Happy Pencil (Stencil) Day! Happy April Fool's Day! Happy Easter! Phew!

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you are feeling your oats, cheerios, or bran flakes, because as you can tell from the title, we have busy days ahead of us this week! You might think Happy Pencil Day is a joke because of April Fool's Day, but it snot. It's truly a day to celebrate the pencil. Which we know, sadly, is becoming obsolete.

I've made a card for the occasion and for S = Stencil on the I.D.E.A.S. Calendar on this rare fifth Monday of the month. 

Onefer

I used a NBUS stripe stencil from Honey Bee Stamps for the notepaper background, inked in navy blue ink. Next, I sponged ink around the edges to draw your eyes to the hocus pocus sweet child in the center holding her mysteriously humongous pencil. 

The image is "tiny townie Penelope has a pencil" from Stampingbella. That sentence is a Double Alliterative, in case you wondered. I would have gone for a Triple by adding ... "poised pointedly."

I colored the image using my Ziggies and Hammy topped it off with his winker. I cut the image using a stitched oval die from MFT. The text panel is from my pp stash and the wee sediment is part of the stamp set. (Please ignore the splotch in the lower right. Sometimes hamsters have to sneeze.)

Playing in: AAA Colourful (Navy and Gold); Addicted to CAS (Stripes); Freshly Made Sketches (Sketch by Amy).

Twofer

I used a new set of ink pads which I received from The Mister yesterday for no specific reason. What a sweetie!♥️The image is dynamic and, as you can see, very emotionally evocative. I colored it with ... wait. What?! Oh, that man! He got me with an April Fool's Day prank ~ clearly the ink pads were filled with invisible ink!!

Threefer

This pretty NBUS stencil from Pinkfresh Studio is inked over its partner NBUS coverplate die called, "Petal Mosaic." The three inks I used are from Catherine Pooler and the sediment is an ancient PTI favorite. Bun E. Frogman came out for his annual hello to you!

Playing in: Just Us Girls (Stencil Week); Try it on Tuesday (Spring); and Pinkfresh Studio (March 2026 Challenge).

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Enjoy your week! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!*

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower! 

Happy Easter, Happy Passover, and Happy Spring to all! Enjoy this time with your family if you are fortunate to be together!

Mwah!

*Life is too short!

Flowing Vine Collage

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you're doing well and you are fully back in the schwing of creativity with your new goodies from Santa! 

We had a lovely weekend belatedly celebrating our 54th weeding anniversary. Haha, was that a parapraxis? 

"A successful marriage is a matter of keeping the weeds out of the marital garden!" Darnell

Please let me know if you see that profundity needlepointed in a shop someday, so I can get authorship rights!©

Onefer and cousins:

The NBUS feature for this week's "Anything Goes" IDEAS is the "Flowing Vine Collage" by Simon Says Stamp. I used linen for the front panel and more of that delicious ribbed paper is peeking through. 

It seems like only yesterday, but this die is from 2016. That's okay ~ no shame. The important thing is that I used it and I had fun making cards with it, which my stash sorely needs:

The NBUS sediment used on the card on the right is from Penny Black's, "T for Transparent." I'm playing in Addicted to CAS.

And, lastly, I turned one of the die-cut vines into a stencil and made this one-layer panel:

After blending ink through the stencil, I made this one a Christmas card by next embossing the panel with the SSS, "Pine Bouquet" e/f. I popped up a NBUS die-cut sediment from Poppystamps called, "Lavish Merry Christmas." Helpful Hammy found me an antique piece of metallic aqua-green for the sediment backing that perfectly matched the CP Daydream ink I had used for blending!

I'm playing in Just Us Girls stencil challenge and Rudolph Days January challenge.

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Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!*

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower! 

Besides making cards, my goodies from Santa included some new jig-saw puzzles. I love them, but I haven't done one since I started blogging.

To my good fortune, it turns out Hammy and Stanley love finding color-coordinated pieces! Our first play was a 1,000-piece puzzle with a picture of 101 pooping puppies, which we (and Nellie) found exceedingly amusing!

*Life is too short!

Seasonal III

Hello Stamplings!

How the heck are you doing? I hope all is well in your little corner of the world! 

