Voluptuous Vellum

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you're doing okay. I'm sorry to have been gone so long. I've been having a heck of a time with migraines and allergies and worrying about what's going on in the world.

When I'm on the brink of becoming an eyeball-itching-TV-watching-zombie on an emotional roller coaster, Hammy climbs up on the top of my head, peers upside down into my face and reminds me that I have a Playhouse full of paper, inks, and product that allows me to make cards in order to spread cheer and thoughtfulness from sea to shining sea.

A check of some favorite challenges got us playing with an old favorite: vellum!

Here the green card base is covered with a piece of vellum which I dry-embossed with a Cuttlebug branches e/f and overlaid with a vellum precolored bird from GKW that has been in my stash for ages. You know those packets of vellum clip art that you could buy at Mike's or JoAnn's? I think it came from one of those. A simple sediment finished it off.

The only difficulty with vellum is how to attach it to a card. I usually leave a half inch on one side or over the top (of a tent card) to attach to the back with double-stick tape. For this card, I just glued the vellum behind the bird and left the sides loose. When you place it on the sill of an open window, the vellum flutters which makes it look like the leaves on the branch are moving. 

Challenges:

• AAA Birthday: Vellum.
• CAS Mix Up Card Challenge (new format): Embossing, vellum, and stamping. This isn't very CAS, so I'm just playing for fun.
• Sweet Stampers: Animals/birds.

These next two use beautiful sheets of white designs on vellum paper.

This one was attached to a sky blue card base and the sediment was silver-embossed.

Challenges: 

• AAA: Congratulations on 6th Birthday!!
• Country View: Summer fields.
• Paper Players: Tic Tac Toe. (Column three.)

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This one has a white heat-embossed sediment and the card base is a charcoal gray. I'm so happy to have rediscovered these pretty vellum sheets and I may now go on a tangent making lots of cards to use it all up. I'm sure the pandemic has a lot to do with my new resolve to use my schtuff. Plus, for all we know, paper has feelings, too, and hates being stuck in a deep dark drawer! (I'm sure it also hates being cut and stitched and stabbed, but we'll ignore that bit.)

Challenges

• CASology: Wind.
• Seize the Birthday: All about summer.
• Watercooler Wednesday: AG with a feminine twist.

 

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So Proud of the Young People

Worrying about the pandemic has now been superseded by the horror of what happened to George Floyd. I'm proud to see so many people, including so many young people, exercising their constitutional right to peacefully assemble to protest racism and draw attention to the need for better police training.

As someone who marched in the 60s for equality, it's hard to believe that this is still necessary, but racism takes generations to eradicate. With each new generation, fewer children grow up hearing bigoted comments from their parents and grandparents, who heard it from their parents and grandparents. And because they aren't directly or indirectly taught bigotry, they don't practice it or pass it on. Unfortunately, that's not true in every home yet, so we must continue to shine a light on racism when it occurs and we must be able to do that peacefully without fear of being attacked by our own government without provocation.

“If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.”
― Albert Einstein

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

Please take care if you are marching and continue to wear a mask!

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A Reunion

Recently we decided we could safely get together with the kids in the back yard for lunch. We are all adults (or nearly) and we were able to maintain our social distance. As the happy day approached, I fretted about how on earth I was going to manage not hugging them. 

Well, duh, I finally reasoned, if I covered myself from head to toe, I should be fine. And so I did!

l to r: Dan, Adam, me; Henry, Adam, Rachel, Nellie, Dan; Rachel, Dan, me

Even though they live nearby, we haven't been together since January, so it was wonderful to see them! Hopefully it won't be long before we can do it again!

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

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL + Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click Page Down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and a pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! (p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!)

Dabbing With Baby Wipes

Hello Stamplings,

I hope this finds you doing great! Hammy and I are still playing with our friends at the retreat, so needless to say, we're delirious and our fingers and paws are very inky and happy.

Today I have a scheduled post with some cards I made using a baby wipe method. There are many ways to use a baby wipe on your card; they aren't just for cleaning your stamps. If you go to the CAS Mix Up Card Challenge, you will find links for videos on the technique and there are prolly more you can find via the you tube.

Onefer

What happened was, I white heat-embossed my full-size MFT Floral Fantasy Background and proceeded to color it in with my Arteza fine-line colored pens. I wish I had taken a photo of it pre-baby wipe to show you how very vibrant it was. We're talking VIBRANT and for me, it was way too-too, especially with such a busy Zentangle-ish image. 

So for the first time ever, I took a baby wipe and dabbed across the panel and by golly, it worked like magic at removing just enough color to make me love it! You can see where I dabbed away with a lighter hand in certain places to leave the card with some dementia.

I popped the colored panel up on a scalloped (PTI) turkoyce fun foam panel and I used a vellum strip for the sticker sediment so as not to block much of the image.

Challenges

• Card Concept: #115 {Mosiac Madness}
• Seize the Birthday: No toppings.
• Ike's World: Embossing.

Twofers

I used the rest of the dabbed colored image to make two QACAS designs. The sediments are from Simon Says Stamp. I used a PTI impression plate for the kindness card and an embossing folder for the praying for you card. 

Challenges

• CAS Mix Up Card Challenge: Baby Wipe. I used stamping, coloring, heat-embossing, and dry embossing.
• CASology: Color.

