STAY COZY

I took a bit of time out this morning to have some fun playing with Christmas Kickstart Challenge #72 - "Wrapped Up for Christmas". The challenge is to use a scarf! I immediately thought about My Favorite Things deer with their long necks that might need a scarf! 

I started with a stitched rectangle of white cardstock that I blind embossed with a snow patterned folder. I glued a couple of die-cut birch tree trunks (Impression Obsession) to the face and stamped the sentiment from Penny Black "Merry Up", splitting it between two colors. I added the deer and his antlers after coloring him a bit with a white Prismacolor pencil and dark brown marker. I cut a strip of red felt, cut tiny fringes on the ends, and wrapped it around his neck. The deer was attached with a couple of pieces of dimensional foam and a kraft matt added before attaching it all to the face of a white card base.

Christmas Kickstart Challenge: Challenge #72 - Reminder Post 

Added April 17, 2023:

Y IS FOR "YUCK"

And in my estimation, soured milk has a pretty high "yuck" factor! I used the current Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers Challenge #230 to create a birthday card for one of my favorite cousins, who is having her 80th birthday this week. She's pretty snarky, so I'm thinking she'll appreciate this card. She retired a number of years ago from her family dairy farm in southwestern Washington and has a large collection of black and white cow knick-knacks.

I started with Avery Elle's #ST-19-08 "Peek-a-Boo Pets" stamp set for the cow (which I colored and fussy cut) and conversation bubble sentiment. I layered pale blue and green paper to look like sky and grass, added a die-cut picket fence, glued the cow over the scene, and added a dimensional frame. I overlapped the frame with the bubble and the cow's hooves. 

The yuck factor was saved for the inside, where I used a Tim Holtz "Snarky Cats" sentiment and added another conversation bubble. That's it!

Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers: SOSS #230 - Y for Yuck

Added April 5, 2023:

PP633 PAPER PLAYERS SKETCH CHALLENGE

It's the fourth Sunday of the month and Anne Marie has a great sketch challenge for us this week! 

 

The Paper Players: PP633 - A Sketch Challenge from Anne Marie

 

The two vertical elements reminded me of tags, so I took out my Stampin' Up "Framelits - Chalk Talk" tags and chose the one that was closest in shape and proportion to the sketch. I thought to play a bit with some layering of small patterns in a neutral color scheme and started by die-cutting the first tag from a panel of white cardstock that I had already die-cut with a stitched rectangle. I attached the front panel to a card base with some dimensional foam, inserting a neutral warm gray stripe behind. Then I had a complete brain cramp and didn't know how to finish. 

I messed with different scraps for what seemed like hours and am not really happy with the final outcome. I think the overlapping tag looks unfinished, but decided to just settle with what happened with the final result. I really didn't have time for a do-over. The die-cut blossom is an Alexander Renke favorite of mine, and the sentiment is from PTI's "Songbirds". 

I'm sure that the gallery will be filled with beautiful and inspirational examples that are up to the quality of Anne Marie's sketch. In fact, the other designers have made some excellent examples! I'm looking forward to seeing what you can come up with.

On a personal note: I've been distracted this week by all of the cat dramas, and cardmaking hasn't been upwards in my thoughts. I think I've already spoken about the additional 6 cats we have acquired since last summer. We fed a friendly little calico cat on our patio during the summer, not knowing she was a lactating mother. After a couple of weeks she moved her 5 kittens to our patio, and we took over stewardship of this mom and her feral kittens. I'll try to make this a shortened version - suffice it to say that we were in contact with CATS (Cat Alliance to Strays) and they will not take kittens unless they've been socialized and living inside. We thought we could socialize them and turn them over, but here we are approaching a year with these cats. The mom was obviously a stray and very friendly. When she had weaned all of the babes, we took her to our vet and had her spayed - she was already carrying 1–2-week-old embryos. We decided to introduce her to our two older inside cats, thus beginning a long process of socialization with the kittens. A couple of them were friendlier by nature. We found a home in the neighborhood for one of the females and she's doing well with her new family. The next one that we were able to handle was so cute we decided to keep him, bringing the permanent inside cats count to 4. We've owned 4 cats before so thought it would be okay. 

Now Chloe (the mama of the kittens, named after the bottle of wine we were drinking when she arrived in our patio) was residing inside with our other 2 cats and 4 of the babes were still living in the patio, but following me everywhere, and pretty much tearing up the flower beds. But they were so cute! The one we decided to keep (Tiger) was brought into the house ahead of the remaining three that we trapped and had spayed and neutered. CATS will only take inside kitties, so at the beginning of October, after their surgeries, we brought the three final kitties into the house and the fun began. Well, let's just say that 7 cats inside the house is way more than we could handle. One of the females is now at CATS, but she's so shy that they're having problems getting her socialized.

