Don't Faint! It's Bellarific Friday!

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....

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

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?

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

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 -