Please be careful as you join me in getting down on your knees or up on a chair to bring your holiday dishes out from their 11-month hidey-hole hibernation. Actually, I don't have holiday dishes, but I do have my big roaster back up in there where the the light doesn't shine. I suspect it's where the dust bunnies meet for Friday night tipples.

Wish I had a pool boy for times like this. Then again, that might be odd since I don't have a pool. But I do have a Twofer of "Anything Goes" seasonal cards for the last-week-of-November I.D.E.A.S. schedule.

Onefer

The leafy background is a NBUS stamp and die from Altenew called, "Climbing Leaves." I stamped and white heat-embossed the leaves and then I painted them using my old beloved Ziggies. Once dry, the lads put on their daubers and blended over the whole thing with DI Antique Linen to bring out the autumnness and polish the white lines of the embossing. I attached the panel to a black background panel. The sediment is from Altenew's "Autumn Bounty" set.

Twofer

This QACAS and NBUS design stands alone and I couldn't think of a way to add a sediment without marring the pure delight of the ornaments and snowfall of this 3D e/f from SSS called, "Verdant Ornaments." I thought the gold foil background gave it a nice frame to focus the eyeballs on the gorgeous details.

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Where's Stanley?

I will be taking a break to finish Christmas cards and we will doing some traveling over the holidays, so I wish you well until mid-January. Please enjoy yourself as you celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, or whatever brings you joy! 

No, seriously, enjoy! Life is too short! And special hugs to all of you who are not well or who sadly know firsthand how hard the holidays can be.🫂

As we wrap up our 13th year, Hammy, Stanley, and I thank you for another year of great fun, friendship, and creative inspiration! Thank you for your visits, comments, and your participation in I.D.E.A.S. and NBUS this year! Mwah!

Happy New Year!!

Challenges:

Addicted to CAS: Ornaments. (2)

Alphabet Challenge: Q is for quick and easy. (2)

Addicted to Stamps and More: Make your mark. (1)

Four Seasons: Fall (1)

NBUS: Never-Before-Used-Schtuff (1)

Rudolph Days: A/G Christmas.

Simply Clean and Simple: Christmas is coming. (2)

Birdies Welcome July

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you are doing great as we turn another page on the calendar!  

Remember those desk calendars that were loose-leaf and held in a plastic caddy with loops? Then you'll remember how in July there were more used days of the year than unused days of the year. 

The moral of the story? Whatever you meant to do in 2024, better get out there and get it done! 

At the ol' Playhouse, the lads and I are starting a whole new month of I.D.E.A.S. I went with QACAS and OLC for this Inky first week!

Onefer

I used these stylized birds on a card not too long ago and I had so much fun, I brought them out to play again. I painted them with my Ziggies, Hammy put on his new blade runners and expertly added the score lines, while the little wonder Stanley tried his luck with schplattering more than one color! 

Twofer

These birdhouses are from an ancient wooden stamp from Hooks, Lines & Inkers dated 1993! Haha, some of you weren't even born then! Cough. More on that in a minute. 

I painted, added a little blue blush to the edges, and finished it off with another old wooden stamp of dots from Stamps by Judith. The sediment is from another old stamp (not wooden) from Technique Tuesday called, "Chicadees."

Happy Inking! I hope you'll join me and my big I.D.E.A.S. this week!

Speaking of Old

Tomorrow I turn 57, if you don't mind me transposing the numbers. I was feeling pretty smug about making it to such a really big number, what with one thing and another. So smug in fact, on Saturday the Bluebird of Irony shite on my face with a case of shingles! 

Happy Birthday to me!

I'm praying and doing my best to keep it from spreading to my eye.🫣 Hopefully, the shingles vaccine will lessen the severity. Plans with family and friends have been canc postponed. And the cover on my birthday cake? A heat dome of temps forecast to reach 90-110 for several days!

But it's all good! This, too, shall pass and lots of folks can't say that. It's hard to get me down because it's still my Diamond Jubilee and I'm happy to be here for it! And I've got dozens and dozens of beautiful cards to open tomorrow! Mwah!

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Enjoy your week! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!* 

Happy 4th of July if you live in America, where we have celebrated our independence and our precious democracy since 1776!

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower! 

*Life is too short!

Challenges:

Addicted to CAS: Critter.

Addicted to Stamps and More: Make your mark.

