Don't Drink And Fly

We all know by now I don't "do" Halloween, but a pal asked if I had any funny Halloween cards, and I thought of the perfect stamps. Here is this year's version of Don't Drink And Fly:

I probably should have made the brick wall a lighter color, like, oooh, I don't know: brick red? Whatever, I still love this witch. Here she is, up close and personal:

Yes, I cut her out, x4. No, I didn't cut in between her fingers or along the broom. No, I don't know what I was thinking. But isn't she great?

Note to self: Next time cut her out before you color the black shoes so you can see the lines. ;/

Also, all the orange layers are remnants from my now-organized box of 1/4 pieces of card stock. It was so easy to find them!  Oh, and no ribbon! I must be slipping.

In other news, I'm taking my show on the road tomorrow to teach a friend how to make cards. The chosen theme is Christmas, with focus on snowflakes and deer. Hmmm, my challenge is to pack what I need and not forget anything. I'm debating about the Big Shot. And I just remembered I need card bases. And envelopes.

Oh, oh, I have an envelope story!  I was packing up my cards for OWH last night and I RAN OUT OF ENVELOPES! ACK! I NEVER run out of envelopes. I buy 500 or 750 at a time! I tweeted my crisis and one of my crafty tweeps, Kara, who I met through The Bloggess has taken up card-making for OWH because of me, and has bought 1000 envelopes because of me, and offered to drive across the county to deliver me some this morning. We had a brief tweet-up in the parking lot of a grocery store and made the clandestine hand-off of envelopes for cash. It was fabulous. I love Twitter and the Interwebz and the Lawsbians (my fellow Bloggess minions). THIS is how social media works, people. Now back to our regular program ...

Supplies not listed below include the brick wall (Hanna Stamps), the witch (A*Muse), the sentiment (Eat Cake Graphics), and the papers (Basic Grey eerie).

Thanks for stopping by!

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Crazy For You

In an uncharacteristic moment in the Crooked household, I did a sketch challenge that's not expired yet. I'm not sure how that happened, but I'm not going to complain!

I just played this week's challenge from Freshly Made Sketches:

and this is what came out:

I've done a blend of old and new here. The old elements are the Basic Grey Cupcake papers and the mystery blue layer (I think it's Brocade Blue) that aaaalmost matches the blue strip from the Cupcake pack. The new new parts are the Lawn Fawn twine* and the Simon Says stamp set I used for the sentiment.

I tried stamping the sentiment in multiple colors, using inks, markers, etc., but none of them looked as good as the Memento Black ink I use for almost everything these days.

The sentiment includes a heart:

which is why I was trying to color the thing with multiple colors, but ... pffth. So I decided black was good, and I'd just put something else on top of it, which I did! I colored one of the Studio Calico veneer hearts with a red Copic marker. Perfect.

For a moment -- a very brief moment -- I considered coloring the loops on that frame, then I came to my senses. WHAT was I thinking!? I'll have to play around with this set some more. It has much potential.

Thanks for stopping by!

* Did you notice the paper has red in it and I used orange twine? I like living on the edge. 

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More of That W Stuff

I don't know what came over me, but I felt a burning need to break out some unopened washi tape and make another card using this sketch:

like I did here and here. It's gonna come around again, too, so I'm just warning you now. Here's my latest 10-minute card:

[ Sorry about the glare. I'm still challenged with photographing white cards.]

Aren't these pretty tapes? They're from My Mind's Eye. I think OWH has a limit of 100 cards you can make with the same design, and I might just do that one weekend so I can make a dent in my washi stash.

I have a busy stampy weekend planned, so I hope to have more cards to share over the next few days.

Thanks for stopping by!

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More VSN cards

I thought I'd show you a few more of my VSN cards from last weekend.

This one was about looking out the window and daydreaming, so we were supposed to use the Glitter Window technique. Here is my card:

 The flower is supposed to be stamped on the card base, and there is glitter on the window over it. Lookie:

 I knew I'd never line up the stamp in a die-cut window, so I stamped it on the top panel, die-cut it, put glue on the back, lined it up and pressed the die-cut piece through to the base. Perfect alignment! HA!  The window is a piece of packing tape covered with glitter.

This next card was for the "use classroom supplies on a card" challenge:

 The paper clip was too obvious, but it's all I had, so I went with things you'd find on the walls in different classes. Eiffel tower = French class. I also have Math, Music, Art, and let's not forget the computer punch card that takes me back to my college days, and also the first few years of the Day Job. What's sad is that so many of you have no idea what that means.

This next one looks similar, but it was for the challenge to use school-themed DP. Um, don't have any, so I got creative again. These 7 Gypsies papers came in handy one more time:

Again, Math, music, ledger paper, a clock. That's school-themed, right?

For the "no dog-eared pages" challenge we were asked to make a bookmark. Here's mine:

I used part of a 12x12 sheet of washi paper (yes, a 12x12 sheet...it's from We R Memory Keepers). I tried cutting it separately from the book mark, but the alignment failed me, so I stuck it to the card stock and THEN cut it out.  Matchy-matchy accessories were out on my desk. I used Hero Arts Mid-tone Tide Pool ink, some Twinery twine, and a HA Pool button.

