JULY MID-MONTH TWO OLD BATS HALLOWEEN CHALLENGE

Mid-July and we're still looking for your Halloween Anything Goes projects here at Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge - you still have two weeks left to play with us! This month's mood board features a couple of ideas using red, white and blue but you're not bound by that as long as your card is Halloween-related. I chose to be inspired by the witch hats in the lower right quadrant.   

This was started with a top-folded A6 white card base. The sentiment is from Unity Stamps with the witch cut off. I stamped the sentiment with black ink, die cut it with a deckle edge rectangle and matted that with black and white printed paper. The opposite side of that paper features the witch hats and I fussy cut one, glued it to the face of the card, and added some bat trim on the hat band. I finished with a coordinating custom envelope - very easy.

Remember that we have a couple of special gifts for a drawing if we get 25 or more entries!

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Here's the link and our mood board:

Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge: July 2024 Mid Month Reminder

SEIZE THE BIRTHDAY!

Today I'm popping in as Surprise Party Guest at Seize the Birthday. This is the first time I've had the honor of participating in that capacity at this challenge - one of my favorites! The current optional theme is "Fruits".

                                        Seize the Birthday: Seize the Birthday #287- Fruits

It's times like these that I discover the real "holes" in my supplies. Fruits seem to be something I don't navigate toward when purchasing new products. So I headed off to my favorite craft store in search of something featuring some sort of fruit. With all of the fancy papers, stamps, dies, and other crafts available at their large inventory, I could only find two stamp sets - one featuring cherries and one featuring strawberries, and no fruit patterned papers. I settled on "Simple Vintage Berry Fields" #20120 from Simple Stories.

Once I had my choice of fruit stamp sets, I won't pretend I didn't struggle with this card! It took me hours to work out a design, and then I just ended up using only two of the stamp images and none of the sentiments (but now I have some more berry/Mason jar images to use in the future). Well, that's how it goes sometimes - I'm sure that much of my struggle was related to performance anxiety and having to come up with something that was worthy of the challenge at Seize the Birthday!

I started with a Strathmore A7 card base and matching envelope. I stamped the strawberries each twice - once with red on white card stock and once dark green on green card stock. Then I blended with red ink and Copic markers, fussy cut the berries and stems and glued them together. So, once that was done, what to do with them? After several attempts to come up with a way to use them, I finally decided the more CAS the better, and opted for layering them with an old filigree boarder die (probably Hero Arts) and die cut it from some old green and white printed paper from my stash. I stamped the sentiment from PTI's "Tea for Two Addition" in their "Pinefeather" ink. I dug through the supplies to find some red and pink printed papers and settled on two very small scraps of PTI paper and had to piece the stripes together to make a wide enough piece to stretch the full length of the bottom of the card. Whew! I layered everything together with some dimensional foam and added some pink sequins.

  

After all of the struggle, I'm happy with the final product. My experience is that the more cards one produces, the more easily the ideas flow. That should be a lesson to me not to cut back my production as much as I have this year!

On a personal note: As I write this on Monday, the entire west coast of this country is hotter than hell this week. There are something like 17 wild fires in California and we sit just 30 miles from the California border. It was 111 here in Medford yesterday and the day before and expecting the same for the next couple of days. We've been getting out early to water veggies that I have in pots - and there's our little community of feral cats that are all struggling with the heat, sleeping most of the day. We're replenishing the water a couple of times a day, and last night the raccoons dropped by to help themselves. I think they're picking up dropped small plums from our flowering plum tree and rinsing them in the water before eating. The water was almost mud on the last filling about 10:00 last night!   

JULY TWO OLD BATS HALLOWEEN CHALLENGE

We're back with a brand new Halloween challenge for July! While you can submit anything Halloween, why not use our new mood board as a fun jumping-off place?

Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge: July 2024 Anything Goes Halloween

I think my submission this month is a bit obscure, giving new meaning to "jumping-off". Looking at the top left quadrant, I was taken by the creepy sign post and remembered a Tim Holtz rubber stamp that I had never used, with a vulture sitting on a sign post. It was quite a small image, so I constructed a scene combining a bunch of small images. 

The moon, bats, and sign post are all Tim Holtz from various Halloween sets and the gnarly tree was a really old image from my stash that I've used several times over the years. I started this card with a gray top-folded 5-1/2" square card base. I stamped a cobweb background on a piece of white card stock, cut it down to 5" square, and attached it to the face of the card. Then, using a 4" square piece of gray card stock, I stamped the moon with Hero Arts "Unicorn" pigment ink. When that dried I over-stamped the trio of bats and the tree. To get the sense of grass across the lower part of the card, I used a Whimsey Stamps grass stamp from their "Zombie Party" set. I stamped the vulture/sign post with black ink on white card stock and fussy cut it out, attaching it to the face of the card with some black dimensional foam. The next step was to white heat emboss the sentiment on a strip of black card stock that had been cut with a stitched curve die and attach it to the bottom of the square with dimensional foam. And because I have this "thing" for ties and simple embellishments, I punched a hole in the top right and pulled some black and white baker's twine through it. After adding a black mat, all was attached to the face of the card.

The custom envelope was made from some two-sided printed paper from Park Lane's "Haunted Hollow" pad. It seemed that paper with creepy animal skeletons would work okay with my card.  

By now, if you send out July 4th cards (I'm not this year) they're probably all finished and in the mail. So, time to start thinking about Halloween! Get out your supplies and join us Wacky Old Halloween Bats with a card of your choice. Remember that if we get 25 or more entries we have a special drawing!

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