Best Wishes

I have a card over at A Blog Named Hero today! I was so honored Mary Dawn and Linda asked me to participate; I'm squeeing a little over here ...

Here's my card, then I'll explain:

I based it on this sketch from my bloggy pal and fellow online class addict participant, Dixie:

During the July 1st OWH blog hop, each blog featured a bonus sketch, and this was the one Dixie used. LOVE IT! FYI, the OWH site has a ton of free sketches for you here: OWH list of sketches.

So ANYway, my card is largely based on Dixie's card, because I love it so. I used the HA Clouds background stamp and spritzed it with water before I stamped it to make it all mottled, just to be different. My flags are made out of washi tape, and the sentiment is from the HA Essential Messages set, stamped in SU Only Orange (retired). I wanted it bright, and I don't own the HA neon inks, yet. heh

So thanks, again, ladies, for allowing me to share in your HA awesomeness.

And thanks to YOU for stopping by!

Birthday Fishes

I've mentioned here before that two of my stampy peeps run the A Blog Named Hero blog. They have some great challenges and they inspire me to use my Hero Arts stamps, which is a good thing! They also enable me to need more Hero Arts goodness, but we won't mention that part. *ahem*

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when they asked if I'd like to guest-post over there, and of course I said YES!  I took the opportunity to break out one of my new-to-me Hero Arts/Studio Calico background stamps, and I made this:

I inked up the Chevron background stamp in four different Distress inks and declared it to be the ocean. That led me to break out my Oceans of Joy set to use the fishies so they could swim in the ocean. I embossed them in black, then colored them with Faber-Castell Gelatos (gosh, I love those things), and cut them out.

My heartfelt thanks, again, to Mary Dawn and Linda for asking me to guest post over at A Blog Named Hero. (squee!)

Thanks for stopping by!

Recipe:
Stamps - Hero Arts/Studio Calico Chevron, Hero Arts Ocean of Joy
Inks - Distress Mowed Lawn, Evergreen Bough, Peacock Feathers, Broken China; Versamark
Paper - Tim Holtz Kraft Core Nostalgic Collection; clearbags.com note cards (really!)
Other - Faber-Castell Gelatos, SU black EP, SU Dimensionals, Best Creation 3D foam tape small squares

Pennant Birthdays

When I was a young thing, I liked Math. A lot. I took advanced Math classes and after-school math classes, and yes, I was a nerd. So even though, much to the embarrassment of my now-grown children, I can no longer add three numbers without a calculator, I still do NOTICE numbers. And patterns. And interesting things like just now when I went to create this post, I had 1,111 posts. Yes, this one is 1,112, but I didn't notice the number until it was cool, and 1,110 is not cool, where 1,111 is cool. Whatever.

Tonight I had plans to rescue a piece of paper from the UFO pile and make birthday cards. Yes, tonight. Why, was there something going on tonight I should know about? Football on TV? Really? Hmmm, oh, well.

So yeah, I was in the craft room and dug a piece of 12x12 paper out of the UFO pile. This piece of paper had four distinct 6x6 sections. Two were little rows of lines that reminded me of candles, and the other two were solid colors - one purple and one pink. I smelled "birthday".

You can kinda see the papers in this totally poor shot of the stamp set I used:

I wanted to use that pennant stamp, so I stamped it many times on both the pink and the purple pieces until I had enough pennants for two "happy birthday"s in each color. Did you now there are 13 letters in "happy birthday"?

After I stamped the letters in each pennant, I started to cut them out, and GAH! It was a fussy-cutting nightmare. What I am about to show you is real. Please do not adjust your monitor. My purpose in life is to expose the ugly, soft, messy underbelly that is the crafting table.

Here is a set of pink pennants cut out with the pieces still attached to each other:


And this is a close-up of the fussy-cutting:

This was the first of four sets to cut. I got lazy and did the rest of them like this:

Side note about that messy crafting spot ... I do change my grid paper, but usually only under two conditions:
(1) It is sticky with adhesive or has paint or pigment ink on it. That will destroy any card placed on top of it, so it has to go.
(2) It is so stamped over I can no longer see the grid lines.
Other than that, why waste good paper? I save the sheets from my Stamp Camps and use them in here. They look much better before I start working with them. This one is weeks old, but still not ready to toss. The end.

Wanna see what I did with all those GAH little pieces? Here you go:


Yeah, I need to adjust those pink pennants a little, but other than that, I think they came out just fine.

Remember that Math I mentioned earlier? Remember I said I stamped enough pennants for four cards? Remember how I said this piece of paper had 2 pieces with these lines on them? Why yes, I have two sets of pennants left over, all cut out and nowhere to go. Sigh.

