My slightly crappy day ends up super sweet...

Today was a bit stressful at work... with all this snow (where the heck is Spring already?!) and trying to get dug out and to work, PC troubles from a power outage in the building last night during the storm, and some heavily pressing deadlines... well, the resultant crankiness was not at Defcon 4, but it wasn't pleasant. 

Things started to pick up after I left early to accompany my mother to an appointment. Afterwards we hit the local Ruby Tuesday's for a peppercorn mushroom sirloin with extra mushrooms, cheddar mashed and the new grilled green beans (yum!) with peach tea. (Although the peach bits kept getting stuck in my straw. LOL)  Sometimes good food and good conversation over dinner can change the color of the sky in my world. =)

Then I got home and my furbabies were so excited to see me.  It's hard to be too cranky with these fuzzybutts dancing in glee because Their Person is home. =)  Some puppy roughhousing and a few kitty snuggles later, and life was even better. 

After that I figured I'd pop online to check my blogger dashboard. I opened it up in Google Reader, and, lo and behold, I saw MY name in the middle of the screen. I actually won a blog candy draw!  Really. Me! Who never wins anything randomly drawn! I had to read it a couple of times, but I knew the comment was mine. I remember wondering if it was too meh when I made it. I wasn't feeling overly mushy-gushy that night, but I really wanted to wish Michelle at Stamps, Paper, Scissors and Donkey Smiles a happy blogoversary. (Her third!)  I thought the candy was pretty sweet, but dismissed the idea that I'd actually win it. I am shocked. Squee'ing in excitement, but shocked. 

So this:

(see here for more detail about the crafty stuff I won)

will be added to my crafty stash as I get started in earnest in my Crafty Year goals this coming weekend.  I can hardly wait! Yay!

Happy Crafting!

Tiddly Inks Birthday Project

A few weeks ago I volunteered (since I need the practice!) to make a birthday card as part of a project for Christy Croll aka Tiddly Inks.  She's collecting 40 cards from her blog followers for her friend's 40th birthday.  Sweet, huh?  She provided this digi and these background papers (now available on her site)

although she did say we could do whatever we wanted.  Her friend's fave colors are red and black.

I seem to be developing a "thing" for square cards. And having this box of dry-embossed DCWV cards is just too easy.  I knew I'd be covering up a lot of the embossing, but I liked the square idea too much. So I picked Retro Squares and created this:
(My camera lens has what I thought was a smudge but what may be something more nefarious, so please excuse the not-so-great photos. Sigh.)

Everything was prepped in Word and printed on cardstock... I picked some birthday and age-related quotations from one of my favorite websites QuoteGarden.com. (I found the site when it was so brand new it practically smelled like plastic shrinkwrap!)  I used my Chicken Salad font from the Pizza Dude, another site where I am a long-time visitor, and created a simple text box that I filled in with a red gradient to match the red background square, then used deckle scissors to cut it out.  I added a "Happy Birthday!" in a quote-shaped bubble text box. I picked one particular quote I really liked to repeat on the inside of the card.  (I wrote in "May each year that passes be your best year ever!" after I took the pictures.)

I colored and paper-pieced and cut out the digi. I'll admit I'm not in love with the background papers, but I found a way to incorporate them... I paper-pieced Kellie's top and skirt with them!  I loved the effect at that teeny size, although lesson learned: Use lighter weight paper and not cardstock when paper piecing, at least definitely at that small size. I also glittered up the boots with Frosted Lace Stickles and added Glossy Accents to the glasses.  Unfortunately something must have brushed across one because there's a tiny blemish, but shhhhh! Maybe they'll never see it. LOL  The card looked it needed something, so I ended up using that same Stickles all around the outer edge of the card.

Then I made a one-layer red square with the quote bubble, this time with her friend's name in it, printed that on 20 or 24-lb paper and glued it to the envelope, which you see in the first photo. Oh so matchy-matchy. LOL

So. Square cards and lots of dimension using foam squares. I'm detecting a trend. LOL  Actually... I used to create flyers and newsletters at my last job (the lack of that kind of creative outlet at my current job is what led me to start making cards in the first place) and working with the computer this way feels like I'm doing much the same thing, except in three dimensions as I cut out pieces and layer them up rather than having them all in one layer on the printed page.  Not that I haven't invested (somewhat more than I expected, quelle surprise!) in inks and stamps that I'm dying to delve into, but it's nice that all the fonts I've collected over the years and my Word skills aren't going to go to waste.

