A Beautiful Day In The Neigborhood

What a glorious day! The sun was out, the sky was blue, it was NOT raining, and many good things happened. Allow me to share:

First, I GOT AN AWARD! Miss June gave me this. Here's the deets: The Karma Award: "These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind of bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award."

I am so honored to receive such an award, I am speechless. Okay, I am rarely speechless, but I was really touched. Thank you, June! As for the "choose eight bloggers" part? Not gonna happen. I am the end of the line; the chain-letter-breaker. I also do not know eight other bloggers that have not already received this particualr award, so I will just stop blathering now and say: Sorry.

Next up in my 'it was a good day' day, I GOT MY WAY! Ahem. You know how sometimes you see the writing on the wall, but no one listens to you and they plow right ahead? Well, at the Day Job, this was happening. I did not criticize, I just innocently asked why such-and-such was not done {some specific other way}, and I was shot down! Shot down!!!!!! Many times, too. I am nothing if not persistent. Well, today the stuff hit the fan. All the people who wanted it THEIR way, and got it THEIR way, ran into a little, um, shall we call it a 'snag'? The proposed solution was ... ready for this? ... "Well, I guess we'll do it the way Leslie suggested". Woo-hoo! Doing a little dance of joy, here. Is it so wrong of me to be happy? Well, I was happy. And I still am, too!

After work, I stopped for my every-other-week massaaaaaage, and boy did I need it! I feel so goooood right now. ;-)

Moving on. Sweet Miss Kristie, an avid player of the Magnolia Down Under Challenges, sent me an envelope full of stamped images (1) so I could practice coloring faces, and (2) because she knew I would never, ever, ever buy these stamps myself. I just made up that last part, but she did send them to me because she is so darned nice, and they arrived late last week.

Tonight, I pulled out my first image and made this card. I think I used about 28 Copics, too. I tried to pick a light source (shining down from the top right) so I could color her correctly, and I tried. Heaven knows I tried. I think I succeeded in making her jeans look like the bottoms were wet, or dirty, or both. And please ignore the fact that I am incapable of coloring every other square in her pic-i-nic basket cloth cover.

Please DO notice that I used a paper flower AND a button! WOW! Sometimes I amaze myself. The flower is from one of the three flower packs I picked up at Angela's on Saturday, and the button is from a pack of buttons I also picked up in the same shopping spree. Why is the flower in that location? Because I schmeared ink or something in the white space and it needed to be covered up. But it was a great opportunity to play with my new stuff! The paper is from the Scrap Heap (yay!) and the sentiment is an SU rub-on.

I only made one of these. I am so used to making 3 or 4 of anything, that I am not sure how I will display all of these I-only-made-one cards at my market. Hmm ... maybe they will end up in my etsy store instead! :-)

To celebrate my blog-i-versary, I am working on a stash of goodies and a plan for giving them away. Tomorrow I'll post about what's in the stash so far, and maybe I'll have a clue by then how I'll give the stuff away. I am thinking about having three different challenges, one per week for three weeks in May. So far, that's all I know. I'll keep you posted!

Thanks for stopping by.