color it red. I knew there was lots of red in the DCWV Citrus Pad I decided to use for my next collection of cards, so I was set. What I didn't count on was the sheer amount of glitter in the pad! There were a few stressful moments before I managed to find a nice simple glitter free red stripe. Paired with black, the red truck really pops!

For those of you waiting ever so impatiently for the sneak peeks, here's a boat and a bear. Boat first...it's spring in Oklahoma which means it's either 85+ degrees, with extra humidity and lots of wind, or it's 45ish degrees and pouring rain...with lots of wind. Spring in Oklahoma can be defined as "with lots of wind". We get just enough of it to be heartily tired of it by the time it stops blowing in early June. Come late August, when it's hot enough to cook an egg as long as you ignore humidity that wraps you in a sopping wet electric blanket set on high, we're wishing desperately for even a light breeze. As for the rain side of things...there's just enough of it that an Ark starts looking like an excellent weekend project. Fortunately, this ark only took a few minutes and won't kill off the grass in the back yard or make the neighbors suspicious.

Spring also delivers to Oklahoma flowers and bugs. My daughter is quite keen on the first and adamantly opposed to the second. I've given up trying to explain them and have resorted to telling her it's just "Bug Season". I don't have any flowers planted around my house as any plant item that can't thrive on neglect and Oklahoma wind it's worth my time to kill. :) My veggie garden is in and for the first time in many years, everything is still alive...even the cucumber plant the squirrel dug up in search of a pecan. So while I don't have flowers, I also don't have bees.

Ha! You thought I wasn't going to be able to wrap that all into a bee card, didn't you? This bear and his cute little companion are simply the Bees Knees! I will say that when you get the image in Dustin's release, the bee has antenna. Here he's gone for the aerodynamic look due to all that wind and a bit of over enthusiastic scissor work. You can't tell from the picture but the flower cardstock is loaded up with glitter, as are the bee's wings.

So for the overall details, all of the cards were made up with Die Cuts with a View Citrus Pad, American Crafts cardstock, Creative Cafe buttons, Making Memories mini-snaps, pinking scissors and Nestabilities. Dustin's oh so fabulous images were colored with Prismacolor pencils and blended out with Zest-It on Gina K's Pure Luxury Baseweight.

Check out the rest of the design team for other great peeks!

Doodle Dragon Designer!

2009-05-04T16:37:00.003-05:00

I hope you aren't tired of hearing me rave about the art of Dustin Pike, because I've just discovered that I am one of his charter design team members! I have linked in the new design team over on the left, along with a cute Doodle Dragon that personally, is just begging for a bit of color! In honor of this auspicious event, I have decided to show you the finished cards I made up of those first dragons.

This continues my run with the My Minds Eye Bloom & Grow 'Grow' line. I really love the colors in this paper. They have been so much fun to work with. I have nearly used up all my Grow paper, but I've barely touched the Bloom side of things. I still have one card to finish off with this group and then I'll move on to a new set of colors.

Back to the dragons! The first one, my "Go Fly a Kite" guy, needed a bit of a touch up when I went to make him into a card. I felt he was a bit pale, so I perked him up by adding in touches of PC905 Aquamarine. I went layer crazy with this card. I had all these great scraps laying about and just couldn't help myself. To keep it from bulking out, I added just a smidge of American Crafts ribbon.

I know these were released as Easter dragons, but I've always seen them as "just hatched" baby cards, or for someone with an unexpected blessing. I have friends who have been waiting forever for China to give them a call and let them know their baby is waiting. Wouldn't one of these be perfect for them?

I'm a bit grumpy about how the red dragon photographed. He looks so great in person, but I had the hardest time getting this half way decent photo of him. For some reason, I just have the hardest time getting a good shot of anything red. I'm going to have to go muck with my shutter speed and lighting again, I think.

Once again - The colored cardstock is Prism, the ribbon is American craftsand the flower buttons are Creative Cafe. The white cardstock continues to be Gina K. Pure Luxury Base Weight. Seriously, you should try this stuff! For digital image printing, I use a laser printer. A big monster Brother multi-function, whiz-bang setup. It works great with my Prismacolor pencils!

Meet Wendy...in Color

2009-04-29T15:12:00.008-05:00

I believe I have mentioned that I do special requests. Typically, these are only for a certain 3 year old with her father's eyes. Sometimes, they're for her father, but only because he doesn't ask as often. Today, however, this one is for those of you who have asked for before & afters on my coloring. As I have also mentioned, I doubted that simple before and after images were going to satisfy what you're actually looking for when you requested the pictures. If I were to do a simple before and after, I think you'll agree that it's not terribly instructive.

before -

after -

Meet Wendy from The Greeting Farm. She's part of the Never Ever set. I bought the set just for her after a couple of months of patient waiting. I fell in love with her the instant I saw her in a sneak peek on the Greeting Farm blog. There are very few things I love more than paper crafting. Reading is one of those things. I've been an avid book worm since the day that I saw Spot run. Throughout my life, I've read more books than I can possibly count, often three or four at any given time. Lately, I haven't read much beyond Robert Lopshire's "Put Me in the Zoo". That book was a childhood favorite and while I do enjoy reading it to my 3 year old, I do miss books with fewer pictures and more words. I do still carve out time as I can to read, but I don't get to read like I did before she arrived. Still, this image is very evocative of my childhood.

A couple of disclaimers before I dive into the actual tutorial part of the post. First, I work off of an 8x10 piece of gessoed art board I picked up at Hobby Lobby with a binder clip to attach my work to the board. It's small and very portable, but not too small that it makes my hands hurt when I'm trying to work. On the down side, it means that most of the time when I was shooting pictures between steps, it was at an odd angle on my knees. This left the bottom edges of my photos a bit blurry. Not blurry enough to affect the overall image, but blurry all the same. Second, in order to keep this post from stretching all the way to Texas, I've scaled down the images. The images are available at large size (often 750 pixels wide), you just need to click on them for the extreme closeups. And finally, I did get a bit distracted a couple of times, so if I seem to jump ahead without a picture, it's because I forgot to stop and take one.

Getting started...I use Gina K's Pure Luxury Baseweight for pretty much everything I color. I've done a little experimenting with craft, but I'm not pleased with the results at this point. That's another post. I used white for this project. In general, when I get new images, or run low on things I want to work on, I take a morning and stamp a couple of sheets with images. I trim them down, leaving enough room for nesties work at a later date. These all go into a pile, so I can snag one and color without having to stop between images. I use Memento ink for anything that I'm going to color. In this case, Tuxedo Black.

While I generally do all my base colors at one time, I do make an exception for skin. I have a bad habit of pulling in outside colors when I go to blend my skin areas, so now I make a point to do those first. I'm still experimenting with color tones for faces. Up to this point, I've been pretty much specializing in pasty white girls. As part of my birthday present, my DH got me the 12 new primsacolors, bringing my set to the full 132 available. In those colors were two that I'm already loving for faces. Here I've started by coloring out all the skin areas in 1093 Seashell Pink.

Once that's blended smooth, I sketch in my shading color. Here I'm using PC1092 - Nectar. Notice I'm not making any effort to be exact about where I put the color. It's in the general area I expect to see shadows on a face. As she's reading, most of the light would be on the pages of the book, so I decided that the light was over her left shoulder. I put my shadows along where her hair is overlapping her face and off to her right. I did not shade along the top of the book, as the light would be bouncing off the pages of her book onto her face.

For the most part, I don't use tortillions. They're small and not very comfortable to use. I do make an exception for skin. Most of my "skin" areas tend to be quite small and I've found that the extreme tip on the tortillion is excellent for blending in my shading in those areas. I rarely clean/sand these as that's pretty much all I use them for.

With her face done, I go back and add in all my base color. I really don't have a specific direction from here. On this image, I chose to work on her dress before her hair. I started with PC929 Pink as my base color. That is blended smooth and then I added PC930 Magenta for my shading. Again, I kept my light over on Wendy's left, so I didn't shade along that side of the dress. Once that was blended in, I found the dress to be a bit too pink for my taste and some of the shading wasn't quite as intense as I liked. I don't have a picture here as I was trying to decide if I wanted to pull in more of the magenta or not. I opted to add in PC923 Scarlet Lake to tone down the pink. Notice that I didn't put it everwhere. The red is a pretty intense color and I just wanted to tone down the color and darken some of the shadow areas.

Next up is hair. One thing I really love about The Greeting Farm images is how the hair is drawn. I can easily see where I want highlights and low lights. When I do my base coloring on hair, I don't try to get my color even. I intentionally end up with areas that are lighter and others that are darker. What's more, I don't try to even out the color when I blend. I just smooth out the lines some. I don't blend hair to completely smooth. I like the textural appearance that leaves in the long run. My base coat here is PC1082 Chocolate.

After blending the base color, I go back and add in mid tones. I pretty much followed the stamp lines on this image, adding color along those lines or into areas between the lines that I felt would give her the most natural looking hair. Now here's the most important part...do not blend this into the whole head. Just blend very lightly so that the harsh lines of color smooth out. If I had blended the color completely, I would just end up with a darker head of hair all over. You'll have some lighter areas, but they would be fairly small. Her hair looks pretty good here and I could easily have stopped, but I felt it was missing some shading.

I went in with PC947 Dark Umber in just the areas where I wanted shading. Where hair overlaps hair and where book overlaps hair, once again blending very judiciously. I don't want the shading to be obvious, I just want it to give the hair added depth. In the end, I'm pretty happy with a rich brown tone. I find doing this tone is the easiest for me, so you'll see it a bunch in my images.

I decided before I ever started coloring that I really wanted to paper piece the book jacket. I could have colored it and been happy with it, but I had some great patterns in the My Mind's Eye Bloom & Grow Grow papers. The back side of one of the more vibrant prints was a very nice tone on tone paisley that I knew would work great. Just because you paper piece instead of plain coloring doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) add some shading to the paper piecing. I added shading along the spine, around her fingers and on the edges of the shadow side of her book in PC905 Aquamarine. I blended with a very light hand as the paper wanted to suck the Zest-It right out of my stump. If you're going to color/blend on a paper piece, test a small area that you're not going to use to see how your blending fluid of choice reacts. I sampled both baby oil and Zest-it. The baby oil wanted to stain if I wasn't very careful.

I trimmed out the paper piecing, ran a black pen around the edges to keep them from showing and then glued it in place. I made sure to just trim the book cover so that my pages would stay white. I'm pretty happy overall with how she turned out. I would have been happier if I had been able to find my Diamond Glaze so I could have added a bit for lenses on her glasses. I used some of my new nestabilities to make up the card. The paper is from the Bloom side of the My Mind's Eye Bloom & Grow line, which coordinates perfectly with the paper piecing even though I used the other half of the line for that. I do love My Mind's Eye! The cardstock is Prism, the ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby and the flower buttons are Creative Cafe.

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

Dustin Rides Again

2009-04-24T11:43:00.009-05:00

Last month I devoted an entire post to raving about Dustin Pike and his awesome graphics. In the time that has passed since that post, he has continued to offer up great freebies (check his blog on Wednesdays!) and has created an Etsy store stocked full of great images. He's even put out a call for a design team (yeah, I'm totally applying!). He continues to provide great dragons on a regular basis along with other wonderful characters. I had a group of them printed off and tucked into my stash of images to color and the MME Grow colors just seemed to suit them perfectly! Once again, Dustin just rocks.

Of all the cards I made up, this one is my favorite. This little bee is just waiting for the April Showers to abate so the May flowers will bloom. I pulled out my new classic rectangles nesties for this one. I love how the scallops perfectly frame out the image. You can't see it so much on the picture, but the white rectangle is also embossed. It looks great in person though. I have a stash of flower shaped buttons from a recent raid on the Creative Cafe at my local scrap store. The white one just fit so perfectly for this card. I waffled on the umbrella color and after I had the card made up, I wished I'd gone back in and done the canopy in orange instead of blue. Still, I love how it all turned out.

On this card, I wasn't sold on this dragon at first. As much as I love dragons, I just couldn't place what was off for me. I went ahead and printed him out, though. In a conversation with my buddy Becks, she pointed it out to me. His basket it empty! Once the problem was pinpointed, he took on a whole new personality to me. He's a very sweet little guy. He now adorns the front of a great little "Miss You!" card. In his next appearance, he'll be pointed the other direction and featured with the dragon holding a hatched egg from my last Dustin post. I think together, they'll make an excellent long card...perhaps for a baby shower.

I'm short guy cards at the moment, so when Dustin posted his little knight, I knew I needed him. Here's another that I could have tweaked up my colors a bit and added in some of the orange, but I really like how he's all done out in blue. Looking at it when I was writing up this post, I realized that he probably would have popped a bit more if I'd done a dark card base rather than the white. He looks pretty good on the white, but next time I'll probably try him on something else.

I had a lot of fun with shading on the armor. I used the cool greys in my Prismacolor box. I started with 20% and worked that with 50% and 70%. The challenge is deciding where all the shading is going to be while trying to keep it from looking like he's wearing dirty armor. I nearly added some metallic silver, but stopped myself at the last minute. I do think he needs a shield design, though. The blank shield bugged me when I was coloring it up. Knights need a good emblem on their shield like a crest or something to make their opponents think twice about smacking it. Dustin's got a couple of great "manly" dragons in his Etsy shop, so I need to figure out which one is going to be best on my knight and snag that with my next order.

A few of you have asked if I would do before and after photos of my coloring/blending. I've done one a few weeks ago when I was starting my experiments with baby oil. It's a bit problematic as when I said in my last post that I'm a lazy artist, it's not entirely true. My style of coloring/blending involves lots of layering of color and blending and shading and a bit more color and perhaps a bit more blending....I can easily do a quick shot of my "before" as I tend to lay down all my base colors before I do any blending. It's the after that I think would probably disappoint. I have a couple of options at this point. I can do a more step-by-step photo shoot. This requires me to remember to stop mid process and take photos. Once I really get going on an image, about the only thing that stops me is a crying boy, demanding food or nap. :) The other is to charge up the Vado HD and do a video tutorial. I need to charge the Vado either way, but I've never done a video tutorial and I'm not sure how it would all work out. As I plan to play more with the Zest-it this weekend, I'll see what I can come up with.

Grow with me & Zest-It

2009-04-23T11:33:00.007-05:00

My parents have gone and my house has returned to it's normal state of slightly cluttered. Slightly cluttered is that zone that involves stepping over a few toys during the day, but not enough has been moved out of place or stacked up to annoy us. We're pretty easily annoyed by clutter, so it's a fine line. We had a good visit with my parents, who managed to sell their house while they were here. They've returned to Alabama, homeless and in search of what they claim will be smaller and low maintenance. Since they've been saying this for the last five house purchases, it remains to be seen.