So... hopefully Christy and her friend Kellie like it. I do. =)

I'm nearly finished getting organized and finishing off the dreaded household 'stuff' that stands between me and some really good times in the craft room, so I'm expecting to be crafting and posting regularly soon and filling up my mom's digital fridge. =)  Til next time, happy crafting!

A sparkling 60th, but not in these photos...

It's been pretty stressful at work since my last post and I've had far too much "real" work to do at home to get much, if any, crafting time in.  Frustration!  Then two weekends ago I had to make up 55 little "you deserve a gold star" cards for one of the departments at work, and can you believe I forgot to photograph any of them?  Newbie bloggers, what are you going to do with us?  =) 

This past weekend came the project that tells me I will probably be investing in a better camera, or at least some decent editing software some day.... I had about 10 minutes to get pictures and the light was dying. White on white with dry embossing and shimmery paper is REALLY hard to capture. =[

My mom asked me to do a card for her friends for their 60th anniversary.  What I envisioned is not quite what I got to in the end, but I was not horrified by it (someday I will talk in terms of being "happy with it" instead of "not embarrassed by" and know that I've reached the next level LOL).

My mom is not the tricked out, flowers-and-ribbon bedecked, frilly sort of card person, so even though the card is for the recipient and not the giver, I wanted to stay pretty clean.  I decided to use a pre-embossed 5" white square base from DCWV.  Then I jumped on the PC and drew myself up a gray diamond in Word using some triangle shapes and a couple of lines, which I printed and cut out/embossed with a deckled rectangle Nestabilities die.  I used my Cricut to cut out a 60 from some shimmery pearl paper and then lightly inked the edges with Weathered Wood Distress Ink to keep it from 'disappearing' into the white background and pop-dotted that over the diamond background.  I used one of the fonts on my PC to make up a Mr & Mrs that would fit in a small deckled rectangle Nestie and cut/embossed that.  Pop dots galore and then I needed some bling because it was kinda boring.  Some clear "diamonds" in two corners and done.

On the inside, I came up with my own sentiment and typed it over the gray diamond shape (which faded out in the flash of my camera), cut/embossed with the same size deckled rectangle Nestie as on the front of the card and pop-dotted on. Then I added some "diamonds" to each corner to pull it together inside and out.

Followed by the photography disaster.  I can't tell you how many pictures of a washed out white square image I took since it was too dark inside for my camera to go without flash.  I ended up getting my best photos outside (you can see the snowy ground in the background LOL) as the sun went down. It was cold and really windy and I kept praying that the wind wouldn't rip my card out of my hand and blow it into the nearest slush pile. 

My mom liked it (although the objectivity of a mom is always questionable LOL) and her friend loved it, so I guess that makes it a success. Judge for yourself... 

Another front view that shows the dry embossed stripes better:

 

And the inside... which had the same pale gray diamond as the front behind the "60":

This post seems as washed out as those pictures, too.  Sigh.  Well, OK.. off to write a letter.  Do you think it's too early to start writing to Santa for a new camera and software?  =)

My First Bugaboo Card and My First Promarker Colored Images!

Well, I didn't get as much crafty time as I had planned Sunday, but I still came up with a few things that I like. =)

First, as my mother will tell you, I can be an impatient child. In my Christmas holiday blog wandering, I saw image after image colored with these Copic markers that everyone raved about. Well, except those people who raved about Promarkers.  Regardless of brand, I fell in love with look and decided I wanted to have a try. At about 30% of the cheapest price I saw for Copics Sketch (if I'm investing, I'm going for a brush tip!), the Promarker price meant I could get the entire line of colors.  So I've decided to play with those as I learn and if I like it as much as I hope, I can invest in the Copics slowly as I learn my favored marker colors and go with refill costs and replacement nibs in the long term. My markers came last week and I finally got to get them out of the shipping box Sunday.

