CASEing Stars

When I saw Chari Moss' card using the new Simon Says Stamp Star Parade die, I knew it needed to be CASEd. Fast forward to this past Monday night, and I was in a panic. I was going to visit my Dad Tuesday morning, and it was his birthday, so I couldn't show up without a card, right? Think Think Think.  Thus, the CASE.

Here is my card:

See? Total CASE, including the trimming I did to make the row of stars fit on the card front. This took me forever to make. I started off die-cutting the stars out of white, then coloring them with Copics. Why? I have no idea. Do I have a squillion colors of card stock? Why, yes, yes I do. Adding glue to the backs of the Copic'd stars didn't go well, and that effort became pretty trash.

One good thing that came out of all that was this pretty mess:

I might need to call it abstract art and use it on a card! :)

But I still had no card. Think Think Think.

Then I spied a stack of adhesive-backed card stock I'd recently resurrected from a box and set out next to my Big Shot. I'm telling you: you neat people miss out on SO MUCH inspiration. So I die-cut the stars out of the colored card stock. Because the adhesive on the backs is old, the backing pretty much came off when I picked it up off the Big Shot, and I had to poke each row of stars out of the die, trim it, then stick it on to the card front. Repeat. I should have been wearing my FitBit, with all the walking I did back and forth. Seriously. You'd think I'd be skinnier by now.

The adhesion wasn't the best, but it's not like this will be manhandled, so I'm not too worried. Here's the obligatory close-up shot:

Yeah, they are crooked. So what? My Dad loved it, and that's what counts. :)

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go design a craft room not for efficiency, but for maxing out the steps between stations so crafting counts as a weight-loss activity. I'll be RICH! RICH!

Thanks for stopping by!

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SOS #149: May Day

It's Tuesday, which means it's time for a new challenge at Shopping Our Stash. This week marks the beginning of the month of May (eeep, I know!), so we're celebrating May Day, and as an off-shoot of that, we're to be inspired by the May Pole. Here are a few photos:

I thought about ribbon, twisted, rays, rainbow ... and I'm sure there are a LOT more ways to interpret these.

Here's what I made:

It's not ribbon, but it is twine, and twine is twisted. I tried to make rays out of the twine, but that effort failed miserably. This piece started out with the twine on an angle, as close as I was going to get to rays, then I ended up making it mostly straight.

I had that rectangle of twine and went looking for a sketch with a square or rectangle to get a clue about finishing my card. I chose this sketch by Freshly Made Sketches:

and the colors are from the current (and final) Dynamic Duos challenge:

So, with prompts like ribbon, twisted, rainbow and rays, there should be a little something there for everyone. I think you should join us!

Thanks for stopping by!

Just Playing, Again

I've been staring at the list of challenges I thought I'd do this weekend, and I was inspired to combine two of them to make this:

The colors came from the current (and sadly, last) Dynamic Duos challenge:

and the sketch is from the current CAS-ual Fridays challenge:

where we are supposed to use three things (I used three colors of twine) on only 1/3 of the card.

Here is a close-up of the braided twine:

I was working on something else, and where this braid idea may or may not make it to that project, I thought it was perfect here. :)

I'm off to work on a few more challenges, and also the painting in the other room. I hope to finish that project early this week.

Thanks for stopping by!

Products used: Simon Says Stamp Happy Everything stamp set, Bazzill Sea Glass card stock, twine in grey and yellow (from Divine Twine) and Caribbean (from The Twinery), and some Sookwang tape to hold the braid in place.

I've Been Distracted

I've alluded to a side project I'm working on that's been taking a bunch of my time. It seemed simple enough at the time I said Yes, but as usually happens in my world, things got out of hand. I'm making a birthday calendar for a friend (two, actually, because once I figured it out, how much more difficult could it be to make two?*), and I realized that being crafty does not necessarily extend to ALL crafts.

I'm not ready to reveal the whole thing, or my trials and tribulations, mostly because it's not done yet, but this is how I'm spending this weekend:

Painting. Lots of painting.

I've also found a new use for my washi tape collection:

The perfect supports for those hearts!

In between all that painting, I've taken stamping breaks, some of which have been more productive than others. Here is a card that didn't get put into the trash:

This was me using up the end of my can of air for the Copic air brush. I made a sky, then some grass, then the air ran out**.  But blotchy was good for this scene, so I'm good. I paper pieced the birds and added some black glaze pen for their eyes. Kathy Racoosin once told me to make the eyes bigger whenever I could, and she's always right about these things, so I try to follow her advice. It hasn't failed me yet!

For the ground I followed a technique Sandy Allnock has been using lately: adding dots of Copics over a colored area. The grass on my card was splotchy, so I added some dots of the same green I'd used to air brush it, plus some T2.

The sentiment is from an oldoldold Cornish Heritage Farms Kim Hughes set. It was the right size, which is pretty much how I choose sentiments these days.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some painting to do ...

Thanks for stopping by!

*When you multiply the project parts by two, the work expands exponentially. Don't ask me how it does, it just does.

**I might get another air can, but I'm probably not going to get a compressor. You see, I've realized that even though I have about half the Copic colors, most of them are Ciaos, since they cost less. But only the Sketch or Original markers fit in the air brush handle, so either I get to make an adapter and get rich, or else I won't be air brushing much.

Products used: Technique Tuesday Chickadees stamp set, Lil' Inker clouds die, CHF Mocha Chicka set for the sentiment, Echo Park papers, black glaze pen.

Mmmmm ... Baklava ...

[If you are here for this week's SOS challenge post, please scroll down, or click here.]