So, the point of this whole "shaggy cat" story is that on Wednesday was the day that we were to bring Tux to CATS for adoption and I captured him, put him into the carrier, and he was so alarmed that he was thrashing around in the carrier while I was trying to get him to my car to cover up the carrier to calm him down. He sprung out of the carrier and that was the last time we saw him. We were sure he would come around by the next day because he would be getting hungry, but we haven't seen him since. We thought we would give him a couple of days before calling CATS to let them know how badly I had bungled this. We're just sick about the whole thing. 

Update: The above was written Friday evening and right after dinner Tux showed back up, but we haven't been able to coax him back into the house yet. He's obviously terrified. We'll see how this all shakes out! Here's a photo of him taken a couple of months ago. You can see he's a very handsome guy who is always dressed for dinner:

WISHING FOR SPRING

We woke up to snow on the ground this morning, which is not a normal occurrence in southern Oregon at the end of March. It has now melted but threatening more of the same. I decided to give myself a bit of time to make a card for a friend who moved to Las Vegas a couple of years ago and we haven't seen each other since. I used CAS Colours & Sketches Challege #507 as a jumping off point. 

I chose to do the layout as a horizontal card, which probably breaks the rules a bit. I had an idea about a continuous scene stretching out across the card, broken into 5 vertical strips. I first made a template by die-cutting 5 vertical openings in it equidistant across the panel and then placing the die-cut panels back into the template, taping them from the back, and stamping and blending a background. Once the background was completed to my satisfaction (along with a kite and birds from other stamp sets) I removed the tape on the back and replaced it with Washi tape on the front and applied adhesive to the back of the vertical pieces. Then I laid the larger panel with its 5 sticky-backed verticals over the face of a stitched front panel with the sentiment already stamped (My Favorite Things #CS-567 "Right at Home"), pressed the verticals in place, and removed the Washi tape from the face. Over the vertical panels I adhered tiny die-cut houses and trees from Alexandra Renke's "Winter City" die set. Easy-peasy, right? Well, not exactly! 

CAS Colours & Sketches: Challenge #507 - Sketch (cascoloursandsketches.blogspot.com)

Added April 9, 2023:

SPRING HAS SPRUNG!

That's the CAS challenge theme our wonderful Ann has selected for this week's Paper Players #PP632. She's encouraging everyone to use flowers in your designs! 

The Paper Players: PP632 - A Clean-and-Simple Challenge from Ann

This is the first week in our area that we actually think spring may be on its way! The first spring flowers I see in my garden are daffodils, followed by grape hyacinth. The daffodils blossoms are just starting to open, and I found myself wishing that I had some daffodil supplies. But, alas, I'm continuing in my promise to myself to buy no more supplies for a while.

I do, however, have this great Hampton Arts stamp set (#SC1013) that always says spring to me. I decided to use only pastel tones on it and started by stamping the outline image with PTI's ""Ripe Avocado" and filling in with Copic markers. I mounted a pale green panel to the face of a 5-1/2" square top-folded card base, then attached the colored floral image to that. I over-stamped the sentiment and added clear embossing powder to strengthen it. To draw additional attention to the sentiment I added a printed vellum flower and 3 tiny gems.  I die-cut a circle from the center of a slightly smaller square of card stock and mounted it to the face.

If you're as pleased about the arrival of spring as we are here in southern Oregon, then break out all of those beautiful floral supplies and have fun with us! And check out the gorgeous cards my fellow designers have posted for your inspiration. But remember that this challenge is a Clean and Simple one.

3/14 - HAPPY PI DAY!

We have a pi-day birthday in our family! My husband's youngest nephew is 33 today and we're all meeting to eat barbeque and, of course pie! Matt is just geeky enough to thoroughly enjoy having a birthday with the same numerical value as the formula for the circumference of a circle! I usually do a pi/pie card for him, and this is this year's offering:

I'm not going to even begin to describe all of the steps in this card - just suffice it to say it was many! This lattice cherry pie was not easy, but it was fun and challenging. I utilized several different circles dies for the pan and the pie. I cut 1/4" wide strips of kraft paper, wove them, and glued them over red cardstock for the cherry filling. I used Copics to darken the crust a bit in places for dimension and added a pie dough flower on the top. I constructed a red and white striped cloth and die-cut stitching along the edges. The final step was to heat emboss the 3.14 with white and apply a silver die-cut sentiment.

It's been raining all day today and the light is low. It's hard to see that this card is a 5-1/2" square card base with a 5" square raised panel attached. 

After posting all of this I thought I would enter it over at Inkspiratioinal Challenges because I remembered it was "Faux Stitching", but I missed the cut-off. Interestingly, today's new Inkspirational Challenge #285 is a word prompt - "Numbers". That works as well!

Inkspirational: Inkspirational Challenge #285 - Word Prompt - Numbers (inkspirationalchallenges.blogspot.com)

Added April 1, 2023:

BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH!

The Ides of March (March 13-15), according to William Shakespeare, were a bad omen for Julius Caesar and in our culture there's an old wives' tale about black cats being a bad omen and thus connected permanently with Halloween. So, my Ides of March offering for our mid-month Two Old Bats March Anything Halloween Challenge is cats and bats. And we're continuing with the fun black and green mood board. (My only regret is that I don't have any neon green paper or ink and I've given myself some time off from purchasing new supplies.) 