I spent an hour or so coloring in squares on a color chart and sorting out the markers into the right order. Then I was ready to choose an image and get started. So here is my very first attempt at using Promarkers and my very first card using digital images from Bugaboo Stamps:

I was a mental mess in designing this card. I knew I had these white dry-embossed square cards from DCWV.  I didn't really know what I was going to do with it, but I liked the idea of a great color pop against the white.  I loved the Cool Aqua color when I was coloring in the chart, so I started with that as my inspiration and wanted something to go with it.  I'm not a big fan of yellow if it's not exactly the "right" shade. (Some day I'll get into what my friend Vasuki calls my "specificity"; she says I'm the only person she knows who is very specific about my likes and dislikes, down to specific shades of a color or particular spice flavors.)  My coworkers roll their eyes because I find daffodils very unappealing. LOL  Anyway, I remembered seeing a green and pink combination on the Bugaboo birthday blog hop, and there were two very bright greens that I thought looked bright and happy and went well with the aqua.  I shaded the Aqua with Duck Egg blue which I also loved.  The bear was another challenge.... I laid down a couple of browns together on a bit of scrap to see them overlay one another, then went with Tan, Cinnamon and Cocoa. The Walnut just didn't weem to work as well with the Tan.  I had seen a lot of brown animal colored images with Sandstone as their light base. Will have to try that next.  I added a couple of pinks for a nose, cheeks and ears, and voila.

I colored a little cake in too, based mostly on the fact that I just liked the purples and was itching to use them. I did the blender pen tip polka dot thing I'd seen to the cake just to see how it looked. Cake with measles. Sigh. The cake looked boring with pale pink icing, so I added Crystal Ice Stickles.  I thought I might use the cake together with the bear (see how little planning I was doing - just coloring for the heck of it! <eye roll> LOL) so I colored in the candle to match my girl bear's dress.  Then I trimmed up both images and sat there, looking at my blank white card.  And moving the cake around to ooooh and aaaaah at the sparklies.  LOL

Poking around in my paper stacks, I found an unopened ProvoCraft Slab... 5 or 6, I think, that I bought a gazillion years ago (ok, more like 6 or 7) when I first thought I might do something papercrafty and then didn't. Loved the idea of the polka dots echoing the embossed dots on the card. However, laying out the paper, my bear, the cake and the card next to each other, I decided I liked the clean and simple look of the colorful bear against the white. My inner four-year-old was going completely ga-ga over the Stickles, so I ended up using them to highlight some of the embossed circles for just a touch of sparkle. And I ended up using the polka dot paper together with my computer-printed sentiment (both cut and embossed with a circle Nestabilities die) along with the cake on the inside of the card.  I laughed at myself for making a birthday card that didn't even say happy birthday on the outside!  I made up for it for making another big polka dot circle and sentiment and putting them on the envelope. I was going to try to ink up the edges or do something with solid color circles, but that kept drawing attention away from the cake.  (Maybe I shouldn't have made the icing so sparkly... it completely absorbed my attention. LOL)  I definitely think working to match sketches might be a good idea with the next few cards I make.

After the pictures were taken, I added my note to the recipient in dark purple sharpie on the polka dot circle on the inside - I thought it looked cute and she seemed to like it.  She put it up where people would see it, which either means it was ok, or she just wanted some attention for her bday. LOL

All in all, not nearly as bad as I thought my very first coloring experience would be.... which means I'm going to have one heck of a time with the next one to make up for it. LOL  But I'm looking forward to it!  That and figuring out how to take a decent picture of my cards. =)

Thanks for visiting!  Happy Crafting! =)

(And love ya, Mom!)

My Other Christmas 2010 Projects

 Some pretty simple cards that I made up... I LOVE this little flower stamp - it can go daisy-style with white petals and a yellow center, or sort of sunflower with yellowy-orange petals and a brown center... or even....

...black and white:

I did have some photo closeups of a bunch of the flowers I'd inked up, embossed with clear powder and colored up in greys and blacks like above and in sunflowery colors like I used on the cards below, but the color is all funky because I took them at 1 in the morning. [Another lesson: moonlight is more romantic than sunlight, but sunlight is the workhorse of the family. haha]

I made two cards with the swirly cutout - one Thank You and one Thinking of You - and then two cards with the ribbon accent, also one of each sentiment.  I liked the white-grey-black color theme and that they were simple and a bit elegant.  And I loved the effect of watercoloring with lamplight black on the flower. Somehow the color name "lamplight black" just sounds like an oxymoron.

Then I did a bit of playing around with distressing, although I think I made a bit more of a mess than I was expecting....