After their departure, I curled up on the sofa with my scor-pal (with mat installed) a stack of uncolored images and a selection of prismacolor pencils suited to match the My Mind's Eye Grow line. Over the remainder of the weekend, I colored 7 images, touched up another and made them and two of the dragons from a previous post up into 9 cards. I still have one image left to finish off and card up. The color combination of aquamarine and pumpkin orange is so bright and fresh. I really loved the versatility I was able to achieve without having to think about what colors I needed. I was able to color, blend, color, blend and when one image was finished, I snagged another from my pile and started all over again. It was the perfect way to relax! I won't inundate you with all 9 (soon to be 10) in one post. I plan on spreading them out to several posts over the next few days.

One of my favorite images from the group (although, not my favorite card) is an Elisabeth Bell image from Funky Kits called Reflective. She's currently out of stock, so I don't have a link for you. She's one of the first I bought from them. I have a picture of my daughter in just that pose, although, without the basket of apples. It's the main reason I bought that stamp.

In my post "They're Here" I talked about OMS and why I chose Baby Oil as my blender of choice. Towards the bottom, I mentioned reading about Zest-It Pencil & Parchment blend. Out of curiosity and a need to empty some funds from a sale of crafty stuff out of paypal, I ordered a bottle.

I ordered the largest I could afford in hopes of getting good longevity out of my purchase. The shipping sucked. Seriously. It always bugs the heck out of me to pay more in shipping than in actual product. 99.9% of the time, that fact alone will kill an order. This is that 0.1%.

Apparently, the high shipping costs included routing the packet on the slow boat to China and then on to Oklahoma as it took 2 weeks to arrive. As I've been power scrubbing my house, top to bottom, I didn't much notice. When it did arrive, it came signature required on a day no one was home. My husband and I spent a couple of hours studying the pick up tag trying to remember what we ordered that would come registered mail. Our only clue was a small note at the top of the tag that said "Shipper: UK". Since I know that the United Kingdom, as a whole, doesn't ship stuff, it became a process of elimination. I'd gotten all the stamps I ordered from Funky Kits, save the one they were shipping out to replace one shipped in error. I rather doubted that they were suddenly going to make me sign for their stamps, so that ruled them out. It finally dawned on me and I scurried off to the post office the next morning before my parents arrived.

As I'd been invaded, I didn't get to open the packet until MUCH later that day. Even then, the bottle remained closed, although my daughter quite enjoyed the layers of bubble wrap. After my parents departed and I'd curled up with my images, the Zest-It came out. I love it. Seriously. This stuff blends like a dream. It was well worth every penny I paid. Like I've told people over on SCS. I have decided that I am a lazy artists. I can draw, but I chose to stamp my images instead. Likewise, I can layer color on color, tone on tone to get great images, but using a blender like Zest-It means I don't have to. For me, that equals great images without a huge time sink, giving me time to whip them up into cards.

Now, to wrap this post up, I'll finish out with a digital image from The Greeting Farm. I've had this one in my pile for a while. I picked it up as part of my Valentine's spending spree. I don't do blonde hair on my images for a reason. It drives me insane trying to get the right color tone. This image was no different. Her hair is a blend of Ginger Root, Sand and Espresso. It still bugs me, but not enough to keep me from putting it on a card.

Today I Am 40

2009-04-15T14:15:00.007-05:00

I'm not old. At least, I don't feel old. I'm not over any hill. I'm not 39 plus a bit, or having anniversaries of past birthdays. I am simply 40.

I have a lot to show for 40 years of living in this world. I have two beautiful amazing children. I have been with my wonderful husband for more than half my life. I've done things that others dream of, like climbing to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with my dad, counting the steps as we went. I've seen The David, but not the Mona Lisa and have been in more castles than I can remember. I saw New Orleans before Katrina and walked through the Alamo. I've gone swimming in an Olympic pool and walked through a concentration camp in Germany. I've seen the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. I've driven through the Swiss Alps and gone skiing in the Colorado Rockies. And in 40 years, my very favorite place is my very own house in a small town in Oklahoma, where my children run to greet me when I walk in the door from work.

Today I am 40. I am not, nor will I ever be old. I just don't have time for it. I have been many places and seen wonderful things. I still have more to see and do. I probably always will. I'm okay with that.

My husband has seen fit to buy me a frankly obscene amount of Spellbinder's Nestabilities for my birthday. I can't imagine a better way to celebrate such an auspicious event. My parents, however, think they can. They have decided to invade. Which means I have spent the last week scrubbing my house from top to bottom to the haunting echos of being threatened into cleaning my room as a child. I should have known that would come back to haunt me. As this weekend also celebrates the first birthday of my youngest and since I know where I rate on the visitation scale these days, I'll mostly forgive them.

The down side of it all is that although I have new Elisabeth Bell and Mary Hall stamps, with more on their way, they are still tucked away in their original shipping packet. Still unmounted and uninked. Sad and alone. Horrible, isn't it? On Saturday, after my parents wisk away from what I'm sure will be too short and too long of a visit, I shall recuperate by cowering on the sofa with a sheet of stamped images and my prismacolor pencils. Look for lots of eye candy next week.

For this week, I leave you with a card for my son. He'll be one. I honestly doubt he'll care. He might if I let him chew on it. Hmm....

Stamping supplies - $$$
Cake and toys that will soon be forgotten - $$$
Getting to chew on the birthday card - Priceless.

Who knew?

Supplies - Paper by My Minds Eye, Stamp by The Greeting Farm (Skater Ian), Ink by Tsukineko (Memento), Color by Sanford (Prismacolor), embossing by Provo Craft (Cuttlebug embossing folder)

Taylored Two-fer Plus One in Abbey Road

2009-04-05T19:55:00.006-05:00

One of my favorite scrapbook manufacturers is BoBunny. I just adore their papers! It's a rare release that doesn't have me flocking to my scrapbook store to add to my stash. Although, when it comes to BoBunny, it rarely makes it all the way to my stash before it's scrap. Abbey Road is no different. One of the first things I do these days when I bring home new paper is to pull out my Prismacolor chart and start listing coordinating colors. Abbey Road was no different.

I actually picked up several paper lines, but I needed some masculine color tones and even with its' florals, Abbey Road fit the bill. I pulled out my images and selected some that would fit some cards I needed to make. I went for "Love Bear" a digital image from the House of Mental line at The Greeting Farm and Henry with his cute cupcake from Whiff of Joy. The bear looks a bit mental, doesn't he? I needed a couple of get well cards and he's perfect for my somewhat bent sense of humor. As for Henry, who wouldn't want that cute little mouse on their birthday card?

For card design, I did a standard take on the Taylored Expressions Cupcake Challenge 62 with Henry. It is a cupcake sort of challenge and while you don't have to use a cupcake, he seemed to fit the bill. For my second take on the challenge, I swapped the squares and circles on the design. I really like how it turned out. The last card was put together without a sketch. Sometimes you just have to wing it.

and individually (click for larger)

I experimented with a bit of background highlighting/coloring this week. I'm not sure if I like it or not. On one image I did, I got a bit carried away and accidentally pulled color from the image into my highlighting. It blended creating a different tone on that portion of the image. Not at all what I was going for. I'm chalking that image up to learning experience and moving on.

For those interested in the colors coordinating with Abbey Road, I used Sunburst Yellow (PC917), Pale Sage (PC 1089), Apple Green (PC912), Dark Green (PC908) Light Umber (PC941), Dark Umber (PC947) and Mediterranean Blue (PC1022). I shaded out my colors with the French Grey pencils in 90% (PC1076), 70% (PC1074) and 50% (PC1072). They aren't in the matching color palette, but I added a touch of pink (PC902) and Scarlet Lake (PC923) for mouths, noses and hearts.

And as a small bonus, my blending box. I altered a wooden box I found in the Hobby Lobby Easter Crafts section. It was one sale 40% so I paid a whopping $1.50 for it. Gotta love that! It's altered with Prima Dude papers, a pair of my cute dragon stamps cut with Nestibilities and tied all together with black & white polka dot ribbon. It's handy to grab, super portable and everything fits neatly inside so it doesn't get lost. Again, click for larger images.

Dustin Pike Rocks!

2009-03-27T10:45:00.004-05:00

For me, there is just nothing like the smell of fresh rubber in the house. Right now, I actually have a small pile of it on my desk, mounted and ready to stamp, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about digi stamps and the every amazing Dustin Pike. Sometimes the perfect image comes along and it just happens to be a sweet black & white printable line art rather than deeply etched rubber. So what's a girl to do? Well, heck, print it off, of course!

Dustin Pike is an amazing artist. I actually found him years ago through his Mooseberry graphics clip art. I bought a couple of pieces way back then, but haven't a clue where I stored the files. To be honest, they're probably gone forever due to a hard drive crash a few years ago. Aside from that, I'd really lost touch with his art. That was way back before blogging became a daily (hourly?) word.

I must say I was delighted when I saw a post on Splitcoast about a free dragon digital art image. I adore dragons, but good stamps and images of them are hard to find. When I found out it was a Dustin Pike dragon...I had it snagged onto my hard drive before you could say "Dustin Pike Totally Rocks!". Actually, by the time I saw the post, he had TWO dragons up for grabs. They're extremely cute and are both now living on my hard drive.

So how do you go from sweet digital image to great looking card? The majority I've seen are using Word to get the image from computer to printer. I used Photoshop Elements. It allows me to place my images for the least amount of cardstock waste. I created a new 8 1/2 x 11 blank image and then layered two each of the dragons into the file. I also added two each of a couple of Greeting Farm images I bought last month. I saved the file for later use on a hard drive that does an auto backup each night (see, I do learn from my mistakes!) and then printed. Now, I understand that some people have problems with smearing. I did not, but I'm using a sweet high end Brother color laser printer. It's the same one I used for my Prismacolor chart, so I knew the images were going to work perfectly with my coloring medium of choice. I printed onto a sheet of Gina K's Pure Luxury Base Weight White. Man, I love that stuff!

I didn't get a chance to make the images up into a card just yet, but I did have some time to color. I seriously love how they turned out.

I used the My Minds Eye Bloom & Grow papers, the Grow Just Stripes in particular, to match up my colors. I bought a selection of these at the local scrap store the other day intending to make cards out of them. I know they're going to be perfect with these dragons. My colors are:

Dragons - Goldenrod, Pumpkin Orange, Crimson Red, Burnt Ochre, Jade Green, and Muted Turquoise
Grass - Kelp Green
Chick & Egg - Goldenrod, Yellow Ochre, Warm Grey 30%

What do you think? Heck, why are you still reading this? You should be off snagging those cute little dragons from Dustin' blog. Scroll a bit, you'll find them. Take a moment to leave him a comment and let him know he totally rocks. Hopefully, he send a few (lots) more critters our way!

A Little Bit of Sugar

2009-03-16T09:37:00.005-05:00

Back in February, I won a bit of sugar...Sugar Nellie that is! Last week, they finally arrived. Two darling, yet to be released Elisabeth Bell stamps. LOVE THEM!! I had both stamped and colored and ready to make up into a project. The Sugar Bowl challenge this go around is cards/projects for Mom. I know my mom is going love getting this card! I haven't decided if it will be for Mother's Day, her birthday, Easter, or just because I'm thinking about her. Just because will come the soonest, and I've got a couple of mini-books that need to head her way, so that's the most likely. She loves getting handmade cards and keeps them forever. She's one of those people you put a little extra into the card for because you know she'll treasure it, rather than trashing it.

I used this week's cupcake challenge sketch #59 that Miss Taylor does. I turned the sketch on its side to accommodate my vertical image. As most of my cards are either hand delivered or tucked into a package of other things, I rarely worry about envelopes. That gives me a lot of freedom when it comes to card sizing. I over sized this one in length by 1/2 inch, so it's 6 x 4 1/4.

The card is colored with Prismacolors & blended out with baby oil, ink is Memento Tuxedo Black. Cardstock is Prism for the card base, My Mind's Eye for the patterned and Gina K Pure Lux for the image. The ribbon is Ribbon FX from Hobby Lobby. The image is available Funky Kits now!

They're Here!

2009-03-13T16:36:00.007-05:00

I am the proud owner of a lovely set of 120 Prismacolor premier pencils. I adore them. While I was waiting for them to arrive, I did some searching as I'd come across a tutorial on Splitcoast Stampers for a technique called "Gamsol Magic". In a thread discussing pencils on the same forum, I found one of the better step by step look at the blending here. It's just photos, but it convinced me to snag a bit of cotton batting off my sewing machine and add a bit of baby oil to it in a small jar.

Now if you've followed me this far and have checked out that first link, you're probably wondering where in heck the baby oil came into play. The original technique tutorial I found used Gamsol or Odorless Mineral Spirits. As my 3 year old daughter will poke her fingers into just about anything and then ask about it, I knew it was a bad idea. After reading several posts about people using Baby Oil instead, I figured it was at least worth a try. Baby oil is essentially just a scented mineral oil, so I don't worry so much about those little fingers. The thought of her getting her fingers in OMS, which is a solvent, makes my heart go pitty pat in not a good way.

That being said, I use a bit of 100% cotton batting well saturated in baby oil in the bottom of a stage 1 baby food jar. The 3 year old has a 11 month old baby brother, so I've got a stock pile of those right now. I can honestly say that I'm thrilled with the results I'm getting. The images don't even look like they've been "penciled". And, not at all to my surprise, my daughter had her fingers in the jar poking at the baby oil soaked batting in nothing flat. There are days when I swear the girl can teleport! She spent a few hours with her hands smelling of baby oil and I was reminded that she can reach considerably farther than I expect on any given day.

Let's talk usability. I highly recommend you take the time to sit down and make up a color swatch chart. I invested about a half a day. Keep in mind that I'm working with the restraints of a toddler and a pre-schooler. You can probably accomplish the same thing in half the time. I created the swatch chart in Excel and after a bit of tweaking, printed it off. I used four columns as my pencils are in a tin with four trays. Each column matches a tray, so I can instantly find the color I need.

My prismas did not come in this color order. They came in some order that I'm sure makes perfect sense to Sanford's packing and shipping department. However, they very thoughtfully included an information booklet that had the colors listed in this order. Since this order groups color families and like colors making it easy to pick shading colors, I spent the better part of an hour rearranging.

I sacrificed a sheet of my Gina K Pure Luxury Base Weight cardstock in order to create my chart. I highly recommend you use a sheet of the cardstock for your chart that you will be using for the majority of your coloring. Your chart should reflect the color, tone and blending that you will get when working on a larger project. You'll be tempted to grab a sheet of cheap sacrificial cardstock to make the chart, but seriously, use the good stuff. You'll be happy you did in the long run.

Here's my setup. I've used my color chart and a piece of paper I'm planning for the card to make color choices for my images.