Krafty Chicks: All occasions.

Seize the Birthday: A/G.

February 12: D is for Dies

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you are doing well, wherever you are! I've got a photo/text-heavy post for you today, so let's get this party started!

In keeping with my I.D.E.A.S. schedule this month (see sidebar), today's post features Dies/Die-Cuts. Because this is the week of Cupid's appearance, I went to my drawer filled with hearts and hugs and kisses. (Aren't I the lucky girl?!) I came across two NBUS heart dies! 

The first is this incredible "Etched Swirl Heart" from SSS:

You know how difficult it is to photograph anything wrapped in gold like this! The card base is white, covered by a piece of vellum dotted with gold hearts. I added the sediment and a gold frame. [SSS Wednesday and Cut It Up.]

In real life that heart looks like a piece of jewelry. I haven't cut one yet from silver, but I'm sure it will be just as gorgeous. Here it is cut from a piece of red fun foam: 

Remember fun foam? The coils wanted to unfurl, but Hammy's little paws were able to furl things back in place.❤ [Addicted to CAS and Just Us Girls.]

I have quite a bit of this vellum with gold, silver, and white hearts. If memory serves, it was from Stampin' Up. Here's another Valentine I made, this time using the silver vellum and a Penny Black xoxo die, cut from more fun foam:

[I'm linking to the Inspiration Station. I was inspired by the XOXO in the photo.]

And the second NBUS heart die, also gracing a very simple card front:

This die is "Hugs Heart" from poppystamps and I added a strip of embossed hearts for some dementia and interest. I love that this heart can be used all year long for many occasions where a hug would be welcome. [Double D and poppystamps PSC#113.]

Also, the letters pop out nicely so they can be used on a second QACAS card:

I have several friends with Febwoooary birthdays, six of which fall on the 13th, 14th, and 15th of the month, so I made a few birthday cards with hearts on them:

For the card on the left, I used the same heart vellum and for the card on the right, I used some pretty heart tissue paper I've had for ages. In order to attach the special papers in a way that hid the adhesive, I put them in a "channel" on the card front. I taped the strip of special paper to the card base and then attached the two front panels to either side of the channel using double-sided tape. Mary's your aunt.

The sediment die is "Big Happy Birthday" from SSS. The sediment on the right is actually cut from a beautiful snippet of glimmery shimmery foosha glitter paper which was a gift from a friend years ago. And that's when the trouble started.

Before die-cutting, I checked the paper to make sure it wasn't adhesive-backed already. When I peeled back the corner, it was just paper, so I added it to a sheet of double-sided adhesive. Turns out the pretty pink stuff is paper that doesn't want to be cut, especially not with a layer of adhesive added. So I ran it through my machine several times with this shim and that shim, turning it this way and that way. Finally, the machine and I, and the paper, were all worn out and it appeared to be cut through.✀✀✀

Not.

I sat down and started to fussy-cut the parts that weren't cut all the way. As I worked, it was clear more parts of it weren't cut, than were cut, but by golly by now I was into it and I wasn't going to stop until I won and I got every little bit of it cut, even if it meant I needed dental work from clenching my teeth so hard for so long and even if I had to use every one of the snippy scissors and cuticle scissors and craft cutting blades I own and even if it took me 53 minutes of my life I was never going to get back. Breathe.

After all that, it looks war-torn in places and who can blame it? And even though I specifically set aside the part of the die-cut that held the dot for over the i, when I finished, I furiously threw everything in the trash and then discovered that the dot was missing. Of course it was. And, yes, I then spent several more minutes going through my trash, to no avail. 

I burst into tears! No, that's a lie. But the neighbor did call to see if everything was okay after my vulgar outburst. No, that's a lie. My neighbor is used to it.

I was going to add a little ❤ in place of the dot over the i, but I forgot. I think I just didn't want to look at it any more. I hope you enjoyed and could relate to the trauma and adventure surrounding this card's creation! I know the person who will find it in her mailbox will be amused!

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Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!* 

See you next Monday! Let me know in the comments if you play with your dies any time this week and I will add your design to the I.D.E.A.S. board on Pinterest!

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower! Happy Valentine's Day whether you celebrate with lovers, friends, or your own best company!

Wait. What? LoverS? 🙊

Mwah!

*Life is too short!