They kind of look more dirty than distressed.  LOL  I didn't want a ragged edge, just sort of the shabby country thing.  Another lesson - watch that you don't accidentally brush your glue dots against the wrong spot on your card.  I got the dot about a half an inch higher than I wanted, and the only way to get the dot off was to rip a hole in the paper, so.... I let it go and stuck the twine to it.  It's not... horrid.  Just looks kind of awkward, I think.  I'll be trying that effect again some time when I'm not in a rush and failed experiments can be recycled instead of given away as a gift. LOL

I had this beige checked paper with very fine wavy lines and I liked how the rusty-colored cardstock pulled that out of the paper pattern.  Unfortunately when I was distressing it up, I realized that the two ink pads I had were not the right shade of brown... so I ended up hiding most of the lined paper with a big square of textured cardstock.  The caramel-colored cardstock strip also matched tones in the paper and it looked good against the color of my little "sunflowers". 

So a set of 8 cards to one, um, lucky recipient. LOL  Actually, she did love them, and used them all up immediately after Christmas sending out thank yous for other Christmas gifts. =)

One last image - I made a birthday card using a Popcorn Bear and didn't take pictures of the final card.  I scanned it, but the scanner blew out the beautiful checked background paper from its mellow, warm orangey yellow plaid to an absolutely hideous neon yellow, and I can't seem to get it corrected enough to get it to look good.  So... the only thing I have is a blurry picture I took when I was trying to decide what background paper combinations to use.  I watercolored again... I realize now, having seen some video tutorials, that I needed to let the image dry a bit before I went back in to do some of my shading, which is why it went a bit mucky on the bottom half of my poor bear, but... again, I'm not ashamed to claim him or his sweet duckie friend. =) 

I also made some super simple sock monkey cards using papers I picked up at Michael's... a Christmas paper I had just picked up had the same reds and browns and a little cream and brown and burgundy cardstock with a little inking and voila! A set of these went to my monkey-loving coworker:

That's all the pictures. I did a few other things... stamped and colored some animal notepages and a karate girl for my nieces, but no pics of those. 

So... these were my beginner projects. It will be interesting to see where I am next year at this time.  Especially after a bit of investment in some new tools and pencils/markers (thank you, Tax Refund!) and some time spent watching experienced crafters' coloring tutorials (thank you, YouTube!). =)  I've been getting my supplies and workspace organized in the craft space in my room upstairs and I've been getting my ideas and imagination organized in the craft space in my head (haha), so forget Super Bowl... it will be Super Crafty Sunday at my house!  The official start of my Crafty Year! Woot! Woot!

Framing it up - Project Two

My second mat/frame project was a girly contrast to Easton's frame.

This time I used a precut white 8x10 mat for a 5x7 picture from Walmart. I had these little stick girl stamps that I got at Big Lots for a buck ages and ages ago and had never used.  They, like some other crafty supplies I've had forever, have been tucked away and carried from place to place as I moved.  (|Yes, Dad and youngest brother, I am sorry you had to help me lug boxes full of sadly ignored papercrafting supplies onto and off big trucks, in and out of various vans and pickups, and up and down many, many stairs, and in two states, nonetheless!)  My coworker, her husband and three girls are sort of new-generational hippies... not old enough to have been a part of the 70s, but the whole Woodstocky, tie-dye and folk music festivals, peace signs and dolphins and groovy feelings appeal to them.  So I wanted something in a girly tie-dye meets floral kind of look. 

I used a Colorbox multi-pad ink stamp in pastels, I believe, and a Night Media floral stamp to do the floral border all the way around.  I was kind of proud that only once did I put the stamp on backwards and mess up my color transition. =)  I set that aside to dry completey and went to work on the girls.

I stamped them on GP white cardstock and painted them up with my Grumbacher translucent watercolor pan set again.  I didn't like the stick arms and legs just, well, sticking there, so I painted over them with a wash of flesh color.  I really liked that effect. And I had a good time just brushing in the hair.... I'll admit the hair had me worried until I figured out that the effect of a little kid coloring outside the lines actually suited the stamp style and the whole look I was going for. So I just brushed in the hair in short strokes and didn't worry about where lines were.  I had a bit of a challenge with the 'tie-dye' dress. I finally figured out I needed to let it dry a bit and then punch up the colors just a little.  Then I cut them out, sprayed them lightly with matte finishing spray and laid them aside.