Application is as simple as pushing the paper "stump" into the cotton batting until it absorbs some of the oil. The batting should be saturated, but you don't need a puddle hanging out around it. Take your time and play with how long you need to poke the batting with the stump to get enough oil to move the color. You can get too much baby oil on the stump and things will get a bit oily. To be honest, I really only have a problem with this when I'm using a lower grade of cardstock for my images. I moved to Gina K's base weight Pure Luxury (my new bestest cardstock ever) and my results increased dramatically with less oil overall.

If you do get too much oil on the stump, give it a rest for a few seconds so the stump has time to absorb the excess. If you're impatient, or the baby is wailing his cute little head off because you decided to blend one small area before you give him a bottle (don't ask me how I know about that, okay? ), give it a quick scrub on your sand paper and try again.

Most tutorials I've found have you laying down a heavy line around the outer edge of the image. I'm not a huge fan of the very light to white centers that this technique gives me. For me, I've found that a light coloring gives me a smooth base to layer and shade on. Additionally, I've found that most of the info sites have you doing just one area at a time. I prefer to do a quick pencil of the entire image and then return to blend and shade. Keep in mind the constraints I'm working under. It's frequently easier for me to do a bit of pencil work on several images while I'm keeping watching on kiddos playing in the yard. Technique and style is often a product of environment. That being the case in my situation, I can easily show you before and after shots of coloring and blending. The left is penciled, the right is blended and shaded. Click for larger on both. The images are Huggybellas from Stamping Bella

Final Notes - I'm given to understand that the OMS will produce better results than the baby oil, so if you're comfortable having that around, definitely give it a try. I've been doing some research online trying to find a more eco (and kid) friendly option. I found a product called Zest It! in the UK. It's made, not at all surprisingly, of the oils from orange peel. I haven't ordered any yet as I've been trying to find something a bit more "local". I am very tempted though as their product details include specific information on using it to blend pencils. They've even bottled it in smaller containers as a "pencil blend". VERY tempting.

I Do Special Requests

2009-03-10T21:29:00.006-05:00

A couple of months ago when I did my first in a long time stamping spree, I bought an Elisabeth Bell stamp from Sugar Nellie (via Funky Kits) that made me think of my daughter. She immediately declared the stamp "her girl". Although I done quite a bit of playing with the image (see my water coloring experiments in the Great Copic Debate post), I hadn't made her up into a card. The first week of March heralds in 4 birthdays in our house falling in a short 5 day span between the 5th and the 10th. My adorable now 3 year old daughter is one of those days.

During a mad house cleaning event prior to the family descending upon the house for a joint birthday celebration, I was picking up my stamped images. I had a few of my early run tests that had come out less than perfect. In an attempt to distract my daughter and get a few more things done, I handed over two of the images and her crayons. She happily made cards for her Gramma and Aunt. When she was done, she insisted I make a card for her birthday with her girl and a dragon. She's an eclectic little girl. :)

The more I worked on the card the more elements were required. She should be pink and there should be flowers. The girl and the dragon were the most important though. Never one to disappoint in the face of her daddy's eyes and curly golden hair, I made up this little gem -

And the requested dragon on the inside -

Don't Faint! It's Bellarific Friday!

2009-02-26T10:54:00.004-06:00

I know what you're saying..."Holy Cow, two posts in one week!". :) Don't get used to it. My goal for the year (that I've already failed miserably at!) is once a week. I'd love to be able to do twice and if I can knock out some challenges, I may hit that. It's early yet though so I'm not making any promises!

In my blog cruising, I repeatedly came across what I first thought of as "Sup'd Up Stick Figures". I found them to be kinda cute in the first few instances, but over the course of the past couple of years, they've really grown on me. As I mentioned in a previous post, I got some excellent $$ in Christmas gifts this year. So when it came time to start spending my pennies, I went and took a serious look at Stamping Bella. Within a few minutes of browsing, it went from "should I buy a couple" to "which ones can I absolutely not own without breaking my budget. It turns out the answer to that question was 7. I limited myself to just the Bellas for that order and to be honest, I can't wait until I've got a few more pennies so I can order more. Next time I'm getting some Huggabugs (Tiddly Inks) and some Chichiboulie Fairies and definitely a couple of the Turtle Tots. I'm a "sistah" for sure these days. :)

Recently, Em started up her "Bellarific Fridays", which means, she posts a challenge on Monday and the resulting cards get posted on the following Friday. As 99.9995% of all my crafty, scrapbooky, cardy stuff is done in the 53 hours that fall between getting off work on Friday and going to bed on Sunday, I figured this pretty well not in my realm of existence. I was a bit surprised when I saw the challenge this Monday -

Bellarific Challenge for Feb 27

(excuse the code...I stole it from Em.)

I really loved the color combination, but even that would not have gotten a card done. To be honest, I'm not sure which fold in the fabric of time swept across my house that allowed me to not only find the cardstock and coordinating papers, but got it all assembled, photographed and actually emailed off to Em by 9:00am this fine morning. I'm hoping it will pass through again soon. I can't blame a rift in the time space continuum for the stamping. I actually had the image stamped on a bit of Gina K's Pure Luxury baseweight for a week or so. I just ran it through my nestabilities and added a bit of Prismacolor pencil and a smidge of paper piecing.

The card is destined for the last in a long line (9!) of fire station baby showers. As I knew this little gem wasn't going through the post office, I made it a bit oversized at 5 3/4 x 4 3/4. It worked better with the largest size of nestabilities in that set. Paper is My Mind's Eye, ribbon is actually some hem tape. I had just barely enough for this card, so the tiny snippet I trimmed off the bow ends is stuck to my shopping list to see if I can get more. The "sup'd up stick figure" is miss Pregabella. Doesn't she look stinkin' cute, just in from her baby shower? The sentiment is from a 2001 Stampin' Up! Sale-A-Bration Set. I think it was a gift as that falls smack in the middle of my stamping drought and I don't remember buying anything around that time period to get it. The set is called Year Round Celebrations.

As a side note, I did discover during the paper piecing that my one and only glue stick had molded. Excuse me? Mold on a glue stick? Can you say "seriously gross"? I knew you could. :D It was moldy a good 1/4 of an inch down into the stick. (bleh!!) Needless to say, new glue stick and something in the way of liquid glue for paper piecing is also on my shopping list.

When dinosaurs roamed the earth....

2009-02-25T15:15:00.001-06:00

That's when I started stamping, or at least it seems that way. When I started stamping, wood mounts were THE way and anything else was highly frowned up. Acrylic stamps didn't exist and if you wanted to go "unmounted" you used what I considered an insane system of grooved acrylic blocks and velcro called "halos". So long, long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, or probably closer to 12 years I went to a Stampin' Up! party and fell in love. Over the course of five years I accumulated an amazing amount of stamps I didn't love, joined in more swaps than I can count and generally stamped my brain (and possibly fingers) out. It was a rare envelope indeed that left our house uninked. My husband insisted the bills go without stamping and as I'd never gotten around to buying a personalized address stamp, I let him have his way.

I stamped and even did a stint as a Stampin' Up! demo. The last was probably my downfall. I sat down one day and realized that most of the stamps I owned were not purchased because I loved them, they were purchased because they would hopefully benefit a business I no longer had time or heart for. I did the unthinkable...I stopped stamping. It wasn't a gradual thing. I simply stopped. I turned my love of paper towards scrapbooking and proceeded to spend the next several years (yes, years!) selling off an amazing collection of stamps. In all that time, I've only come to regret two sets that went the way of eBay. I haven't regretted them enough to hunt them down and buy them again, though. :)

I didn't sell off my entire collection of stamps. I simply kept those I absolutely loved. My collection is quite small now, and fits in a couple (three, I believe) IRIS drawers in among my collection of scrapbooking supplies. When acrylics made their big boom in the scrapbooking arena, I bought a few. Not a large collection and I was more selective. I bought only stamps I was sure I would use for my scrapbooking projects. I have frames, journaling blocks, swirls and the like. My acrylics fit neatly into 1 single 12x12x2" storage drawer, including acrylic blocks.

So where does this bring me? Well, back to my roots, so to speak. I never stopped loving stamps even though I walked away from them. About 2 years ago, in a fit of boredom, I strayed off my normal scrap blog roaming onto a blog of cards. I read and hopped and read and hopped some more, slowly renewing my love affair. I bought a few acrylic CTMH stamps through my friend Becks when she decided to try out her hand at demoing. I was very careful to stay the path of stamps I felt I could use in my scrapbooking, but it was a path my heart simply wasn't completely devoted to. Personally, I think the baby stamps did me in. It only took a couple of "welcome baby!" cards to pull me back to my beloved inks and stamps.

I'm in love once again. I've found my way back to the heart of my crafting spirit. It's pretty cool, really. As with any one who has seen a love put to the way side, I'm more cautious. It takes me far longer to consider a stamp for all it's merits and decide to buy. I have carts and wish lists littered across companies that are rapidly becoming my favorites. While I can see the appeal of acrylic, true rubber will always hold my heart. There's just something about the smell of deeply etched rubber that makes my heart go pitty-pat. The advent of EZ Mount cling foam has served to make them dearer.

And with all that said...I leave you with a card I made this weekend with one of the first stamps I ever bought. It's dated 1995 on the mount from Stamp Oasis.

Here's a shot of his little friend that's destined to grace a card front in the near future. Possibly on a different bit of paper, though. I'm not convinced that the one he's on now does him justice.

Both of these little guys (gals?) are colored with prismacolor pencils that are blended out with baby oil. The white cardstock is Pure Luxury baseweight, courtesy of Gina K Designs (love this stuff!). The waver is on BasicGrey Bittersweet and the flyer is on Prima at the moment.

The great copic debate

2009-01-15T16:53:00.003-06:00

I want to take a moment and talk about Copics...or rather my lack thereof. I own two Copic markers, a colorless blender and then a pink marker (Lipstick Pink I believe) in the Sketch style. I bought them on sale and still couldn't believe I was spending that much for just two markers. I played around with them a bit and I will admit that they are pretty awesome. I can completely understand the appeal of these markers. The color is clean, streak free and saturated. Even with all that, I still cannot bring myself to buy more. I did some major searching and price comparisons after receiving a very nice gift card for Christmas. While the Sketch markers had the most flexibility, at $4+ a marker, they were well beyond what I wanted to pay for a decent color selection. I looked at the lower price option of getting Ciao markers. I found these beauties as cheap as $2.96 a marker. That doesn't sound bad until you start doing the math. To get a decent (at least 36 colors) selection, I'm still paying over $100 ($106.65, to be exact from MerriArtist.com). Affordable with my Christmas money, but what about when I decide I want more colors?

Don't get me wrong, the little I have played with Copics makes me seriously covet a complete set. I could completely wipe out my Christmas money buying just Copics, but it's rare that I have this sort of money at my disposal and I want to get as much bang for my buck as possible, including some stamps I've been coveting far longer than those markers. So I dug through my stash of art supplies for some watercolor pencils and some standard colored pencils. Courtesy of an artist mother, I can draw and paint, I just don't enjoy it. At least not from scratch. Stamping allows me to skip the bits I don't like and go straight to the bits that I do. Which means I have an appreciation good art supplies.

Part of my collection of art supplies included a moderately okay set of watercolor pencils. Watercolor was always the most forgiving of the art mediums I tried growing up, and the pencils are a perfect match for stamping. I simply trace out the image areas with the color of choice and apply water with a brush to pull the color into the center of the area. Voila, instant shading. Coloring in the area lightly and tracing the edges more heavily gives a more intense color. It mostly just takes a bit of practice to learn how to get the results you want.

Take a look here. The image to the far left is done in colored pencils, the image in the center is watercolor and the image to the right is the watercolor before the water was added.

After several hours of playing with my watercolor pencils I came to the conclusion that my moderately okay set of pencils was limited on color selection and needed an upgrade to at least a very good set. Fortunately, Hobby Lobby carries what I consider to be Very Nice water color pencils in open stock. Even better, they were 30% off this week. I invested in a few in the color range I wanted to experiment with and was very pleased. I will be adding to my collection in the near future.

The image to the left is the same as before. The image to the right is also the same, only this time with water applied. The image in the middle is with the new watercolor pencils. I'm really pleased with the color options the new pencils provide. The standard colored pencils used on the image to the left is a super cheap set of Crayola brand pencils. Functional until I can invest in a MUCH better set, most likely a full on tin of soft lead Prismacolors.

A selection of my pencil play -

On the bundled up cutie in the top, the left is colored pencil, the right is watercolor. I purposely went with pale shades on the watercolor one as I was experimenting. Overall, I'm very pleased with the results. The girls are both Elisabeth Bell from Funky Kits in Scottland, while the boot and daisies are Alessa Baker from Impression Obsession.

So let's talk money. I've already mentioned the price per marker up at the top. If you're just starting out and aren't concerned about the color options available, hit the school supplies section of your local discount store (Wal-Mart or Target) and grab a set of Crayola or Kodak colored pencils. I have both and can attest to them being excellent for play and even full fledged card making. I've seen sets from RoseArt in 72 colors, although it's more likely that you'll find a sets of 24. Personally, I'd skip over RoseArts. I'm not a big fan as the quality overall isn't that good. Price wise, expect to pay under $10 (to be honest, if you pay more than $6 or so, I'd be surprised). Once you decide you like the results you're getting, you may want to upgrade to a high end set of pencils. My favorite is Prismacolor. With their latest release of colors they have 132 shades. You can find the whole shebang on Amazon for $110. If you do the math, you'll come up with a whopping 83 cents per pencil.

If you want to try watercolor pencils, expect to pay a little more. Hobby Lobby carried them on open stock (selection of 60 colors) for $1.49 a pencil. Watch for a good sale and you can pick them up like I did this week at $1.04 a pencil. So for the $12.50 I spend on watercolor pencils, I got 12. For that same $12.50 in Copic Ciao markers, I could have gotten 4, or in high end colored pencils, 15. On my limited budget and in this economy, it's pencils all the way. Try them. I think you'll like them.

Is this thing on?

2009-01-01T16:07:00.003-06:00

Oh gosh. Talk about blog neglect! Or rather, let's not. Let's just say it's been one very busy season and leave it at that. I received lots of lovely things, some as gifts, others as a result of some excellent sales on eBay. Sadly, I've been too stinkin' busy to do a thing with them! Soon. Trust me. No, really. I'm serious. Okay, just don't go on my definition of "soon". Or on my card sending schedule (no heckling from the peanut gallery, Becks!). I have some lovely new stamps, courtesy of a nice place in the UK and equally nice place on the East Coast. So cards are in the making. I've even managed to find some of my favorite stamping tools and they're just waiting for me to put them to use. I've even got a review or two in the making as I got some fab new tools. 2009 will be a year full of blog posts or my name isn't Yosemite Sam! Okay, so it isn't, but there's lots of blog posts in me, I just know it!