In other news, I won an award! I did! One of my tweeps, @IamthePeachy1, posted her Super Blog Bowl Sunday MVP awards, and I got a mention in the Crafty section. Isn't it grand? -->

You should totally check out her Wednesday "Joke From My Daddy" posts. Hysterical, as is the rest of her blog.

And please check out my Crafty Pay It Forward post from earlier today. It should be fun!

Thanks for stopping by!

I've Been Stalked!

You may notice I have a new badge in my right side-bar. I've been STALKED! Every Friday EtsyStalker features a few etsy shops that catch her eye (their eyes) and they included ME ME ME this week!

Check it out here. EEEEEEK! They also featured my bloggy and Twitter pal UnderstandBlue.

I am sooooo excited! (Can you tell?) Personally, I suspect it's because she tweeted that she is in Phoenix and was looking for restaurant recommendations, and Blue happens to be in Phoenix for Leadership 2010, so I hooked them up. Twitter rocks!

I'll be back tonight with a plumbing extravaganza that you won't want to miss. Seriously.

Thanks for stopping by!

I've Been Featured!

Just a quick note: I've been featured!

Yes, my friends, one of the cards in my esty store has been featured on someone's blog! Check it out: http://kraftymax.blogspot.com/2009/07/frantic-friday.html. I am so tickled!

Gotta run to the Day Job. I hope to have an actual card to post tonight.

Thanks for listening to me brag. ;-)

Prezzies!!!!!!

Is this not GORgeous?!?! I think it is a trivet. Or a cheese plate. I could make it serve any purpose I want, right? :-)

A friend of mine is overseas for a few years, and in her travels she went shopping in Poland. She saw this and thought of me, so she sent it to me! How sweet was that?!?!?!

Uh, yeah, green and blue, hello! This is so perfect for me, and I am very touched she thought to send it.

In other news, I am working in The Other Room today, with a goal of taking down the 6-foot table. That means I need to find new homes for all the stuff ON the table. It is going well, and I hope to have a happy update later today.

Thanks for stopping by!

Today was a glorious day! The sun was out when I left for the market, and even though the Rain & Cloud Gods threatened us, the sun won out! Yay! This was the view from my table. Quite pretty, I'd say!

The market traffic was pretty brisk, but there were not a lot of buyers. Back to normal! But we always have a good time all the same. :-)

Last week I blogged about how I had more cards than would fit into my space, and although I got several most-excellent suggestions for presentation, I thought I'd show you my dilemma.

This is the box that holds my Birthday and Thank You cards. This box is the one that is too full, and since expanding my table space is not an option this year, I needed to thin the herd so people could actually take cards out to look at them! (They were in there pretty tight.) Last week I just did not put them all out, but today I tried an overflow box in front of the big box (you can see it there in the bottom left corner), and it worked out pretty well! Let's hope I sell a lot of Birthday cards in the next few weeks. Oh, and I'll need to stop making more, too! Like that'll happen ...

A little market diversion (I told you sales were slow) - check out this little pig! The Rock Lady finds rocks that 'speak' to her, then she paints them and does these really cute presentations. :-) Isn't he cute?!

When I got home, I checked my email and I had this "Gift of Love" from Miss June! Lookie:

I am supposed to pass it on to five more people, but you know what? Once again, everyone I know already got it! So if you read my blog and you do not already have this lovely badge, please feel free to take it!

I was all aglow with the love, so I went off and cut up all the card stock for the Stamp Camp kits for tomorrow and Monday. I bagged them all and cleaned up a little (scary, I know!), so all I need to do tonight is set up the stations and go to bed! But while I was cleaning up the tables, these two pieces of paper fell together, and this card happened:

I kinda like it! The floral and the Rose Red DS papers were just asking to be used together; the sentiment is from the Together Forever SU set that I had not put away yet; I did have to get the Cuttlebug out of The Other Room to cut out the sentiment, but that turned out to be a good thing, since I'd forgotten I needed to pre-cut a bunch of shapes using one of the SU dies for my kits; the ribbon is from a little pile of scrap ribbon on my work table; the pearls are from a little bag of goodies I won on Angela's blog when she was at her last Craft Show Extravaganza. (I straightened them after I took this photo.)

The card has been bagged and tagged, and I really am done playing for a few days. Well, except that I'll need to cook up something for Monday's UHC challenge.

One bad thing that came out of all this: meet The New Heap. Or maybe I should call it a 'heaplet'. Or maybe it's not quite a heap yet, just a heap in the making. You know, with potential to become a heap, maybe, one day. But I PROMISE I'll work on it first before I go back to the other heap. Really!

There's only one day left to enter my Blog-iversary G-I-V-E-A-W-A-Y. Check out the details of what you could win here!