Okay, that title is the result of a steam of consciousness, and in my world, that's gonna be weird. For the current Jingle Belles challenge to up-cycle or recycle something (see, another Earth Day challenge!), I knew what I wanted to do, but I just needed to get off my butt and DO it.

Since moving to Ohio, I've been introduced to The Spicy Olive, a specialty store that sells infused oils and vinegars. They have really nice packaging, which includes two colors of tissue paper: burgundy/plum (it's tough to tell) and olive. I knew the burgundy/plum would go with my Basic Grey Eskimo Kisses papers, so I got to work on my plan.

I cut eight pieces of the tissue paper about 5x7, applied multi-medium to a scrap of card stock, and began layering the tissue, adding more multi-medium between each layer. It was during this process I decided it was much like putting butter between sheets of phyllo dough to make a crust, or even Baklava. Mmmm, Baklava.

See how that works?

About an hour later, I looked to see if the glue was dry, and it was, mostly, but I am impatient, so I die-cut it anyway. Here's my card:

AGAIN with the disappearing sentiment. I tried two things: (1) die-cut a piece of the tissue paper to act as a shadow under the blue die-cut, and (2) traced around the edge of the blue with a white gelly glaze pen. Sigh.

But I was quite happy with the reindeer:

The tissue paper got all wrinkly, and I think it looks like leather, which is deer skin in real life.  I was going to add a black eyeball, but ... where to put it? So I didn't.

I like the reindeer, but not much else about this card. I did use a never-used die, and I disappeared some of that paper, so there's that.

In other news, it's a glorious Spring day here, so I think I'll go finish cutting the grass! :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Products used (Inlinkz is not happy with the SSS site make-over, so no links today.): Basic Grey Eskimo Kisses 6x6 pad, Lil' Inker JOY die, Tim Holtz Reindeer Flight die, misc tissue paper, multi-medium, SU 2-way glue pen, white Gelly glaze pen, Craft pick, Neenah Solar White card stock, ATG, Fiskars paper trimmer, Teflon bone folder, MS mini score board.

It's My Blogiversary!

[If you are looking for my SOS post, please scroll down, or click here.]

I think a lot of my original bloggy pals started their blogs around the same time I did. There certainly have been a lot of blogiversaries happening in my Feedly feed the past week or so. One of my pals, Libby, celebrated SEVEN YEARS of blogging on the 18th, and I realized she was just five days before me. Can you believe I've been blathering for SEVEN YEARS?!

So I plan to copy Libby and re-post my first card. It's actually from my second post, since my first post was "um ... hello? ... tap tap ... this thing on?"

There were two cards in my post. Here's the first one:

(I was clueless in the beginning about sizing photos, so I can't really embiggen it for you and still have it in focus and viewable. But if YOU click on it, you can actually see it.)  I was already a bit twisted back then, as I used punch-outs from the SU Spiral punch (I think that's the name) for the frog's dumb-bells.

Then I went off on a tangent - a sign of things to come - and posted this one:

It's the rubber molecule (roughly) made out of the rest of the punch-outs. I can no longer find the page, but the background of the card was a copy of a school's Web site about rubber and it contained the diagram I tried to mimic. And mine is crooked. You'll notice the chemical thingies don't line up with the straight printed text. Le sigh.

Coincidentally, Libby has a chemistry background, so this is kindof perfect. :)

Many thanks for sticking with me all these years!  I'll be back soon with something NEW!

Thanks for stopping by!

SOS #148: Happy Earth Day!

It's Tuesday, which means it's time for a new Shopping Our Stash challenge. Today is Earth Day, so this week we'd like you to up-cycle or recycle something and use it on a project.

For my card I used a piece of tissue paper I've been staring at for weeks. It came wrapped around some stamps I bought, and it was so pretty I couldn't just throw it away! Here's what I did with it:

Isn't it purty? (The tissue paper, not necessarily my card.) I first cut the paper into three pieces, then applied some matte medium to a piece of white card stock and stuck down one of the pieces. I smoothed it out, mostly, but there were some wrinkles and I'm perfectly fine with that! I did the other two pieces and set them aside, then started the thinking process. I so rarely think too far into a card before I get started. I like stamping without a net. :)

I decided the light blue stars coordinated pretty well with the Simon Says Stamp Surf Blue card stock. For some reason I chose to limit myself to one piece of the stuff, which became a challenge. This is actually the third of three cards I made, and the larger oval behind the sentiment is really two pieces of an oval that have been pieced behind the white oval to look like I meant to do that. I call it creative recovery. I was NOT going to cut another piece of virgin card stock for one small oval. Pffth.

The blue in the sentiment is Hero Arts Cornflower. I tried several blue inks, but none was dark enough (navy was too dark). Cornflower was okay, but I wanted to darken it, so I went over it with my Versamarker to darken it a shade. I need a royal blue ink, and I'm apparently missing that in my collection. Time to go shopping!

Oh, and the pearls were white and colored with a Copic marker to mostly match the green stars, or at least not look too far off.

Here is one of the other two cards I made:

Same idea. This one got a full oval backing for the white oval and three green gems from the Hero Arts Pool Mixed Accents. I have only a few left!

My third card:

This piece was a bit narrower than the last one, so I trimmed back the front of the card and put a piece of washi tape on the inside edge:

I think I chose poorly, as it's pretty busy, but the color is right!

That's it - one small piece of tissue paper just became three cards! So what do you have in YOUR stash that could be reused or up-cycled onto a card or other crafty project? I think you need to join us in our quest to reduce the landfill, if only a teeny tiny bit. :)

Please stop by the SOS blog to see what my fellow team members have made, and be sure to leave them some blog comment love.

Thanks for stopping by!

Products used: piece of tissue paper, SU pearls, misc washi tape, and the following:

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