Sketch Extravaganza - Prima Style

2008-11-18T16:30:00.005-06:00

The LSS hosted a big sketch based crop. The participants got a new sketch every 2 hours. Shanel passed out a couple of sketches to each of us on the Design Team to work up before the event. I could use whatever I wanted and my instructions were to alter the sketches, but to make the sketch recognizable from the layout. One was a single page sketch, which I rarely do, with a single photo, which I'm fairly certain I've never done. Just one photo on a layout? Isn't that a crime of some sort? :) One photo quickly became three for me. I used some of the new yummy Prima YOUth papers. This is done with a combo of the 12x12 sheets, 6x6 pad and the matching flowers. The large flower is a Bazzill blossom, the rest are Prima. Brads are Bazzill as well. Title is American Crafts Thickers and BasicGrey Chipboard letters/numbers.

Click for a large view -

The other layout was double page, multi-photo. I actually liked the original layout so I stared intently at it for a few days before I decided how to make it work. One technique I've learned from various classes is that my layouts are more cohesive when my subjects face in towards the center of the layout. That being the case, altering the sketch was as easy as mirroring it. My large photo and title are on the right hand side. My second twist was to do a Halloween layout using Christmas papers. Yep, those are Prima's gorgeous new Christmas papers, Christmas Fancy. The pinks and greens were perfect for my photos. Linsey loved being a fairy for Halloween.I did a few other tweaks to the general sketch and then I blinged the heck out of the layout. The bling flourishes are pink Say It With Crystals, again from Prima. I fussed with this layout for a while, trying to really get it to work for me. I had half a dozen or so flowers on it and just couldn't get it to flow. It was only when I pulled them off to swap them out with a different set of flowers that I realized the glitter asterisks (American Crafts Thickers) that I was using as flower centers didn't need the flowers after all! They were the perfect accent to pull the bling in line with the colors and the subject.

The title is the same American Crafts Thickers, ribbon is from Hobby Lobby, washer I believe is Making Memories. It's been in my stash for a while. It says "Believe"

Again, click for a larger view -

Quick Cards for Christmas

2008-11-14T14:25:00.002-06:00

I love making cards, although I rarely do these days. When Shanel (my LSS owner) asked if I could make her some Christmas cards for her Holiday Open House coming up this weekend, I said "sure!". She needed the cards by Sunday, and knowing my timeline, I figured I had about an hour (maybe 2) to work on them and have them ready to bring in the next day. Knowing my limitations, I promised six cards. I only took pictures of 5 because the last one looked lame and unfinished. We did a bit of work on it when I got to the scrapbook store, but I didn't take my camera.

I've been dying to see the new Creative Cafe papers first hand. I keep seeing them in various spots around the web. Seeing them up close and personal, they are every bit as pretty! The kraft background behind the florals make them look so elegant and really dresses up the cards. I tried to keep my supplies limited for these so people didn't feel like they had to buy a bunch of stuff to accomplish great things.

Papers, buttons, base cards and scalloped velvet ribbon are Creative Cafe. Trust me when I say this ribbon is seriously yum-o! It's a bit expensive at 75 cents for a 1/2 yard, but well worth it. I usually buy it in yard lengths so I have it on hand when I want it. The blue is probably my favorite color, but I love it in brown and black as well. I'm nearly out and need to stock up! All of the flowers are Bazzill Blossoms. Again, love these! I have packs of them in various sizes and colors. They mix, match and layer very well. Glitter letters and remaining embellishments are all American Crafts. The glitter "spots" on the buttons are the dots that go over the J and I letters for that font. I never peel the suckers off when I'm using those letters, so I end up with them as spares. They make great flower sparkles.

And now for the cards (click for a large view)-

Blog Neglect & New Stuff

2008-10-17T16:29:00.006-05:00

I have shamefully neglected my blog. All I can say is that is has been a busy couple of weeks of Baby Showers, Consignment Sales, State Fairs and more Baby Showers. The DH's shift is about to explode in babies. I've got at least two more showers before the year is out.

In between all of that madness, I've been trying to squeeze in a bit of crafting. I've managed a layout, a mini-book and a cool dry erase board project. Mostly in just the last weekend. I picked up another mini book while I was dropping off my latest round of Design Team stuff at the LSS, so I should have blog fodder for weeks to come. Not to mention I haven't even blogged about last month's kit. Probably because I haven't TOUCHED last month's kit, but that's a whole 'nother story. :)

Onto the Design Team stuff. I'm going to start with the last projects first as I don't want the mini book to consume the first half of the post. So layout first. Create My Keepsake, one of my preferred scrappy forums, has started doing a Friday "Scrap Formula", in other words a sketch. They post them on Friday and in order to be eligible for their RAK drawing at the end of the month, you have to post them by Noon Sunday I believe. I know that it's such a limited time that odds are pretty high that I won't ever get it posted in time to be part of the drawing. Still, The Oct 3rd formula really sparked my imagination. It was a single page sketch, but I immediately saw how it could be a full 2 page layout. After many revisions and additions that took the better part of Monday, I finally ended up with a piece I really like. The more I see it, the more I like it. I figure by the end of the week, I'll love it. The papers, journaling cards and rubons are Fancy Pants Daily Grind, buttons from my hoard, Bazzill Blooms and bling from Prima.

I am constantly amazed by my daughter's ever growing imagination. This is an old, nearly defunct riding lawn mower. The DH used it to move the trailer around the back yard when he mows. Miss, on the other hand, considers it her 'tractor' and just loves to go sit on it and turn the wheel. I don't know where her imagination takes her, but I'm sure she's off riding into the sunset somewhere.

I can't really take credit for the conception of the next project. I saw a version of it on Mish's blog probably a month ago and I've just been waiting for the right products to make up a version of my own. 12x12 frames are not readily available in my area, so I went with an 11x14 clip frame. I had several ideas for how I wanted it to work out and I'm pleased to say everything came together far better than I hoped. The rubons are on the glass rather than on the paper, which means I can change out the paper and still keep those elements. I love the dimensional effect this gives, although it really doesn't come through on the picture.

I will say that you really have to want rubons on glass. It's one of those things that takes lots of elbow grease. Make sure your glass is clean. Just go ahead and clean it again to be on the safe side. It seems to help the rubons stick better when applying. Because it's glass, they're going to occasionally shift and tear. Just chalk it up to "rustic effect" because I couldn't NOT make it happen. I found for this particular design a black dry erase marker worked the best.

And the last project for the week, but certainly not the least. I got a comment on my blog a couple weeks back from my LSS owner asking if I would be interested in doing another word book. I really had a blast doing the Bo Bunny Happy book, so I figured what the heck. I called and she pointed me at the website for Heart of Texas Studios. She'd gotten a selection of their word books in stock and pretty much let me have my pick of book and paper. I waffled heavily between the OKLAHOMA book and the COWGIRL book. In the end, I decided on the COWGIRL one. She had some cute cowgirl papers, that I initially planned to use, but once I go there and started trying to make everything fall into place in my head, I knew they weren't going to work for me. While miss has loads of cowgirl attitude, I don't have any pictures of her in cowgirl gear, so the cowgirl focused papers didn't work.

After going through the store several times, I finally settled on another of my favored paper companies, BasicGrey. They've had some lines I haven't cared for but their last couple of releases have really rocked. The paper is from their Sultry line, which you wouldn't expect to work in a cowgirl theme. I'm pretty darn pleased with the results though. A lot of it has to do with the distressed/weathered look BasicGrey is known for on their papers. It meant that I had very little actual distressing to do myself. I pulled it more towards the western feel with silver heart buttons, a concho and some bright pink leather lacing. I use a combination of quotes and personal journaling to pull it all together. No tinted pictures this time. I kept each page to a double page layout style and put them in chronological order. The pictures span about 18 months.

Click the images to view them larger.

Journaling -

C - There's more than just boots and a hat to a cowgirl!

O - Rough and tough; snakes and snails and puppy dog tails; in that, sugar and spice, everything nice package.

W - you don't have to own a horse or live in the west to have the cowgirl spirit. A cowgirl attitude is a way of life. Cowgirls are independent and self-sufficient. They believe in old-fashioned values and command respect. They have a uniqueness and style that is all their own.

G - "Cowgirl is an attitude, really. A pioneer spirit, a special American brand of courage. The cowgirl faces life head on, lives by her own lights, and makes no excuses. Cowgirls take stands. They speak up. They defend the things they hold dear. A cowgirl might be a rancher, or a barrel racer, or a bull rider, or an actress. But she's just as likely to be a checker at the local Winn Dixie, a full-time mother, a banker, an attorney, an astronaut." - Dale Evans Rogers, 1992

I - She'll ride to your rescue, into your heart and off into the sunset. Squealing "yeehaw!" along the way.

R - What's a cow girl without her side kick? He's not much good for anything but drooling just yet, but as soon as he starts crawling, they'll be off! The West (and the backyard) will never be the same.

L - Linsey has a cowgirl attitude. I don't know where she gets it. I guess she must have been born with it. She yearns for the great outdoors. Her imagination turns an old run down riding lawn mower into a tractor. She is wild at heart, sassy, sweet, courageous, strong and not even three yet.

August Kit - SEI Poppy

2008-09-16T16:44:00.003-05:00

With all the excitement about the Design Team and my anniversary gift trip to the convention, my kit club has gotten second fiddle this month. The fact that I struggled a bit with the papers this go around also delayed things a bit. The papers were SEI Poppy. Simply gorgeous with metallic shimmery highlights. Overall, it was a smaller kit than the last one, which I expected as the metallic papers cost more. The shop owner made up for it with a great selection of embellishments. There were matching die cuts and buttons from SEI, paired with their duo toned cardstock. In addition we had cute pompom trim, Creative Cafe tags, mirrors and sand. Yep, sand. The sand challenged me and I had several ideas tucked away to make use of it, but I just couldn't make any of them gel with the rest of my layout ideas.

I added a few bits of my own after shopping at CKC. I do love these papers, so I'm sure I'll use them up somewhere. The blues and whites are definitely destined towards something altered for Christmas.

I printed four sets of pictures to use with these papers and ended up using just two. During a cleaning spurt last weekend, I sorted through a huge pile of pictures that had been stacking up on my desk. Most of them were Wal-mart muck ups, where they double printed or printed something in error and had to reprint, or their machine was broken all weekend and I decided I didn't need the pictures after all. In the midst of all of that, I did find a nice stack of photos perfect for upcoming layouts. I need a few to fill out the selection, but that's easy to remedy. One set of photos is from 3 years ago. Our last babyless vacation. I was actually preg at the time with Miss. We're not in these pictures. It's of the International Association Firefighter Fallen Firefighter Memorial in Colorado Springs. It's a very poignant place for me and brings home the fact that what my guy does isn't the safest thing. I so never want to visit this place to see my DH's name inscribed on their wall!

I do like how the layout turned out, even though I basically hacked a very pretty piece of red & white paper to bits before I finally settled on a design. :) You would think with girls that flower paper would be a piece of cake. Man! I could not believe how much I fought these! Next layout is a design I pulled from the August Page Maps. I reversed the design to work with my pictures. These are of Missy's very first culinary adventures. She got to make cookies with Daddy. She was so excited. They aren't anything fancy, just one of those refrigerated rolls of cookie dough you can buy, but to her, it was culinary greatness. I've been missing my Cricut lately, so I do a fancy welded title on this one. It's probably over the top flowery, but I had fun doing it.

Last layout is one on the boy child. I did one of these with Miss a couple of years ago and I knew I wanted to do one on him. One of the side benefits of having a C-Section is that I got to have a bit of say in my delivery day. Mister timed things just right so that he could be born on my Father-in-law's birthday. My DH is the only son of an only son, who now has an only son. The name carries on. Frank passed away nearly 8 years ago. I so wish he could have been here to see the next generation of Reed's being born. He would have loved that boy!

Per request, I have done larger files. Current images are 500 pixels. If you want to see them bigger, click for a 1000 pixel version. Only the layouts are this way. The kit stuff was done beforehand and I didn't go back and resize them.

American Crafts Romance Paper, plus some

2008-09-12T11:18:00.008-05:00

Dona called to tell me she had new DT stuff for me. I was quite excited to hear it was American Crafts products. They are another of my favorite manufacturers. I normally lean towards shabby chic and vintage/grunge look papers, so their clean bold patterns are a change of pace from some of the others I love so well. Turns out, this time around, they gave all three of the DT the same line of papers. Not the exact same papers, because if you know American Crafts, then you know that one of their lines can easily encompass 20+ different designs. They all coordinate, though, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what the other two girls put together.

The paper is all from the American Crafts Romance line; lots of reds, pinks, creams and browns. Our one stipulation was that we could not do anything Valentine's themed. Easy, peasy for me! I don't think I have a single valentine's day photo! Working nearby the shop made it easy for me to stop by and grab my packet. The owner let me choose between the three, only she wouldn't let me poke through them first! I had to chose based on the paper on top! ACK! I chose one with lots of circles and polka dots. Once I opened the package I was thrilled with my choice. Nearly the whole package was polka dots, with a sheet of stripes and a sheet of blocks thrown in for variety. They also gave us 2 12" lengths of ribbon and some AC Romance chipboard to use. To that, I added cardstock in bold dark pink, chocolate brown and cream. I browsed through the store trying to get some inspiration from the various products hanging out there and came across one of the new Bo Bunny word books. The word was "HAPPY". As soon as I saw it, I knew exactly which pictures I was doing.

I made the book first and used the scrap for the layout. I tend to do the essentials on my mini books and then plan a layout after I have that worked out. I knew I'd have enough paper for both, so it was just a matter of figure out which prints I wanted where. I ended up not using the stripes for the book surface since I knew I wanted it for the layout and then used the brown dots paper on the shorter pages so I'd have enough of it left as well. It's all a matter of thinking out your projects before you slice into your paper! :)

Miss is a total hat fanatic. She just loves them in all sorts and shapes. It's been this way since birth. I just love these pictures. I've been meaning to do a layout with them forever and even tried an 8x8 once with them. It didn't work with the papers I had, so I tucked the photos away for another day. That day finally arrived. I knew the colors of the AC Romance papers were going to be perfect, so I printed an 8x10 of my favorite and several others. Isn't that just an adorable smile?

Fun fact - the flower is a Bazzill blossom paper flower. It started life white and I tinted it to match the paper I was using. I love white paper flowers for this reason. They're easy to color into something that coordinates perfectly. You can use reinkers for dye inkpads, actual clothing dye (be super careful!), watercolors and Glimmer Mists. I prefer the last two options. Watercolors is one of the easiest as I have a nice collection of then. Just put a bit of the paint in a mister bottle with water and shake. Test on scrap paper first before spraying the flower. Spritz and dry!