I'm off to finish setting up for tomorrow! Thanks for stopping by!

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.

More Awards!!!!

Sweet Kristie gave me two (TWO) awards today! Woo-hoo!

This first one is the Marie Antoinette award.

This one came with rules - I am supposed to link to the blogger who awarded it to me (see above), post the award (done) and nominate 7 people who deserve it. Seven people !?!?!? Sigh ... When you all travel in the same circle, this is a tough one. I tell ya, one of these days I am gonna make up my own award so I get to go FIRST!

For this next award I'm supposed to nominate 5 bloggers... um, if I do not have 7 for the first award, I certainly do not have 5 for this one. I cannot even give it to the same ones as above, cuz, well, I am one of the Little People.

But I will follow the other rule for this award, and that is to tell you 5 things I am addicted to. Or more correctly, since this is my blog, I am supposed to tell you five things to which I am addicted. There, that's better. ;-)

Okay, here we go:

1. Paper, ribbon, irreverent sentiment stamps - all things related to card-making (I mean, c'mon, it is all I do!)
2. Books. I love to read. Mostly historical novels, but the occasional trashy love story finds its way into the mix now and then.
3. Weird history. Okay, not really addicted, but if I have the TV enabled, it is usually on the History Channel, and it is undoubted something along the lines of 'things you didn't know about {pick a famous person}'.
4. (Running low here ...) Um, er ...
5. ? Can I get extra credit for loading up #1?

I guess I have an addictive personality only when it comes to stamping. Hey, I am a good catch! And a cheap date! Just buy me stamps!!!!!

Okay, that's enough of that. Thanks, Kristie! I feel the love all the way across the big pond(s)!

I'm off to stamp now. Thanks for stopping by!

A 3-Fer

Today I have a three-fer for you.

First, I got this cool blog award from Kristie, who I thought had fallen off the planet, but instead she just had a LIFE. Thanks, so much!

Now I am supposed to pass it along to 5 other bloggers, but the people I thought of already had it, so pooh. Again, we'd all go to the same Tupperware parties, too, I am sure. So like chain letters, this one stops here. ;-( But I am touched that people like me, you really like me!

Okay, moving on. I had A Moment today and this is what I said:

Yes, I did say this, so I thought it appropriate to make it into a card. I had the chipboard letters out, so why not? The ribbon is closer in color to the red-ish letters in real life, really....

The reason I said this? Because my baby...my second son ... will be 21 years old next week! Okay, all together now ... HOLY CRAP! And not only am I a bad Demo, I am a bad Mom, since I just thought to make his card. I have much redeeming to do, here.

This evening, I made three or four total messes before this came out:

It was a real glitter fest, I tell you! For cardboard backing and stability, I stuck the sticky numbers to a frozen dinner box that gave its life for the craft. I actually put the numbers on two layers of the box, so I cut each number out twice, which explains all the white that is showing around the edges of the glittered numbers. The rest of the card is also covered in glitter since I think the glue won out over my attempts to contain it under the numbers and letters. It is everywhere. I have glittery pj's, too. Quite sparkly, actually.

I am VERY proud of the embossed happy and birthday words. I stamped them in Versamark, then in Burgundy, then onto the paper, then embossed them with clear EP. Too easy! And the paper is from a retired pack - Treehouse, I think. And the card stock is from my stash of textured every-color card stock. And yeah, the words are a little cock-eyed, but so what!?

I do not think this will pass muster as the final version, as there is simply too much glitter in places it should not be. But as far as the design goes, it might accomplish my main goal of not totally embarassing the bajeebers out of my boy if he is around any fellow Fraternity members when he opens the envelope from his Mom.

Okay, I'm off to make version #5 and then try to clean up some of this glitter...

ETA: My co-worker is on the mend; thanks for your concern. Still hospitalized, and being watched, but her Mom is with her and she should be able to go home soon. They think it was a low sodium level and too much water, which can be a deadly combination. You can read about a similar condition here.

I Got An Award!

We interrupt this program to bring you this special bulletin:

Look what June gave me! My first-ever blog award! I feel so special. ;-) Thanks, June!

"This award is given to a blog that invests and believes in PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind of bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or 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!"

Isn't that a neat idea? Now I am supposed to pass it on to another 8 people who demonstrate this spirit. Unfortunately, I do not read 8 other blogs that have not already received this award. Pooh! It's kinda like a group of friends who want to have Tupperware parties, but they keep inviting each other. So (taking a cue from Kristie) I just want to say how much I enjoy all the wonderful and talented people I have met, virtually or otherwise, through blogging. This, coming from someone who said she'd never have a blog, because what's the point? I get it now. :-)

Okay, Group Hug!!!!

Now back to your regular program.