This is my offering for this two-week period:

As you already know, CAS is my technique of choice and this one came together so easily that it's almost embarrassing! On a green card panel, I stamped Tim Holtz's cats with Memento Tuxedo Black ink and over-printed the sentiment from Impression Obsession "Is the Moon Out Tonight?" with VersaMark ink and embossed it with white powder. I also stamped and embossed the sentiment on black card stock and cut the black cats strip out and pasted it over the top of the sentiment. The final addition was black bats and white gel pen on the cats' irises. I edged the green panel with black ink and matted it with a second layer of green card stock and mounted all of this to a black card base.

Remember that it doesn't always have to be a card, as long as it's Halloween-themed. I hope you have as much fun with this as I have all month! 

 Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge: March 2023 Mid Month Reminder

  

THE PAPER PLAYERS - COLORS

Good morning, all! As we "spring forward" this morning, The Paper Players has a color challenge for us - #PP631. The colors for the challenge were selected by our very talented LeAnne!

The Paper Players: PP631 - A Color Challenge from LeAnne

I'm not a big fan of Daylight-Saving Time - it messes too much with my natural rhythms and makes no real sense to me. Here on the west coast my blog entry needs to be set for 2:00 AM Sundays to meet the time that our new challenges go live. Does that mean that tonight I'm really supposed to set it for 1:00 AM? I think I'll set it for the usual time and just see what happens. 

That being said, here's my CAS response to the new challenge:

Rifling through my stash to come up with papers and inks for LeAnne's challenge wasn't entirely successful in that I couldn't find anything dead-on the "Tahitian Tide" color anywhere in my scraps. These challenges really point out the holes in my supplies! I settled on a piece of printed paper with the greens and bluey turquoise tones in a wash and die-cut the leaf images from PTI's "Lovely Layers" set - one of my most-used sets over the years. I also found a scrap of white cardstock that had been embossed with my Cricut Cuttlebug/Anna Griffin "Foundry" embossing folder. I die-cut it with a small deckle edge rectangular die and mounted it to a slightly larger piece of yellow cardstock. I stamped the sentiment (PTI "Doodle-Do") with their "Hawaiian Shores" ink on the face of a 3-3/4" x 5" white panel and glued the embossed image to it. After making creases in the larger leaves, gluing the two main pieces together, and adding a stamped and die-cut center, all of this was attached to the corner of the deckled rectangle. Finally, the panel was attached to a white card base with a couple of matching gems for sparkle. 

It's now your turn - have fun and check out what our wonderful designers have made of LeAnne's challenge to inspire you!  

HIDING THE EASTER EGGS

Our talented Joanne is head of this week's The Paper Players challenge and the theme for PP#630 is "Easter".

No Easter supplies of note, so I'm once again "winging it". I had some small scraps of printed Easter cardstock that I bought several years ago to make candy bags for my grands. It had some cute eggs on it, and I decided to hide the Easter eggs in the grass. I also have this very old rubber stamp of spring flowers/grasses and I stamped it on pale aqua paper with PTI "Pinefeather" ink. Then I fussy cut three eggs out of the printed paper, glued them to the aqua paper and stamped the stems again, "hiding" the eggs. This was all mounted to a white card base with a couple of mats and the final step was to insert a small piece of pink polka dot ribbon and a PTI "Tiny Tag". The sentiment is made from words from two different stamp sets, heat-embossed with white, and threaded through a punch in the face of the card with a small white pin that I had rescued from a clothing tag some time age. Anytime I see an interesting attachment or tag from clothing I always hoard it! I custom made an envelope with a piece of bright pink paper, using the pink side for the inside of the envelope. Unfortunately, it completely overpowered the photograph and skewed the paler tones.

The challenge designers have come up with some wonderfully inspiring cards for you! Hopefully, unlike me, you have some beautiful Easter-themed supplies to play with. Have fun!

The Paper Players: PP630 - A Theme Challenge from Joanne

GHOULIES & GHOSTIES

March's Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge is fun! And what's easier than a bright green on black background?

I heat-embossed a sentiment from Impression Obsession's "Is the Moon Out Tonight" set with Zing! "Leaf" embossing powder on black cardstock and die-cut it with a stitched rectangular die. I mounted it to a black card base that had been heat-embossed with Tim Holtz spatters with a bit of dimensional foam. I heat-embossed a bat from Impression Obsession #CL336 "When Life", fussy cut him out and mounted him to the corner of the rectangle. Easy peasy! I was disappointed by the photograph because it came off as quite a bit more yellow than in real life - and there are a bunch of dust particles that mysteriously showed up in the photo that aren't on the card. I'm not sure what that's all about.

Anyway, it's now your turn! Check on what my fellow design team members have presented for your inspiration and join us!

Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge: March Anything Halloween