The HAPPY is probably my favorite project I've done lately. Miss is a huge Backyardigans nut and one of their recent releases was "Front Page News", which turned out to be a super hero themed show. Miss loved it and has been playing super hero off and on ever since. I had a big collection of shots of her zooming about the house in her cap, saving us from toe lint to giant robots and just about everything in between. We laughed that night that she was "Super Happy Girl", so the HAPPY word book was just perfect for these pictures.

With the last book, I talked about unifying pictures across a 4 month period by using a sepia tone. The shots for this book were primarily from one night, with one shot from the next day. Since her outfit was pretty consistent, I didn't have the broad timeline need that prompted me to tint last weeks photos. However, since her "costume" consisted of a dark red American Flag shirt, dark shorts and a bright aqua puppy dog blanket/cape, they didn't exactly go with the paper I was using. In this case, tinting helped unify the overall look of the book. I went with a pink tint that would coordinate with the papers I was using. It gave my happy girl and nice rosy glow.

The pictures don't show the final assembly. I intended to use book rings from the Creative Cafe. They've got them in a great selection of colors that perfectly matched this paper. But my holes were not perfectly lined up (my bad!), so the eyelets I used put the bottom ring into a bind. I opted to use a bright pink organza ribbon with white polka dots I found on the shop's ribbon rack. It looks so cute! If they don't have an updated shot for the design team blog, I'll try to take another myself on Tuesday when I'm in for kit club. Oh, and page 2 shot totally sucks! I didn't realize I had awful photo glare until AFTER I pulled the pictures off the camera. I'll see about updating that shot for you as well.

I used up every little snippit of the AC Romance papers. I had just enough left over to make a quick, simple birthday card -

As I was browsing, I got a tour of all the new products from the shop owner. I totally love doing this as I get the inside track as to why she picked the papers she did. She showed me some fabulous new cowboy/cowgirl papers from Creative Imaginations that I just adore. I stumbled across the perfect pictures to go with them the other day. While we were looking at those, she showed me some gorgeous new Marah Johnson papers. I have a love/hate relationship with MJ designs. Either I totally love them or I totally hate them. I don't seem to have a middle ground with her stuff. This one, though, I totally loved. The paper is green with brown swirls and metallic pink "grunge" effects and the caption "I'm Kind of a Big Deal". That is so Missy! Shanel scooped the paper up and handed it to me and told me to consider it part of my DT assignment. Yay me! Check it out! I must say I adore this layout. Funny thing, the main picture here is almost exactly 2 years after the layout pic above. Can you believe she is just 2??? She looks so much older in that picture, although, that smile is still the same.

The flower on this page was altered in the same way as the one above, only this time after it dried, I painted it with a clear liquid glue and dumped pink glitter on it. The jumbo brad is a Heidi Swap, again painted with glue and glittered, this time in clear. Glitter is Doodlebug. Their Sugar Coating Glitter is fabulous!

One thing I will admit to really disliking about the MJ paper. It's not true 12x12!!! What the heck?? I didn't even notice until I was tucking everything in my bag to take back to the shop. When I laid it on top of the other layout, I noticed it was 1/2" short. Sharon and I got to looking at it at the shop and sure enough, the paper is only 12x12 with that stupid "cut me off" strip. Cut that sucker off and the paper goes to 12x11 1/2. So super annoying. I managed to gently disassemble the layout and layer it on the bold pink I had used for matting the photo. I still love the layout, but I'll be paying closer attention to MJ papers in the future. We checked the others in the shop and it appeared to be just the papers with the metallic accents. So stupid. I'll update when I get a chance to do a new photo.

Oh, here's a card I did a week or so ago for one of the guys on the DH's shift that just found out he's going to be a daddy. Okay, I did it for him and his wife, but you get the point. :)

Next week is kit layouts. I've horribly neglected my kit this time around. I love the papers, but for some reason I'm really struggling with inspiration. Here's a shot of the only layout I've got going on it. I'm still trying to decide how I want to deal with the bazillion wallets I printed for this.

Adventures with Fancy Pants Papa Papers

2008-09-08T09:30:00.007-05:00

This is actually last week's post. It's a bit disjointed and rather rambling. It was just one of those weeks. Stick with me. The pictures at the end are worth it. Another post on this weekends scrapping activities is coming shortly.

My very first Design Team assignment was challenging. It was Fancy Pants Designs, which I usually totally love, but this was one of those lines I looked at and just didn't care for. I knew as part of my DT assignments that I was likely to get papers I would never pick up for myself, so I was prepared. The paper is very masculine and one sheet has titles and quotes about Hero and Brave. Not my choice for fire fighter layouts, but I was sure I had at least one picture to use on it. One layout out of a handful of papers and a sheet of rub-ons just wasn't going to cut it! I've seen several takes on file folder mini albums lately and I vaguely recalled seeing an Accu-Cut die at the shop for one. I went rummaging through the stacks of dies and found two in different sizes. I knew at that point I was onto something. I cut two of the smaller folders and three of the larger. It made a very respectable sized mini album. Approximately 5x7 when folded. A mini album is an open invitation to embellishing my little heart out and I knew rub-ons just would not be enough. I snagged a set of BOY stamps from Creative Imaginations and then proceeded to raid the Creative Cafe wall.

I have to admit, I have a total weakness for the Creative Cafe. I can buy exactly what I need to embellishments without having to pick up a whole package of something. If I only need 3 olive toned felt flowers, I just get 3 olive toned felt flowers, in my choice of shapes and sizes. In the long run, I probably pay a bit more per piece for my embellishments, but as I USE everything I buy, I totally feel like I get my money's worth. Check out this layout I did of just Creative Cafe products -

Before I go off on my mini book ramble, I should show you the layout I did with the leftovers of the mini book, plus the one sheet of paper I didn't cut for it. My husband is a fire fighter to the core. I could not imagine him doing anything else for a living, but he's so much more than that. I really wanted to show the side I see all the time, verses the side everyone else sees. I think I pulled it off.

I know a lot of people struggle with mini albums or just avoid them completely. For me, mini's are a freedom from scrappy rules and restrictions I sometimes feel when I'm doing layouts. It's an opportunity to use a bunch of photos that wouldn't normally be related. To be honest, until very recently, mini books intimidated me. It's just been within the last year that I've really exploded with them. Now I'm completely addicted.

I poured through the last 4 months of photos and specifically pulled out photos of the new little man in the house and my totally rockin' DH. I have tons of photos of him and our girl and I knew I could have added some girly flair to the book, but what I really wanted was a book of my men. When printing photos for a mini album, I print a selection of photos in standard 4x6 and in wallets. I get two wallets, so if I muck something up, I've got a spare. If not, then I have extra photos for a project on down the road. For minis, I always print more photos than I think I'm going to need. You'd be surprised at how many photos I can put in a mini album. For this book, I printed 30 and to be honest, I really should have printed at least 32 - 35. I could have used a few extras. For the book, I ended up using 29. One of the 30 was a picture I had printed in box 4x6 and wallet. Since the book was covering four months, I wanted to unify the pictures, so I modified them all to sepia tone. This is one of my favorite color options and I do a ton of it. I have a stack of spare wallets in those colors that will someday very soon be a project of their own.

Click for larger -

CKC Tulsa - I shopped 'til I dropped

2008-08-26T16:20:00.003-05:00

My anniversary is next weekend, but my oh so thoughtful husband gave me an early anniversary gift...a trip to a CKC convention. Yay me! It's great that he knows me so well. This is only my second trip to this convention in the four years it's been in Tulsa. Typically, we're already on vacation somewhere else, so I'm not able to go. This is also a teeny (seriously teeny) convention, so it doesn't rank high on my "drop everything and go" list. Still, I'm not about to skip a day to myself scrappy shopping! I hadn't planned to attend, so I didn't register this summer when it was available. That left me scrambling through the class list trying to decide if I wanted to take a class or not. I know it's only been a year since I took classes at a scrapbook convention, so I was floored at how much some of the classes were charging. There were several that were over $30! Seriously!! In the end, I decided that one class first thing in the morning and spending the rest of my money on supplies was the best division. That got me at the convention center in time for reasonable parking, plus if I found the right class, I might actually learn something.

My first class choice was an acrylic book. After my tag experience, I've been wanting to try a mini album in acrylic. After trying to get to the sponsor's web site and failing miserably and doing some searching, I found several reviews on the class. None of them were flattering. They all agreed that the album was top notch for quality, but that the class seriously lacked. After checking out their booth and class sample, I'm inclined to agree. I figured it would be a reasonable backup alternative if my new first choice was full. My next option was a SEI class. To be honest, being SEI, I really figured the class would be booked. I think the only reason it wasn't was the time slot. The class was actually very lightly populated, which made for a very relaxed atmosphere. I can honestly say it was one of the best classes I've taken at a scrapbook convention. The class was on SEI's velvet paper. I'd dabbled a bit with velvet paper back in the day when I started stamping, so I knew what to expect for the paper. The techniques, however, totally rocked and on a couple of occasions, surprised me.

The project was a cute accordion mini book. It's not done and to be honest, the colors are not something I would have chosen, but I do really like how it's coming out. And frankly, velvet paper just rocks. I immediately jotted off a mail to my LSS owner asking if she had seen it and considered carrying it. I do hope so! Velvet paper has all the lush qualities of real velvet in a paper form. Which also means that anything you can do with paper, you can pretty much do with this stuff. We inked it, stamped it, and embossed it. Our oh so fabulous instructor also tells me you can run it through an ink jet printer and print on it. I bought 3 12x12 sheets in colors that match my LSS kit for the month. :) They also carry it in assortment packs but I didn't see any of those in their booth. As an added bonus for the class I won a package of buttons, plus they gave us a page of alpha stickers and a 40% coupon.

The totally cute instructor is Connie Hastings, who really did a bang up job teaching the class. Check out her blog!

After class, I had 20 minutes to check out the displays for other classes, pick up my vendor floor pass and take a quick break. A scrappy convention is one of the few places where a girl has the opportunity to use the men's bathroom. I should have taken a picture. How funny would that be?

Once the important necessities were addressed, it was time to shop. Number one on my list of things to pick up was adhesive. I can't believe that I'm clean out of glue for the second time this summer! I've heard good things about Zip Dry for acrylics and it's made by the same company as the glue I used for my acrylic tags, so I grabbed a bottle of that. My girl latched onto the lid when I got home and I haven't a clue where it's ended up. She's like a magpie for crafty objects. I've also heard good things about Kokuya adhesives, so I grabbed one of those and a couple of refills. I have an on again off again relationship with my Herma tab dispenser, so I decided to pick up a We R Memory Keepers one and see if I liked it better. It came in a very alterable clear. I can't wait to doll it up with some rubons. I also picked up a couple of sticks of QuickStik. I've heard very positive reviews of it when adhering paper to chipboard.

That brings me to my next set of purchases. I opted for three chipboard mini albums in cute shapes. Two Maya Road and an oh so cute fire hydrant one from Boxer to do fire station pictures.

I took a break from my shopping to sit down to make & take a cute alerted clipboard. They had one of those big glue and go guns from GlueArts that look like the ATG guns. I got to give it a try and I must say that I am NOT impressed. I found it bulky, heavy and difficult to use. Thankfully, I can say that without having dropped the $$ to buy one! On the up side, I was a total rebel and didn't follow the directions on the make & take. The demo gal was busy chatting it up with another lady, so I took the bits and glued them down how I thought they should go. I love how it turned out.

I watched a few other make & takes along the way and got some good ideas for quick projects and simple gifts. Then I broke for lunch. I have friends in the area who I used to work with. Phil, who I must say is one of my very best friends (and possibly the younger brother I always wanted, even though I already have one) cruised over to pick me up and drive me down town. Between construction and traffic, I'd never have made it without him. I was totally glad I did. Even though one friend totally flaked and the other was hijacked into a team lunch for work, the remaining crew was fabulous company. I totally miss working with these guys! Even though I had my camera and mentioned early on that we could do a photo, none of us remembered after the eating was done. So you'll just have to imagine four geeks at a table talking computers, work and super heroes. I did say we were geeks. No one understands a geek like another geek. It was a right fabulous lunch.

After lunch, it was back across town for a bit more shopping. I raided my favorite paper lines, adding extra SEI poppy to round out my LSS club kit, the oh so cute Imaginisce Hallowhimsy and some of the oh so yummy Scenic Route Sonoma. I have a pile of paper on my dining room table and I just don't know what to cut into first!

One of my weaknesses is brads and eyelets. I shamelessly indulged myself when I hit the Dollar Scrapbooking booth and then again at the We R Memory Keepers booth.

So even though it was a teeny convention and none of my favorite vendors were there for me to drool over, I still had a grand time and feel that my money was well spent. Particularly after I spread it out on the table and examined my haul. Not bad for a mere $150, minus class & vendor floor fees.

Check it out!

2008-08-21T22:22:00.002-05:00

My very first toot! I'm a designer for my oh so fabulous LSS! Check it out! Too cool, huh? Even cooler, Andrea, one of the other designers, is also a fire wife. Her husband was once my husband's lieutenant.

Needless to say, I'm super excited! I can't wait to share my stuff!

The Last of the the July Kit

2008-08-19T10:21:00.023-05:00

If the number of layouts and projects I manage out of a single kit is any indication of how much I love a kit, then I clearly adored the July Inspire Me kit from my LSS. Of course, it was filled with one of my favorite manufacturers - Cosmo Cricket. Today is club day, so here are the final bits I put together. First, the layout. I totally love this layout with one small exception. That being the adhesive. BLEH!!! I am entirely out of dry adhesive. All I had left was a bottle Fiskars clear gel adhesive. I don't have anything against liquid glues. They are great for a myriad of projects. Layouts, however, are not one of them. It seriously warped like crazy as it dried. I ended up tucking it under a couple of heavy books and that helped some. It will eventually go flat once it's in the album, but for now, it's all wavy. Most annoying! Aside from that, however, I adore it. It's all about my favorite girl. These are pictures from 4th of July weekend. She was sitting and coloring at one end of the table while I scrapped on the other.

One of the things that was included in the kit was a set of die cuts. I used a few on the She Adores Him page, but I pretty much had the whole sheet left. I was blog hopping a couple of weeks ago and came across a blog that showed a cute little book done with left over chipboard frames. Inspiration struck. I've been wanting to do an acrylic book and I knew this would be perfect. I stopped by the LSS for a sheet of Clear Scraps clear acrylic and went to town with it on the Accu-Cut with the Tags die. I ended up with a great handful of clear tags ready to go.