Sorry about the bad pictures... a bit blurry and dark, but you get the idea:

I finished off this frame differently.  I used a photosafe sheet protector and cut it down to create a pocket for the picture, taping it down on three sides and leaving the top edge open. I covered this over with the cardboard backing the mat came packaged on.  I adhered several strips of the velcro, then flipped it over and pop-dotted the girls on.  The mat seemed to still need something, and I had some translucent flower buttons in shades very close to the Colorbox inks and watercolors, so I used glue dots to get those on there.

So girly and sweet - I like this one, flaws and all. =)

Framing it up.... Project One

OK... so we begin....

This is one of the Christmas gift projects which I actually managed to get pictures of, not having a blog yet when I was working on them.  Actually, I only took them after my then 7-month old lab puppy ate part of the wrappings... fortunately she only stole the ribbon and ripped the paper but didn't damage anything.  I still had all my work gifts at home and was planning to play slightly-post-Christmas Elf on my week off. (Something about going in to work dressed in your comfy sweatshirt and favorite jeans and knowing you're there but they can't make you work feels kinda deliciously bad. It's not something that happens often as I don't really take a lot of time off, so I enjoy it when I can. heh)

I made this one and another one I'll show later for two of my coworkers who 'live' in fabric-wall cubicles and both have kids and lots of photos.  I wanted something they could use either on the cube wall as is or to put in a frame later, so both projects are 8x10. 

Easton is a 6-year-old soccer player...

I used a Tiddly Inks digital image that I sized up and printed on basic GP white cardstock. It was colored with my Grumbacher translucent watercolors (I got two pan sets in December, one opaque and one translucent).  I left the legs white and just shaded them with the lightest hint of gray as socks instead of legs since I loved the blue and red accent on the sneaker and didn't want to mess it up with lousy skincoloring. LOL  Unfortunately this is a scan and not a photograph, and I lost some of the lighter gray shading, but I don't feel too awful about this one.  This was actually my second project teaching myself to paint with watercolors.  It looks pretty striking in person against that dark blue mat, which helps gloss over any of the holy-hannah-where-did-she-NOT-learn-to-paint issues.  LOL  Having seen a gazillion cards and coloring examples on blogs since then, I can see some of my, um, missed opportunities.  Room to grow. =)    He also looked better after a light coating of matte finishing spray. 

Here's a closer look at my soccer kid:

I then cut him out and focused on the frame piece. I got a precut white 5x7 double mat for a 4x6 photo at Walmart. I took what was the outer narrower mat layer, cut one end off by making diagonal cuts (so from the side you don't see a gap in the mats) and cut it a little wider to just fit a 4x6 photo, then adhered the mats together with that on the back. I stamped and embossed the stars using Stampendous embossing powder in marcasite. Not happy with where that top one is next to Easton's name, but I had to put it there to cover a stray mark I got on it during the process. And the larger star on the bottom... oh, that was as much fun as pulling splinters. I bought shrink film, thinking from what I had read that it would shrink to about 45% of original size.  But what I actually got was film that shrinks to about 25% of the size.  I didn't have a big enough star shape to begin with to get what I really wanted as an end product, but, again, lesson learned. No interesting new things the week before Christmas. LOL  I shrunk it down, then coated it with embossing ink and the marcasite powder twice.  I bent it a little the second go-round while it was warm from the heating tool to at least try to give it a little oomph since it wasn't as big as I wanted.  The Easton was made on the PC with one of the 3000 fonts I have (I was newsletter queen at my last job and I LOVE fonts!), printed on cardstock and trimmed up.  (Looking at it now, I'm not sure whether I'd like to be a little bigger, but it worked for me then, obviously. LOL)  I pop-dotted that on the frame and laid that aside.

I used a black Sharpie to go around the edges of the dark blue background mat to finish it up a bit and put a couple of strips of industrial strength velcro on the back.  Then I laid out the white mat "frame" with the Easton and the opening for sliding in the picture at the top and my painted soccer kid image until I got them where I liked them.  I used a Stampamajig to make sure I got the frame back on exactly where I measured it to be and stuck that on with strong adhesive.  Then I pop-dotted my soccer boy on.

All in all, I liked it... mostly because I love how his name in red really pops, the stars are nice and glittery in person, and for one of my first paintings ever, I'm more than okay with my soccer kid. =)

So there's project one for your perusal.  On to the next!