I made this next one right after I discovered this piece of DSP while re-orging all my scraps:

The challenge was to use something inspired by apples. What else could I do but make a card with it for the challenge?

Another challenge was a "Sandbox" theme, and we were to use something sand-related, so I chose to sand some Core'dinations card stock:

This one took me 20 minutes, since that center panel was a UFO from a former failed card.

This next one was a sketch based on what she called the "Victorian" method of lining up desks in neat rows facing the front of the classroom. Um, we had rows of desks in school, and I'm Mid-century, but hardly Victorian!  Yes, I yelled at her a little. So heres' my card:

This next one stumped me big-time. It was a Tic-Tac-Toe with school-themes entries, and except for ONE COLUMN, I had NONE of the images. I ended up making this:

I used Stars, ABCs and School Books. Okay, I called them school books. It's as close as I could get.

Lastly, I give you the cards I made for my own challenge, which was to use notebook paper on a card. It could be real notebook paper, a stamped image, or computer-generated. I didn't care as long as I could recognize it as notebook paper.

Here is the first card I made to use as a sample:

Gosh, I love her. Anyway, I tore a page out of a mini notebook, crumpled it, punched holes in it, distressed it. The image is water colored with an Aqua Painter and ink I put onto an acrylic block. I think the notebook paper took me longer to do than the water coloring. Seriously.

I made this second one in an attempt to do something a little different:

I colored the piece of paper with the HA Tide Pool ink I still had out and used it as a layer for the sentiment panel. I stamped the clock and sentiment, but the border and flower were already there. It's a tag from the Cosmo Cricket Clementine paper pack, as is the bottom piece of patterned paper that I thought I'd never use. :)

Oh, well, that's it. That's all of them. Maybe now you can see why I spent Sunday cleaning instead of stamping.

I hope to get back to stamping this weekend. Monday is the beginning of Hope You Can Cling To, which runs the entire month of October. We'll post a challenge a day, and all the cards you make are to be sent to the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. I'm hostessing on the 28th, but I hope to play most of the daily challenges throughout the month.

Of course, I'll also be making some too-late-to-post challenge cards from my regular pile of neglected challenges. I hope. :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Day 7 Homework for Kick Start

Whaaat? So I skipped from Day 1 to Day 7. That's because this is an inspiration class, and that takes more time than a specific "go make this" challenge or new skill. At least in my world it does. This one has actually been cooking for 2+ days, as we needed to involve another person and have a plan. These things take time, people.

The challenge was to select a partner in crime, then select some stamps that both of you own. Then we were to go off on our own and make a card using the same stamps. The idea is that people have different styles, and when working with a specific item (or items), will come up with different ways to use them.

My partner is crime is Melissa Shea of Love My Scraps, and we chose these two Hero Arts stamps:

The Lattice background:

 and the Friendly Flags stamp set:

Then we went to our corners and started to work. Here is the first card I made:

I stamped the lattice background in Versamark on a white base, then heat-embossed it with clear EP. I then stamped two of the triangles three times each on a white scrap using Distress Black Soot, clear-embossed them, then cut them out. Now I had parts-is-parts.

I colored the triangles with Hero Arts Neon inks, then layered the pairs and stuck them to the card front. The pearls between the flags are Doodlebug, and the ones on the sentiment panel were colored with Copics. I really wanted to use the neon Copics, hoping to match the ink, but they dried dull, so these were done with regular Copics.

Then I decided this card was too obvious, as in: using these stamps in an obvious way. So even though it is a perfectly good card, I challenged myself to make a second card, just to see if I could, and this is what came out:

I stamped the Lattice stamp in SU Bashful Blue ink onto a scrap of white, then used the A*Muse cloud dies on it. Then I used a technique shared by Lisa Spangler so use a piece of scrap paper to make a hill. I cut the hill, then used the negative (top) piece to mask the card, then applied Distress Mowed Lawn ink to it with a blending tool. I moved the mask to the left to make the second hill. I didn't make them different colors on purpose, but I like how that turned out. :)

Now, about those trees. I wanted to make them Fall colors, and I inked up a few in several ink colors, then planned to go over them lightly with the Mowed Lawn ink. Let's just say that they are green now, and they were relegated to the back row. I started again with more trees and only inked their edges with Mowed Lawn. They got pop dots. I drew the tree trunks with my Brushed Corduroy Distress marker, and wiped my mostly-browns (or maybe it was my mostly-yellows) blending pad along the edge of the panel for some definition.

I originally had the sentiment on a white strip of card stock, but it was too in-your-face, so I embossed it with some white EP onto Vellum. I cleverly (almost) disguised the glue dots with pearls. I need to get some larger pearls.

So those are the cards I made with these two stamp sets.  Now please pop over to Melissa's blog post to see what she created!

Thanks for stopping by!

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