The book was not without it's struggles, however. First off, the die cuts were only printed on one side. Very typical for die cuts, not terribly great for acrylic books. Secondly, my beloved KI Gloo failed me. I've never had a problem with KI Gloo and acrylics until this project. I could not get it to dry. It showed through the acrylic, oozed everywhere and was generally a mess. I was frustrated and ready to call the project a loss, even before I took the sneak peak pictures. I decided that a few embellishments and maybe some paint sponged on in key areas would do the trick. I took photos and zipped a mail off to a girl on one of the message boards (never got a reply from her though). I knew I would need a couple of tags to replace two that were just completely beyond repair, so I stopped by the LSS and picked up another sheet of Clear Scraps (her last one!) and cut a few replacement tags, plus some scalloped circles for a future project. While I was there, Shanel turned me on to Beacon 3-in-1 Advanced Craft Glue and loaned me a bottle to try. (I just realized I left this at home even though I swore to return it to her today!) Fabulous stuff! Stinks like crazy but it holds! And even better, it DRIES! Here's a close up of one tag, showing how you can see through to the others -

Even with the new glue, I still had the problem of lots of white showing through the tags. However, since KI Gloo failed me, I was able to salvage 80% of what I'd done. I gently pried the die cuts and photos off the tags, backed them with patterned paper from the kit and then glued them back on. Some were well enough covered that an application of some BasicGrey swirl heart rubons did the trick. Others just needed a little embellishing with buttons and those green flowers that were originally on the She Adores Him layout. A few tags were unsalvageable and I pulled out the spare wallet photos and redid those. Thank goodness you get two wallet photos! I usually stash the spares away for later projects, but this time I needed them. A Creative Cafe binder ring and white and that same ribbon from the Socks layout, plus a bit of black and white ribbon from my stash completed the project. I LOVE it!! Here's the finished tags -

Stroll down memory lane

2008-08-19T09:42:00.006-05:00

After spending hours upon hours upon hours working on your pages, how often do you take the time to wander back through them? For me, not as often as I should. Last night I got a wonderful trip down memory lane as I browsed through my layouts looking for my favorites to submit to my LSS for their design team call. When it was all done, I settled for a nice mix of things I had just finished and things I had tucked away into albums. There were so many layouts I loved that I didn't even crack the 8x8 books.

In honor of my walk, I decided to share a few of my favorites. Starting with the 8x8s. I totally love working in this size. I can easy get 3 photos with a great layout. My top four from my daughter's book -

This is one of the first layouts I shared online. I did it for a challenge. As I recall it required a bunch of different patterned papers, ribbon and a certain number of buttons. It was so much fun to put together!

This one is from a kit swap. Each member would build a kit for their buddy and then swap. I love Sassafrass Lass papers, so this was right up my alley.

Here's one from an online class. The right size was the class, with the painting and angles, everything else is all me.

This last one was for a Fancy Pants Design Team call. The white is actually a transparency. I doodled on it with a resist medium and then let it dry. Once it was dry, I sponged pearl white paint onto the transparency. After it was all dry, I peeled away the resist to reveal my doodling. The transparency is then layered over cute Fancy Pants paper. I added a bit of Heidi bling and a glitter title to tell the story of my daughter getting her first bling. (Her daddy cried more than she did!)

Now for a few 12x12s. This one is one of my very favorites. I taught this in an online class on Create My Keepsake about a year ago. I love using bright bold colors with black & white papers and pair that up with black & white photos, with just the occasional color photo for added pizazz.

Another total favorite here. With both kiddos, we've done a picture of them curled up in Daddy's fire helmet. I held onto these for a long time before I found just the right papers and embellishments to really make them pop. The great title doesn't hurt either. She is truly her daddy's heart!

Fun techniques page. This one is loaded. The snowflakes are all stamped on a transparency. My favorite bit are the jumbo Making Memories grommets. This layout was actually on their gallery for a while. I love my grommet tool, even though I haven't used it in a while. Perhaps it's time to break it out again.

A friend of mine pointed out that I had a ton of pink in my gallery. I hadn't really noticed, but I do have a girl. Here's a couple from my pink obsession -

And a couple of single pagers. This first one was for a Design Team challenge. The challenge was to scrap your weakness. Tea is probably more of an obsession than a weakness for me, but I love how this layout turned out. The "{tea}" bit in the title is done on Shrink Plastic. It looks really cool in person. It's also blinged up with some Prima swirls for steam over my favorite tea mug.

This one is actually a 2 pager, but for the longest time, only this side of the layout was complete. I would drag out the other side and stare at it a bit on a regular basis. In fact, it's only been finished for probably two months. I realized this morning what has been continuing to bug me...no journaling! What was I thinking. I plan on picking up a journaling card at the LSS and fixing that before I hand over the portfolio. I didn't think to take pictures of the other page, so you'll have to wait until it get it back to see the whole thing.

Cards and Altered bits. Next to doing a layout, I love to stamp. After stamping, my greatest love is altering stuff. A good 95% of my altered stuff goes to family and friends as gifts. Here's a note, mostly to self, take time to take pictures before handing over the project! I'll post next week on the hazards of forgetting and having others photograph your work. Anyway...here's a few cards -

An adorable notebook. This is done in American Crafts. I just love this! I actually made 2 of these. The first one doesn't look near this pretty and only has a handful of pages still in it. I used the heck out of it. I need to make another before I start using this one. That way I'll always have one ready to go.

Totally fun Milk Carton. Shanel (my LSS owner) had these in stock and I fell in love with them. This is the only one I got pictures of, however. As far as I know, it is still living at her shop.

Combo card & altered. Pubcalls was doing a big birthday bash and giving away fun prizes. I didn't win anything, but I loved how this card and altered clothes pin turned out. I made a matching envelope for the card that is lined in the same patterned paper. I still have this. It's just too cute to give away!

Let's Talk Layouts!

2008-08-13T10:40:00.004-05:00

Let's talk layouts. After being only partly productive last week, I more than made up for it this week. Miss is getting used to Mama scrapping regularly on the weekends and comes to sit at one end of the table with her crayons. When she tires of that, I can generally distract her with the Backyardigans or a selection of Disney movies. The boy child tend to be more problematic, but he's 4 months old, so I give him a bit more slack. Either way, productivity was high. I got the two from last week done, plus some. So let's talk!

First up, my total favorite. I loved it from last week, but now that it's finished, I love it even more. It doesn't hurt that it features my guy!

I did go with glittering for the title. Unlike the letters in the glitter tutorial, though, this one was a bit more challenging. The welded title was too big to fit through my mini Xyron. Now I do have a Xyron 900, which would have worked, except it's out of adhesive. I've been thinking about investing in a 510 for larger titles like this. Thinking is as far as I've gotten with it though. I ended up using a liquid adhesive and then glittering. Some areas dried faster than I could glitter so they aren't covered. You can't really see it here, but it gives it a nice rustic distress look that really fits well with the rest of the layout. I also had brackets cut to go around the title, but decided not to use them. The black scalloped band is velvet trim from my LSS's Creative Cafe. They were featured on the Creative Cafe blog, so you can see where I shop! I'm always raiding the cafe wall when I go in. So much goodness!

The other layout from last week, finished. I have to say I totally love how it turned out. I did decide to swap the pages back to the way I originally built it. I just liked the feel of it this way.

Notice anything different about the flowers? The green totally bugged me all week with the pictures up on the blog. So I decided to go with something that better fit the layout. Since I didn't have any white flowers on hand, I made some. I really love how the crocheted flowers look and they took less than 5 minutes a piece. I would whip one out whenever I had my hands free. I actually ended up with 7, so I've got extras for cards or another layout. Take a closer look -

Moving on to new work for the weekend, I found my Uniball White pen and went nuts-o for a bit. I knew I wanted to do circles and was trying to figure out how to do the background. I used an old Creative Memories template that I got at a National Scrapbook Day crop eons ago. The double layered technique I learned in an online class. It was taught as a freehand sort of technique, but I've had the best luck when using a template. If I free hand it, I throw it away. :) My pen was pretty low when I started this and now I'm nearly out of ink entirely and need to find a replacement pen.

For some reason, I did a close up on the fun flower, which is layered die cuts that were included in the kit, but no close up on the doodling. Go figure! Maybe I'll take a few minutes and write up a tutorial on this and the crocheted flowers. Still, I liked how the die cut turned out -

After all that pop and pizazz, I went for something more...I dunno. Chic maybe. The style on this last layout is definitely a 180 from the others! It's more soft, more subdued in color. I used the oh so yummy Black Market Society papers from the kit and added in some matching flower ribbon I found at Hobby Lobby and some Imaginisce velvety bling flowers I'd gotten from the LSS for a different project and then ended up not using them. They've been sitting around waiting for just the right layout. They were actually on the table with me because I had thought to use them on the Adores layout, but went with the crocheted look there instead. The black brads I used were out on the table because I thought they'd work with the crocheted flowers, but turned out to be too small for that.

I've got two altered projects in the work at the moment. A mini book of acrylic tags. I totally freaked on it as the glue didn't want to seem to dry. I guess I was just being impatient because when I went back to fiddle with them last night they were seriously stuck fast. It took 48 hours to get there though!I still need to do a bit of tweaking on them to make up for the glue showing through in some areas, but I really like the way they're turning out. Sneak peek -

I think I'm going to do a bit of stamping with some staz-on and maybe a bit of sponging with some paint, but that's for this weekend. My other project is an altered canvas with a photo transfer technique. My friend Becks found the instructions on the Scrap Freak site and I couldn't resist giving it a go. I've always wanted to do an altered canvas and I had picked up some sweet Bo Bunny papers at the LSS a couple of weeks ago that are just perfect for this. The canvas got the base coat last night and I'm hoping the kiddos cooperate for me to get the photo transfer done tonight. My guy is working, so all bets are off at this point.

A Bit of Bling - Glitter Style

2008-08-08T09:47:00.004-05:00

Glitter is one of those things that doesn't photograph well, yet still gives a nice punch of impact to your layouts. I love using it. Occasionally I have people asking me how I got the nice even glitter coverage on my letters. Since I was glittering anyway, I figured I'd take a few photos and share the how to that works best for me. Click on images for a larger version.

First off, supplies. Mine are pretty simple and straight forward. I use my Xyron 150 loaded with permanent adhesive, a good quality extra fine glitter (it really does make a difference), in this case Doodlebug, and my letters. The letters are the Cuttin' Up Cricut font cut at 1 3/4". Any guesses as where this title is going? :D It took me a while, but I finally came up with something that really fit those pictures. The letters are loose, but I cut a white welded shadow for them to go on to give them just an extra bit of unity and pop.

You can use any color cardstock for glittering letters, but I've found I get the best results when I use cardstock that is the same color or very close in color to my glitter. Since I'm using black glitter, I went with black cardstock. Run the letters FACE DOWN through the Xyron. It's much easier to glitter the face first and then apply adhesive to the back. I've actually done it both ways when I decided at the last minute to use a bit of glitter. You can do it, it's just far easier to glitter first.

Give the letters a good rub. If you've ever used a 150 machine, you know that no matter how much you rub the cover, you still end up with adhesive boogers. There's all sorts of pricey tools you can use to eliminate these. Most rubon tools and scoring tools are effective. I find, however, that a slightly dull pencil does better than anything else I own. Take your time and carefully go around each edge of every letter. There's no rush. You don't get a prize for glittering first, and really, it's important to just take your time and make sure you get every edge.

Peel away the cover layer. If you see any areas where you still have adhesive (they'll be shiny and sticky if you touch them), use a bit of plastic wrap over the area, press and cut in those edges again. Once you've got all the extra adhesive boogers gone, flip your paper over and give the backer paper a good rub down. This will ensure a nice even coverage of the adhesive on the letter. This is particularly important if you're using textured cardstock. The Xyron adhesive likes to just sit on the high points, or peel away with the backer paper. Carefully peel off the letters and lay them onto your glitter surface. If you have any letters with missing areas of adhesive, very carefully run the letter back through the Xyron. If you're careful, it won't stick to the machine. Repeat the previous step to eliminate extra adhesive and then peel away the letter.

You're ready to glitter! While a little glitter goes a long way, now is not the time to be stingy. Dump a good portion of glitter over each letter. It will look like a mess and if you're not careful, you'll have glitter everywhere. I have one of those tidy trays, but I've found that a piece of paper, or a paper plate works just as well. When I'm doing lots of letters, the paper plate tends to work better. Keep in mind that the glitter will stick to the paper plate. If you're worried about that, take a minute to rub the plate down with a bit of corn starch and then wipe lightly with a paper towl. This help the glitter come off the plate. I usually don't bother as the amount that sticks is pretty minimal.

If you're a bit of a neat freak, this next step could drive you nuts. I shake the plate a bit to make sure the letters are well covered and then I just fish for them with my fingers. If you don't want glittered fingers, use a pair of tweezers. Hold the letters by the edges, making sure you're over the plate (or tidy tray, or whatever glitter surface you chose) and gently tap them on the back side. This will cause any loose glitter to flick off and back onto the pile. Set each letter off to one side. You may have more glitter jump off when you place the letter down. Just make sure you place them on a covered surface.

As I mentioned, glitter doesn't photograph well. So this shot looks pretty much like the first one. This next shot isn't much better, but you can get a bit of a feel for how the end results looked.

This is my glitter pile after I fished out all the letters. For cleanup, I simply bent the plate and poured the glitter back into the bottle. Once all the loose stuff was off, I took a paint brush and brushed anything else that would come off the plate into the jar. There was still a slight film, but as the jar was still full, I didn't bother with it and just chunked the plate into the recycle bin.

When I'm ready to stick the title down, I'll run the letters through the Xyron 150 one more time, this time face up. While the letters are still covered, a good rub down on the surface makes sure the glitter is well stuck. You'll still get a bit that will want to migrate to any possible surface. If this bothers you, once you remove the cover layer on the 150 paper, go over each letter with some Crystal Lacquer or other clear dimensional paint.

Pages in Progress

2008-08-04T09:41:00.002-05:00

I got to sleep in on Saturday (yay me!) and then the kiddos decided it should be a high maintenance weekend, so I didn't get anything finished. I've always liked seeing unfinished pages, sorta getting a peek into someone's design process. Since I didn't finish anything this week, I thought I would share a bit of insight into my process. :) I'm still working with the July Kit from my LSS and I must say, Cosmo Cricket makes me one happy scrapper. I love the color tones in the Hello Sunshine line. They look bright and bold up front, but pair them up with the right elements and they seem to tone down and go a bit on the rugged side. So they work well for manly pages, like this one -

Isn't he hot? :D Definitely a keeper, my guy!

This is as basic as it gets. No title, no embellishments. There's a journaling block, but no journaling yet. I really love the Prima journaling overlays. I'm worried that when I actually write on this one that the bold print behind it is going to cause me problems. I've got some ideas for solutions if it does, but right now I'm hoping to keep it as it is.

