Baby Steps

I'm still in the throes of settling in and getting unpacked. Slowly. Baby steps. Today's accomplishments include the following:

I bought a wreath hanger for my front door and re-hung this:

And I unpacked my new storage cubbies for my Copics and got this done:

I still have more markers to find for the other slots, and I'm not sure where these cubbies will live permanently, but at least the markers are out and accessible.

These baby steps are helping me make room for the craft table. One box at a time I'm a little closer to that goal. :)

In other news, Bobra is adapting to the wood floors and has found a way to use them to his advantage. He gets a running start and slides into piles of packing paper like a dog will jump into a pile of leaves. It's hysterical, and I only wish I knew when he was going to do it so I could have the camera ready. It's so funny.

Thanks for stopping by!

SOS #125 - Stitching

Happy Tuesday. Are you ready for another Shopping Our Stash challenge? This week we ask you to use stitching on your project. It can be faux stitching or real.

Here's my project:

I had another idea, but it morphed into something completely different. I was going to faux stitch around the edge of the hexagon circle, but instead I decided to pop it up on dimensional adhesive and faux stitch around the outside edge.

The paper for the top layer and the circle were from The Heaplet, as I've packed my other papers. First I die-cut the hexagon circle out of white, then die-cut the solid circle from the patterned paper. I glued them together, then put back only a few of the die-cut parts-is-parts.

When I went looking for my next layer, I had A Moment and realized I could just turn over the piece I'd used to cut the solid circle. That's one less piece of paper in The Heaplet. Whoot! The paper was less than 5 1/4" long, so I trimmed the base to fit.

When I added the banner for the sentiment, I thought it looked weird, so I put some white faux stitching on it to make it look more like it belonged, and not so floaty.

In another Moment, I added some wooden hexagon pieces. I didn't even bother to color them, as I thought they looked nice in their natural veneered state.

Okay, now it's your turn! Go into your stash and make something using real or faux stitching, then come back to Shopping Our Stash and link us up so we can see what you've made!

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Gettin' Inky

One of the first things I did after moving into my new house was find the most important boxes. No, not the kitchen; that's still largely in boxes out in the garage. I'm talking about the craft room. I'm in week #6 or 7 of not getting inky, and I was starting to itch. Fortunately I had a crafty retreat to attend this weekend, so I dug out Craft Desk Box 1, Craft Desk Box 2, and The Rest of The Craft Desk box from the piles of boxes in two different rooms (I might have an overflow problem) and ripped through them until I found most of what I wanted to work on this weekend.

Luckily for me, I planned to come home each night (Bobra is still not sure this is "home", and he needed me), because I forgot 3 or 6 things every day. But I have been crazy-productive, so I thought I'd share a few things I've made.

First, I broke out my Kelly Purkey BACON set and made this:

How fun is that? Several of my cards from this weekend were collaborative, in that (for example) I didn't want to take a week to figure out what to do for a background, so I talked to a few of the ladies and got ideas. I think it's funny that I stamped the pigs on some patterned paper I picked up at the last retreat and I was going to put it back on the "Leave it/Take it" table when I decided instead to just use it!

Here's another one I made:

For this one I used my trusty Lawn Fawn Critters In the Burbs set to make a doggy sympathy card for some friends that had to put their dog down this past week. So so sad. :(

Then there's this one:

I may or may not have taken an unplanned trip to Archivers, just to break up the day and not be sitting, and I got a few stamp sets, so I made myself use them. This card uses a Taylored Expressions set (it comes WITH THE DIES!) and some Me And My Big Ideas papers. You can't tell due to my lack of photography skillz, but the eyes were colored with black and white glaze pens, and they are very shiny in real life.

Last, but not least, is another collaborative card:

I loooove how this one turned out. I used some Basic Grey Persimmon paper and a new-to-me-still-unopened Avery Elle stamp set and dies.

I also made a ton of cards for Operation Write Home, but they were unceremoniously bagged and put away before I took any photos, so I'll get to those later this week.

I still need to finish unpacking the craft room so I can set up my table, but this weekend was a wonderful "welcome back" to the crafty world for me. :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Geek Week

My pal Libby is celebrating Geek Week on her blog to celebrate Mole Day, and she asked some of us if we had any geeky cards to share. Well, I DO!

Remember this one?

It's an artistic rendering of the rubbah molecule. Yeah, it's out of focus because it's very tiny and I enlarged it so you could see it. It's tiny because I didn't know much about sizing the photos back then, and I don't know where the original lives.

I first posted this in 2007 in a post called Over The Edge, and again in 2011 for a Flashback Friday post. I might be kinda proud of it.

Why not head over to Libby's blog and see what other geeky creations people have shared?

Thanks for stopping by!

SOS #124 - Halloween OR Orange & Black

Hello, and happy Tuesday! It's time for another challenge at Shopping Our Stash. This week we ask you to make something with a Halloween theme OR you can just use orange and black. Since I'm packing, and I've over-achieved and packed all my 6x6 pads and my seasonal stamps, I went with the orange and black option.

Here's my tiny card:

It's only 3x3. I cut some white card stock to 3x6, scored it at 3", then masked off the back. Then I stamped an Avery Elle image in both orange and black, and added a Paper Smooches thank you. If I hadn't already packed my twine, I'd have added some orange and black twine, too.

Now it's your turn! Why not stop by the Shopping Our Stash blog to see what the other ladies have created? Then go into your stash, pull out some orange & black, or some Halloween stuff, make something, then come back and link us up so we can see what you've made!