My thought process on embellishments - I'm thinking black glitter. I like the bling and the black makes it less girly. I want to keep the circle elements going and pull in a bit more on the stars. I have chipboard stars and I'm well stocked with buttons. The title on this one is already set as is the journaling. The title will be "This Man". I even have the .cut file ready to chop it out. I was just waiting to see where I wanted to go with style and colors. You'll have to check back next week to see this one finished and check out the super sappy journaling. This one was inspired by another Design X challenge. Gosh I love that site! :)

Okay, onto the second layout. This one is actually a bit further along than the other one, but it also has it's own set of challenges. First, the layout ->

First off, I'm not attached to the left/right layout at the moment. I actually built the layout with the two sides reversed, which is how the hearts ended up in the bottom center. I was trying to balance hearts one side to the other and then when I flipped the pages, they ended up in the center. Still balanced, but a different sort of "harmony". I like it just as much that way. I tihnk the title will be the deciding factor on which side will end up where.

I don't typically use patterned paper for the base of my layouts and I very nearly didn't here either. I ended up going with it for a couple of reasons. First, the black cardstock that came with my kit seems more dark grey when I lay stuff on it. Second, I'm short stock on 12x12 black cardstock. Third, well, it just looks good! I was really torn because the back side of this paper is really cute and I had another layout in mind for it. I think my LSS has a few more sheets so if need be, I can get a couple more so I can use the back pattern.

The embellishments are die cuts on top of chipboard. I happened to have the Buck Naked chipboard buttons in my stash and the die cuts listed that they fit right on top. Yay me. :) I tied white ribbon through the buttons to get them a fun 'stitched' down sort of look. The green Bazzill flowers actually match better in person. I'm not sure why they look so olive toned in the picture. I probably need to go in and tweak the contrast a bit.

One item of interest, all of the white photo mats are cut from a single 12x12 sheet of white Bazzill. I really hate wasting white. I don't know why that color bothers me more than others. Maybe because I can use it for journaling or photo mats or small elements. It just drives me nuts to waste. I cut the wallet mats first and then the circles, which left me with a big chunk of cardstock with two holes in it. I was able to easy tuck one hole behind the 5x7 picture, but I still had a 4x6 to mat and not enough "whole" cardstock to do it. I did not want to slice into my remaining piece for one silly photo mat. So I didn't. The 4x6 mat isn't whole. The circle that lays over the top of the picture is actually the circle hole that was causing me the problems. It is laying exactly how it was on the whole sheet. There is a matching scoop in the mat of the photo behind it. I just lined it up with the edges when I stuck it on the page. Voila! No waste! If I had been thinking, I would have cut all the photo mats first and then cut the circles out of them so that they wouldn't show. Ah well, it looks great and no one knows but us, right?

Unlike the layout above, this one doesn't even have a working title and there is no journaling at hand just yet. I can usually pull a title out of my journaling, but this page is just fighting me. Once I decide on the title I've got three options for the lettering. I have two different glitter Thickers, one in white and one in yummy green, I have my Cricut, of course or I have a selection of plain chipboard that I can paint white and stamp with black spots to coordinate. Which one I use will probably have a lot to do with what words I'm using for the title.

The pictures were from early May. Nicholas had only been home for about 3 weeks. She'd gotten over her first impressions with him and decided he was smooch worthy. :) Titles I've tried for this are "Sweet Siblings" and "Sweet Smooches". I'm thinking it's not so "sweet" any longer.

Comfort Zone - Design Experiment Challenge 19

2008-07-27T18:35:00.001-05:00

Just a quick post for now. I'll come back tomorrow with all the gory details. This is another Design Experiment layout. Using items from my LSS kit. Supplies are Cosmo Cricket, Cricut George & Opposites Attack.

Journaling reads -

Only good things are allowed in my comfy chair. A good book, a couple of kids, snuggles, hugs, tickles, giggles, smoochies, a soothing cup of tea. When we bought new furniture this year, I insisted on an oversized chair and matching ottoman. I wanted room to cuddle with my whole family. This chair is perfect. It's not six months old yet, and already full of so many memories.

New month, new kit - plus a page

2008-07-22T14:03:00.002-05:00

This month's kit really rocks for me. It's Hello Sunshine papers from Cosmo Cricket. They're one of my favorite vendors so I was pretty excited. I've been wanting to see this paper first hand and I was not disappointed. I even remembered to take a picture before I sliced into any of this yumminess -

In addition to the Cosmo papers, there are a couple of sheets of Black Market Paper Society paper. This stuff is seriously fabulous. If you haven't seen, or rather touched it first hand, it's a text weight texutred paper. It feels kind of like a stiff linen fabric. I love it! The distressed look black and white papers and really sweet. I cannot wait to cut into them! This month's kit is all about sewing, so there's a set of Bazzill In Stitches templates. Being an avid cross stitch girl, you'd think I would be all excited about these. I'm not. I've never stitched on my layouts. Heck, even my buttons are glued down! Those that appear to be "stitched" aren't. I just thread a bit of floss through them and tie it off. Presto. The kit is rounded out by MM epoxy letters. I'm not a fan of sticker letters of most sorts. I make an exception for AC Thickers, but that's about it. I think my biggest problem is that there are never enough of the right letter. These are the same. I've looked at three prospective titles and keep running out of vital letters. They're about to go right back into the package and straight into the donate pile. Rounding out the kit is some black bling, a few journal spots from an etsy shop (also not likely to get used), and Jenni Bowlin birds.

Now I've got a friend who is total bird nuts, with a focus on owls. She's obsessed, but I don't hold it against her. (Love you, Becks!) She liked them, but I am so not into birds. I keep staring blankly at these and wondering what the heck I'm supposed to do with them. They don't fit in with any of the pictures I printed out. I have a feeling they're destined for the same pile as the polka dot Making Memories expoy letters.

Not satistfied with that load of goodies, I shopped the store for things to round out my kit. I waffled over some jumbo green Bazzill blossoms, and ended up putting them back. They pushed me over budget. I figure I'll end up going back for them in a week or two when I'm ready to embellish. I added cardstock, more Black Market paper, the 8x8 matching Hello Sunshine pad and glitter thickers. A girl cannot have too many packs of glitter thickers! Well, this girl, anyway. :)

Last, but certainly not least, is another Design Experiment page. This is challenge 13, a word(s) or phrase you use all the time. With a 2 year old who doubles as an auto playback tape recorder right now, we've changed a few choice words. The new curse word of choice in our house is "Aw, Pickles!". Anyone a fan of Higglytown Heroes? :) Besides being a phrase she'd already picked up from watching Higglytown, it's silly enough to stick in my head. I have gotten some interesting looks saying it in public. The wording down the left is all Cricut work. I actually did three different versions before I found one that worked with the layout. Email me if you'd like the .cut file. The layout is from the June Page Maps. Papers are Making Memories, cardstock is Prism, lettering is Cricut Cuttin' Up, title is glitter Thickers.

Oh wait, one more thing. I have to show off my fabulous fashion sense. I got a new shoe that makes quite the statment -

Before you ask, it's broken. I stepped on a piece of PVC plumbing pipe Missy thinks is a toy, in the dark of night. I walked on it for a week and a half before I found someone who could correctly read an X-Ray. (Bleh!) I get to sport this fancy bit of business until August 20th. Hmm...I wonder how it would look with a few rubons? Altered foot brace anyone? :)

Inspire Me June Kit Results

2008-07-16T15:40:00.003-05:00

(Gasp!) Two blog posts in two weeks? Will the madness ever end? Well, probably, but stick with me for the moment, okay? I'm really trying to keep this thing up. So major post today. Last month, in a fit of temporary insanity, I joined the kit club at my local scrappy spot. To be honest, the owner has been tempting me with their kits for several months. When she told me June was going to be Jenni Bowlin papers, I really wasn't any more tempted, but I actually had the funds and it was the Trendy line, which is all reds, whites & blues. I'm rather fond of that color combo so I figured what the heck.

After spending a month working with Jenni's papers, I'm still not overly fond of them. They're pretty, but they just don't reach out to me and scream 'Drop Everything & Crop!'. So I won't be going out and buying up all the lines I don't have. Still, I'm really pleased with what I turned out this month. I do wish I had taken the time to take a picture of the kit before I started scrapping, so I could show off what I had to work with. I chose to not use several big items, so they're tucked away into my stash for later inspiration. At any rate....Let's get to the layouts!

Favorites first. I've got two. The first one was really fun to put together. After my daughter started walking, and then running, we went through a phase where she was darn near impossible to catch well on camera. I've got a ton of really bad shots of her. I got teased for sending out images that were less than perfect, but I couldn't bring myself to delete them. After all, they were a part of who she was then! So an entire layout of less than perfect shots -

Roll back the calendar about 6 months and I pulled out pictures of my girl and my dad. These were from my Gran's memorial service, which is why he was dressed up. Either way, she didn't care much. She was far more interested in his tie. I actually had a series of wallet size pics ordered up from Wal-Mart to add to this layout, but their machine was down all stinkin' weekend, so I decided I didn't need them and moved on. You can't read the title well at all here. (I guess I could post the close up shots I took), but it says "If I told you I LOVE you, could I keep you FOREVER?"

And now for pictures in between the two. This layout is probably my least favorite. I feel like it needs something but I just don't know what. It's not a bad layout though, so unless it really starts to bug me, it's not gonna change.

One more from the kit. The one is a Design Experiment blog challenge. I do love that blog! The challenge was week 14, I believe. I did five self portraits and journaled about how I felt. These are pictures of me and the new little man in my life. I think it's pretty obvious that I was flat exhausted. I am not at my best at 3 am, but there's nothing like a camera flash to snap you into reality. :) My journaling is more querky than serious here. Anyone who can be serious at 3am needs to go back to bed! I'm still exhausted, but I figure that's not going to change for a good 18 years or so.

I'll wrap this post up here. I've got another Design X layout I finished and I remembered to take pictures of this month's kit before I cut into it, so I'll save those for later this week or maybe next. If you're lucky, maybe tomorrow, but c'mon folks, don't go holding your breath. It's not like I've got a good posting track record here!

Vicki's Crafty Secrets Card Challenge

2008-07-07T09:07:00.006-05:00

For those of you who have looked at my blog and then keep coming back in the vain hope that I might actually have updated it in the last year...all I can say is well, I told you so! :)

Now that I'm not being distracted by being pregnant, perhaps I shall post more often. I wouldn't count on it, but keep checking just in case. In the mean time, for your viewing pleasure, I offer up four cards I made this weekend. Vicki Chrisman offered up a cool challenge by sending out 20 packets of Crafty Secrets bits and pieces. All we had to do was make up some cards or a project. Once I got started on the cards, I couldn't stop. I used up all my bits and quite a few of the embellishments she sent.

First, the cards as a group:

I wish I had thought to take a picture of the package before I started, but I didn't. My contributions to the whole thing was cardstock, a baby stamp from a CTMH stamp set and some of those lovely sugar coated doodlebug chipboard alphabets. A note about the alphas, use extra adhesive. The stuff that comes on them doesn't hold worth anything.

And now for a few close ups -

This one is just oh so slightly blury. I need to go back and see if I can get a better shot. I really like it though. It came out soft and lovely. I haven't done watercolor in a while so it was nice to reacquaint myself with a much loved technique.

And finally, for my favorite....

Check out Vicki's blog (http://vickichrisman.blogspot.com/) to see the other fun projects and take a few minutes to check out Crafty Secrets (http://www.craftysecrets.com) while you're at it!

EK Success Curvey Cutter - Everything you wanted to know and more...

2007-06-13T10:33:00.000-05:00

Items of note -

1 - Yes, you need a glass mat.

2 - A little repositional adhesive goes a long way to retaining your sanity

3 - Yet another storage issue I didn't need

4 - Lots of sizes makes for great shapes and mats

5 - Are they cricular squares or squared circles? Perhaps they're squircles?

All that said, the cutters are really very nice and I give them a "good to have" for your tool box.

Let's talk packaging. In many respects EK really hit the nail on the head with this one. You can buy just the "shapes" you want/need. They are packaged in circles, ovals and a rounded square that I shall call a squircle because this is my review and I can do things like that. Whatever you call it, they're fairly fun. Of all the pieces, I would rate the squircle as the least necessary for your toolbox. Those are more of a neat, but not necessary.

If you cut circles at all, you should check these out. I rate the circles as a very good thing for your tools box, which is right up there under Must Have. If you're a fan of circles, then go ahead and push it right over to Must Have and get it over with. Ovals for the most part, fall between the circles and the squircles, running right at nice to have, but again, not necessary. Each shape comes with two templates. The ovals package comes with the cutting head, but no fears if you are not an oval person. You can buy just the cutting head assembly. EK Success states that you can get 24 Ovals, 22 Circles and 22 Squircles from the various shapes. I found that I could even get a few more cuts by running the cutting head around the outside of the templates. You can easily get an 11 3/4"ish circle using the outside of the circle templates and similar results with the other two shapes.

One of the best things about any of the templates is the ability to cut 1/8" gradiations, which means instant matting with no thinking in my book. As a small note, the ovals gradually change shape from a fairly pointed oval at the smallest point to a very smooth oval at the largest. At four points up the scale, when the shape changed, I ended up with a couple of curved slices rather than a clean mat. In those instances, you'll have to go up a notch and shoot for a wider mat.

One question I've seen on these cutters is whether or not you need the big 13x13 glass mat. Yes, you do. I tried using the cutters on both the glass mat and on a self healing mat. Don't even both to try the self healing mat, it was a disaster. Although, if you're going for a distressed look on your edges, you might just give it a go. For the most part, it's not worth the effort.

You can get away with using just a sheet of glass from the hardware store, but I would discourage that for one very big reason. Safety glass. The glass mat is tempered or "safety" glass. Which means if you drop that sucker on the concrete slab you've got hanging around for your grommet setting and it breaks, it's going to break into a zillion little bits, none of which will have sharp edges. Yes, it will be a pain to clean up, but it won't send you running to the emergency room because you've sliced your foot in half. The piece from the hardware store will break easier and will shatter into sharp nasty shards. Additionally, the lovely glass mat comes with smooth rounded edges (no slices here!) and a grid for lining up your projects. As an added bonus, if you've ever had the slightest interest in trying to hand cut your own lettering, you will have the perfect surface!

This brings to a close V's Glass Mat Safety lecture. We now return you to your regularly scheduled tool review. As a side note, this mat is also a great surface for painting. It cleans up well under hot running water with a sponge.

Now, the mat has little rubber "feet" to keep it from wandering around your work surface, as do the cutting templates. The feet on the templates work great as long as there is nothing between the feet and the glass. Put anything, like say a picture or the paper you want to use for a mat, between the template and the glass and it will move. I practically guarantee it will. This is easily remedied with some repositional adhesive. I like the Herma dots. Just a little dab in the corners of the paper or photos keeps it from wandering off while you're trying to cut.

One of the biggest positives and negatives to these templates is the center cutting guide. Unlike other systems that give you a clear cutting guide to lay over your pictures/papers to determine where to cut and then remove only to hope you might possibly get the cutting template into the same exact spot as the cutting guide, the EK guide just drops down into the center of the cutting templates. You lay the template and guide over your project, size everything out and then remove JUST the cutting guide. Everything else is still neatly in place. Unless you forgot the repositional adhesive and bumped it while you were removing the guide, there is no guesswork to getting your cuts just perfect.