InLinkz.com

Move Update + Some Advice

Hi there! As some of you may know, I moved from Maryland to Ohio this month, and because of the packing, I had to work ahead back in September and get all my DT projects done so I could pack the craft room.

Well, here I am in Ohio, all moved in, but not unpacked. I figure I've got a year or so to unpack, and my plan is that anything still in a box next summer will be sold at a yard sale. I have a dream that both of my cars will fit in my garage.

I do plan to tackle the craft room before the kitchen - I have my priorities, after all. Oh, I'll dig out a baking dish or a utensil here and there for the kitchen, but my focus will be the craft room. I've only pre-scheduled posts two weeks into November, so I've got to get back to being inky!

Bobra has settled in to his new abode quite nicely. He weathered the 8-hour drive a lot better than I expected he would, and he slept most of the way. Once our furniture arrived, he curled up on his blankie and went to sleep. He still has a learning curve with the whole lack of traction thing on the wood floors, but other than that, he's pretty settled in, and that makes me happy.

Some local friends stopped by last night for a pizza party welcome, and it was so much fun to have them over. We used packing paper as a table cloth. HA! These are my people.

Now for the advice part. Packing was painful. I decided since I was soooo efficient in the use of space in my teeny tiny condo, that taking that stuff out of its efficient space and putting into inefficiently-shaped boringly-square boxes made it multiply ten-fold, if not more.

I also re-discovered lots of long-forgotten supplies, like things I bought at the beginning of my crafty journey that I wouldn't dream of using now. My advice: periodically go through your stash, and instead of putting it into a box on a shelf for a rainy day, purge it. Either give it away or sell it, but get rid of it. You do not need it. I tossed so much stuff it was crazy, and I'm sure when I unpack I'll find some questionable items I really should not have packed, and it will be purged on this end.

I've officially bought into the "less is more" theory, and I do plan to downsize even more now that I am here. I will be helped along by smaller closets that won't hold as much s-crap. It's kindof like cutting long hair. That first cut is mentally painful, but once you've trimmed it a bit, the next trim is easier and soon you have a cute new hairdo. That's my goal: a smaller stash and keeping only things I know I'll use now, not "someday".

I'll be sure to report back on how that's going. :)

Thanks for stopping by!

ABNH - Envelopes Challenge

Hello! It's time for this fortnight's challenge over at A Blog Named Hero. This time we'd like you to make or decorate an envelope.

Yep. You can make an envelope from scratch or dress up a regular one. You can also make a matching card, but it's not a requirement.

We're still collaborating with CAS-ual Fridays, so I've used both CAS-ual Fridays and Hero Arts products for my project.  Oh, and I over-achieved and both decorated an envelope and made a card. It just seemed right.

Here is my fancy-schmancy collage:

I know, I know, the focus is on the envelope, so I'll get into a bit of detail about what I did to enhance it.

This all started with a remnant of Japanese paper from The Heaplet. I started out by lining a basic envelope. The first step is to cut the paper about 1/8" to 1/4" narrower than your envelope, then line up the top edges:

My envelope has rounded corners, so I used my corner chomper to round the corners of the liner. You can see it's just cut a bit narrower than the envelope. It's also shorter. You don't want it to go all the way to the bottom. We'll get to that in a sec.

Next step is to apply tape to the top edge of the back of the liner and to the bottom of the envelope flap, like this:

We only want to stick the liner to the flap, not the inside of the envelope. Once it's secured, it will move freely inside the envelope as the flap is opened and closed. Here's how it looks all stuck down:

Notice I stuck it below the existing "lick strip", and I've creased it where the flap folds. The bottom part is all free and easy.

Then I went wild with my stamps and decorated the outside of the envelope, too. I KNOW! Here's the front:

I stamped the image from the CAS-ual Fridays Beanstalks stamp set in Hero Hues black, then colored it with Soft Pool ink using a Fantastix. My plan is to write the address in the space between the two images. That handsome strip of Japanese paper hides a unfortunate schmear of pool ink. Oh, wait, no, I was wrong. That handsome piece of Japanese paper is to tie the front of the envelope to the lining. Yeah, that's it. I meant to do that!

Now, about the back. I started by stamping the flap:

Same deal: Beanstalk stamps, Hero Hues black, and Soft Pool ink applied with a Fantastix.

Now, the rest of the back:

See how that strip of paper ties in with the lining? :) It's held down with some 1/8" Sookwang tape. It's not going anywhere.

Okay, then I had to make a card, mostly to try and use up that piece of paper. Here's the card, then I'll explain:

I trimmed down some pieces of the paper that I'd trimmed off to make the liner, and just made them into three different widths of banners. The sentiment is from the Hero Arts Sending Smiles stamp set, and I stamped the same branch I used on the envelope to ... wait for it ... pull it all together.

The three gold images are from the Hero Arts set. I stamped them in Delicata Gold, which is as yummy as everyone says it is. Why that image? Because if you look closely at the paper:

you can see the flower centers are a dead ringer for that stamp image. I win. :D

After the gold ink dried, I went back and used my black glaze pen on all the dots on the stems, on both the card and the envelope, and also on the centers of the gold thingies.

Finally, I layered the whole thing on a piece of Hero Hues pool card stock and then onto a Hero Arts white card base.

Then I rested.

So, do you decorate envelopes to match your cards? Have you ever tried lining an envelope to dress it up a bit? Wanna give it a shot? Then why not come play our challenge? :)

Thanks, as always, to our fabulous sponsor:

One lucky crafter who links up to our challenge will win a $25 gift voucher from Simon Says Stamp to purchase some new toys.

Thanks for stopping by!

Products used: Japanese paper and the following:

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