The down side to this handy guide is that although they made the templates out of a reasonably sturdy plastic, the guides are flimsy and just beg to be trompled, cut, cracked or otherwise destroyed. And the little lifting handles are just cheap. I would have liked to something a little more substantial in such a key element to the system.

The actual cutting head is a dream to work with. The cutter works fabulously, slicing through paper and cardstock like buttah. The handle swivels, allowing you to get a clean cut in one smooth motion. No need to pause and change your grip as you go around the shape. Just drop the cutting head into the appropriate groove for the size you're wanting and cut. The blade assembly on the cutting head has four sizing adjustments. The cutting assembly snaps easily between these adjustments and once in place, doesn't move. The cutting head will cut either direction and the blades are replaceable. The cutting head comes with a spare replacement cutter, which neatly stores in the top of the handle.

Speaking of storage. My biggest complaint with this system is storage. It does not fit neatly into most of my storage containers. I've been looking at a small stack of 12x12 drawers, which will handle the templates, but unfortunately, not the glass cutting mat. I did find that they fit well in the Cropper Hopper vertical paper storage bins. They use up about 1/2 a bin for all the cutters and the mat, so I'm using the glass mat as a divider and filling the other half with cardstock.

Overall, the templates were well worth my money. They are versatile and easy to use, not to mention fun. With more and more products and tools coming out that are somewhat oversized, I hope we'll see some new storage options in the future to cope with that.

(NOTE - This review was originally posted on Create My Keepsake on 3/2/2007)

BasicGrey Precision Cutting Mat - Must Have!!

2007-06-13T10:29:00.000-05:00

"Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything!" The quote on the mat says it all.

Items of note -

1 - Fast AND accurate depends largely on the person behind the craft knife.

2 - This is not your mama's cutting mat

3 - Storage can be a challenge

4 - Lots and lots and lots of markings make for one happy cutter.

5 - I need two so I can build double page layouts.

All that said, this is a really great cutting mat that should find it's way into your Scrapping Essentials Pile.

If you haven't seen, held, fondled or otherwise had a face to face meeting with this mat, let me give you the low down. The mat is a 15"x15" self-healing mat with a sheet of metal sandwiched between the front and back. This gives the mat some extra weight, but it also keeps it from wandering around my work surface when I'm trying to do some delicate cuts. The accomanying ruler is 18" long, metal with a magnet strip down the back side. This gives the ruler a little bit of lift off the working surface. That can be cool, unless you're like me and can cut a curvey line even using a magnetic metal ruler. I had a couple of instances where I leaned the knife at just the wrong angle and it drifted off under the edge of the ruler.

As a cutting surface, the mat is excellent. The 1/8" markings around the edges made thin, precision cuts a breeze. Those magnet tie downs are great at tying down smaller pieces of cardstock that might try to head off on their own while you're cutting. The tie downs and ruler should not, however, be a substitute to paying attention to what you are doing with the craft knife! Those magents only hold the paper in place. The blade on your knife will happily wander all over the cutting mat (or at least veer off course) when you're trying for a precise cut. My not so spiffy retractable craft knife and I are not on the best of terms right now, but that's another review.

As a working surface, those little markings are great at getting items straight and lined up on the layout. The biggest downside to the mat? Well, the obvious...you can't use it as a cutting surface and a layout building surface at the same time. My solution to the delima was to use the mat as a work surface. My layout is stretched out on the coffee table beside me while I work on cutting, punching holes and anything where I'm concerned about my work surface. I do primarily double page layouts, so using the mat to build my layouts really wasn't feasible anyway.

For those of you that want to use it for building layouts I have two things to recommend -

- Pick up a package of the Magnetic Tack Refills. That will give you an extra 10 tie downs and more flexibility.

- Get all your cutting out of the way before you start building your layout

The only other downside I have to this mat is the size. It won't fit into any of my traditional storage areas. Since I'm using it almost constantly as a work surface, this is a fairly minor delima. The mat does have a hole in one corner (as does the ruler). My handy husband has offered to install a hook near my workspace to I can just hang the mat on the wall within easy reach. Storage delima resolved. Perhaps BG should include a cuphook in the packaging?

Much worse, in my book, the mat doesn't fit into my cropping bag! As I generally crop outside the home at least once a month, this is a bit of an issue. So, while it's going to be a staple in my home cropping space, it's not going to be doing any traveling. I would love to see BasicGrey follow up on this with a smaller "travel" size mat, maybe one marked for 8x8 layouts with a nice magnetic 12" ruler?

Now if I could just find a really great craft knife to go with it...

(NOTE - this review was originally posted on Create My Keepsake on 1/11/2007)

Making Memories Grommet Tool in Review

2007-06-13T10:21:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite new "toys" is the lovely new Making Memories Grommet Tool.

Items of note -

1 - You're going to need a hammer.

2 - You're going to need a good solid surface.

3 - The MM hammer is cute, but locate a large "real" hammer

4 - This is not a silent tool!

5 - I always feel the need to make curtains when I pull out the kit.

All that said, I love the tool and the effect I get when I use it. I give it four out of five stars. Not necessarily a must have, but definitely high on the list of darned cool.

After my Cricut instructions episode, I made sure to take the brief moments it required to review the very limited instructions on this piece of hardware. Limited might actually be over stating it. There were just a couple of bullet points on the package, pretty much what I've come to expect from Making Memories in the way of instructions.

At $20, I feel like I reasonably got my monies worth. It comes in the standard MM tin, of which, I now have a small hoard. They cute, but what I'd really like from them is a nice toolbox. This handy dandy little tin includes:

o 2 anywhere hole punches (1" and 1½")
o 2 setting handles (1 large and 1 small)
o double-sided setting base
o self-healing mat
o storage tin and 12 grommets (6 large and 6 small)
o Tool designed for small and large grommet setting

What this kit does not include is a hammer. I haven't used my MM hammer since I got my MM Instant Setter a couple of years ago. After a mighty quest, hunting for the mystical MM Hammer of Doom, I finally located my old MM tool kit under a suspicious pile of patterned paper that I distinctly do not remember buying. It did provide a lovely 15 minute distraction as I thumbed through all the paper, though.

Once I settled back down to go at it the setter, I was back in business. I was back in business for less than five minutes. While the little MM Hammer is cute and takes up relatively little space in my scrap hoard, it is largely ineffective with the Grommet hole punches. It works moderately okay with the smaller of the two hole punches, but I soon went hunting up the large household hammer to have a go at the larger of the hole punches. I had some technical difficulties with the large hole punch and after a mail to MM, it was suggested that a VERY solid surface (they recommend concrete) is the best for using the hole cutters. Apparently, everyone needs a good concrete slab in their cropping space. As I'm still having some difficulties getting that punch to cut, even after trying it on my back patio, my punch is probably just dull. I contacted MM again and they're going to replace it. I ended up finishing my holes with an xacto knife.

Once I actually got to setting the grommets, things went much smoother. The setting plate is two sided. I didn't notice this initally, but once I figured it out, setting the large grommets went MUCH better. I discovered that I got the best results when I gave the setting tool a couple of solid whacks with the MM hammer, they take a much lighter touch than the hole punches, then finishing the set with a few light taps on the various prongs.

The tool actually creates a very nice peek-a-boo window effect nicely framed by the grommets. I know I will use this to frame out small images on a page. After I got the tool figured out, the actual cutting and setting of grommets went very quickly. It did take me back to the early days of eyelets, when we happily whacked away at them without any regard to sleeping babies. I had to wait until Linsey was up and about and playing before I could break out the tool.

The biggest down side to this tool I have discovered so far is storage. I did not need yet another MM tin sitting on my shelf. Not to mention that this tin is exactly the same size as the Instant Setter tin, although, when fully loaded it does weigh a bit more. I've still manage to grab the wrong tin several times. I finally broke out the labeler and fixed the problem. The other storage issue is the grommets. The package came with a small selection and I bought several other packages. These are in very plain packaging that does not lend itself well to storage. I ended up opening all the grommets and dumming them in a baby food jar for lack of better place to put them.

Currently the color and style selection on the grommets is fairly limited. We had the same thing with eyelets in the beginning, so it's just a matter of the tool catching on before we see a wider variety of styles. Personally, I want snowflakes. Big honkin' grommet snowflakes. On the up side, the grommets do have a nice clean finish that takes paint and ink very well. They can also be sanded to give a more rustic look.

I think the biggest problem this lovely little tool will have is pricing. At $20, the actual took kit was not a bad deal. I've seen large anywhere punches in tool stores and they aren't cheap. They also don't look near as nice or user friendly as the ones in this kit. The grommets, though, are where people will be inclined to pass, or at least find a good coupon. They're packed 12 to a pack with 6 large and 6 small on the circles or 6 each of 2 different color flowers for $4. That can add up pretty quickly.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with my purchase. I'm still looking for an acceptable storage solution for those grommets, but acceptable storage is an ongoing mission of mine.

(Note - Originally posted on Create My Keepsake on 12/20/2006)

Full Blown Cricut Review

2007-06-13T10:17:00.000-05:00

Linsey was an angel last night and happily played in her baby demilitarized zone (ie. the jumbo play pen) while I got down to business with the Cricut. I had Survivor on the TV, Itsy Bitsy Spider going in the pen and the Cricut on the coffee table humming away.

Okay, notes first -

1 - Wait until commercials to push CUT. Otherwise, the bug will flat drown out Jeff and you'll miss something important. Thank you Dish Network DVR!!!

2 - The manual may look thick, but it's got lots of languages, so reading it takes no time at all! It's super easy to follow and understand. (don't do as I did, take time to read it!)

3 - The cutting mat is uber sticky. I mean UBER sticky.

4 - 6x12 paper may sound like a good idea, but scraps work fabulously with less waste.

All that said, I am so in love with this tool! Definitely five star. I can't wait to get my new cartridges.

After breezing through the instruction manual, I discovered there are three settings that help you get a great cut. The blade housing has kind of a depth setting on it. I found that a 3 on the blade cut both patterned paper and cardstock very nicely. I fiddled with speed and pressure settings as I sampled various papers. Mostly a thin patterned paper and a smooth 80lb cardstock I got from Stampin' Up! It seemed to me that these adjustments are some personal taste and some technical functionality. I think that I'll get a feel for what is needed on what sorts of stock as I use the bug. For reference, I used a speed of 2 and a pressure of 5 on the cardstock.

After playing last night, I must say that at least 2 mats are essential or you are going to spend half your time unload and loading paper onto the mat. Did I mention that it's oh my gosh sticky??? It's so sticky that when I pulled the patterned paper off, it curled. Yeah, that sticky. I can see that over time it will lose that stickiness (which is the main reason to replace the mat), but for initial use, it's got almost too much grab. As for having two, I was cuting letters and shadows out of different colored cardstock. A little foreplaning on that with two mats, I can load the paper on both, cut the first, set it to shadow, load the paper and cut the second, setting both with the finished cuts aside while I work on my layout. Sadly, the machine only comes with one mat, so pick up a pack when you buy the machine.

There is a Cricut tool kit out on the market. While it isn't essential, I can see where it would be helpful. It has moved up to near the top of my Christmas wish list. You can definitely manage without it. I used my Creative Memories multitool and that helped get the letters off the mat (like I said, UBER sticky!) without tearing them up. I tore the patterned paper ones the first go. I used my pampered chef stone scraper to get left over bits off the mat. I have a set of Stanley picks I stole from my husband's tool box (Shhhh! he doesn't know! :) He had three, he won't miss one set, right?) to poke out holes and whatnot. This worked, but after two hours straight of playing with the bug, I wanted that toolkit.

The Cricut comes with George/Basic shapes. It's a nice multifunctional cartridge...that I am totally bored with already. First, it's a unicase font, only upper case letters available. I'm a title case type of girl, so I'm craving lower case letters. Second, the shapes are basic, thus the name. :) There's a couple of styles of tags, two flowers and then a set of squares, circles, triangles and various polygons. Once I had run through them, I was itching for variety. I didn't order a shapes cartridge, but having played with the basics, there are now a couple on my Christmas list. The set it and forget it mentality of this machine already has me wanting to do shaped die cuts, which I haven't done much of in the past.

My favorite thing about this little bug is the "shadows" feature. I have oodles of alphas for my Quickutz (like 12 I think), but not a shadow in the bunch because I'm not willing to pay the full amount of the alpha cost over again to get the shadows to go with it. No extra cost here. Just push a button, type in the letters, press cut. Voila! Bliss. I now have "LINSEY" with shadows in 6 sizes. That feature alone has me sold! See the note above about mats though. If you even think you might do lots of shadows with your lettering, get those extra mats. Or if you're going to do a shapes cartridge, so many of those are layered with different colors!

My last comments are on paper. I started out slicing 6x12s, since that's the size the mat would hold. Within 15 minutes, I had grabbed my box of scrap cardstock and was using it. It takes a little thought, but even small scraps work. The mat is printed with a rulered grid, so you can see the sizing. If you're going to cut 2" letters, you want to make sure you've got a good 2" plus a bit strip of cardstock/paper to work with on the mat. I did 2 1/2" strip with no problem cutting 2" letters. It's also a piece of cake to position the blade at a different location on the mat to use up bits of paper you have left over and to really get the use out of the whole cutting surface on the mat.

Now I've been an avid Quickutz advocate for five years. I haven't been so impressed with their releases this year, which is one of the reasons the Cricut caught my eye. Don't get me wrong, I love my dies, but I can already tell that about half my alphabets are likely to appear on eBay in the very near future. There is just something to be said for being able to type in your word or phrase, push cut and walk away.

(NOTE - review originally posted on Create My Keepsake on 11/10/2006)

Bad Blogger

2007-06-12T10:53:00.000-05:00

I am a bad blogger. I'm going to come right out front and say it now, before you get a chance to get attached to my blog. I'm inconsistent. I'll post every day for a couple of weeks and then nothing for weeks on end. Actually, I can't imagine posting daily, so just check on a weekly basis. If I get excited one week and post more than once, it won't take you long to get caught up. I'm not making any promises though. Not on the posting front anyway.

I will promise, however, to be completely honest when it comes to my reviews. If I love it, I'll rave about it. I love many tools, so that happens more often than not. Loving a tool doesn't mean it's something you've gotta have, though. Some tools/supplies are just flat subjective. I'll do my level best to give you the facts on those and let you make your own decisions. On the other hand, If I really hate a tool, I'll tell you in awesome graphic detail why I hated it. If you still feel compelled to buy it afterwards and give it a try for yourself, not my problem. I'll happily come along and tell you "I told you so" afterwards if you need it.