Challenges

• CAS(E) This Sketch.
• The Flower Challenge: Embossing (heat or dry). I used both.

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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! Please let me know you came by so I can be sure and return the flavor!

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL + Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click Page Down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and a pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! (p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!)

Lovely Shenanigans and Glory Hallelujah!

Hello Stamplings!

Greetings on this last week of summer 2018! How's it going?

I'm really sorry I missed your call yesterday. Michael's (I call him Mike) is having his "lowest prices of the season" sale so I ran over there just to take a peek. You know, in case they got in something new since I was there last week. They didn't, but it would have been rude not to buy something(s)!

Why do I always fall for that "lowest prices of the season" line, anyway? We all know the calendar has four seasons in a year and yet businesses have 32 of them!!

Onefer

Hammy and I have sadly not been able to mesh our creative juices with the cue cards of one of our favorite challenges for months. That changed this week, YAY! CASology's cue card for this week's challenge is DRESS and we immediately thought of this sweet dress and hanger from Memory Box.

I cut the dress from a bit of left-over stencil monoprint background from my stash and just love the fun "fabric" it made. I outlined the dress with a black marker for some definition and that's why it looks like it was cut from something thicker than plain white paper.

The panels for the dress were cut in pink and black using a Lawn Fawn zigzag die and they were offset because they created a cool diamond border. The sediment is from Concord & 9th. Since I was making fabric and making a dress, I finished off the card by cutting a border on the right with my rarely used pinking shears.

Twofer

From sweet and ladylike to rakish and rowdy, here's a card for kicks and giggles! (Management's Legal Department has issued the following warning: engagement in activities depicted above by two consulting adult pumpkins may result in a baby pumpkin.) The pumpkins are very old wooden stamps that still know how to amuse a card recipient! The fun sediment is from Riley & Company and the angled frame die is from PTI. 

Challenges

• Cards in Envy: Feels like fall.
• Creative With Stamps: Pumpkins.
• TIME OUT: Home Sweet Home: Pumpkins.

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Thank you!

I am thrilled to give you an update on our grandson Adam following his shallow river dive in July. This week the neurologist declared that Adam's C1 neck break had healed sufficiently, so the neck and body braces were removed and there shouldn't be a need for surgery! Adam still has to be very careful, however. He can't ride his bike for a while yet and he isn't sposed to roughhouse with Henry until after Christmas! Obviously the doctor doesn't have teenage sons because, bwahahahaha, that's not gonna happen!

We feel very blessed and are very appreciative. Everyone in the family would like to thank you all for your kind thoughts and prayers! Mwah!

From this,

To this!

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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! Please let me know you came by so I can be sure and return the flavor!

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL + Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click Page Down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and a pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! (p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!)

Swoon!

Hello, Stamplings!

Well, that's January done then, 31 days whooshed by in the blink of an eye. Wish I'd stay on that diet 29 days ago, but that's wodka under the bridge now. What's done is done. Have a chocolate kiss.

We can't dwell on any kind of negativity while there are lovelorn frogs in the world! Do you see how he is looking at you?

How about now? Can you see how he is still looking at you? 

His eyes are following you around the room because he woves you. Not woves you like a blanket, wuves you like a puppy. He is, of course, a colored and winked Purple Onion frog, sitting on a PTI oval, and encased in an MFT stitched heart. He wanted the heart cut from the pretty green paper because it looks so good with his skin color. His swoon was made, letter-by-letter, using Concord & 9th's Sophisticated Script, which I'm an idiot for not using more often.

Challenges

My Froggie all aswoon was created especially because CASology has such a fun and perfect cue card: SWOON! I used the sketch from Freshly Made Sketches. I didn't use a rectangle, but I think that's okay. And I'm entering CAS on Friday: Color Me Pretty.

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

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and a special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower!  Please let me know you came by so I can be sure to return the favor!

Wait. What? One card? Is Hammy okay? Yes, he's fine! He's letting me slow down a little while I patiently wait for new glasses, but I can see his little wheel spinning feverishly as he thinks up lots of future ideas!

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL +  Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click page down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and the pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond.  Thank you!

Flowers in Winter

Hello, Stamplings!

Welcome to the crest of the week! Now all you have to do is ride it on into the weekend!

I'm very happy to say that my first cataract surgery went off without a hitch yesterday! I wrote most of this post earlier in case my eye was blurry, which it still is, but all is well. Thank you all so much for your well wishes!

Up first today is a simple one-layer card:

I don't buy many wooden stamps any more, but when I was at Mike's recently, the stamp I used for this card jumped out at me from the display. I do love an image where the artist does 90% of the work by carving natural shading into the artwork. All I had to do was color the rubber directly with my Ziggies markers, give it a spritz, and stamp it on watercolor paper! Scrumplicious!

The NBUS stamp is from Inkadinkado. It's liberally winked, which you can see better below. The sentiment is from Penny Black's "Sweet Wishes."

Challenges

• CAS Watercolour January Challenge: Birthday.
• HLS January Watercolour Challenge: AG with option of sequins.

Evolution

Sometimes I'm not sure how far I want to go with a design, even with a clean-and-simple-one-layer card like the above. I'm sure you've had that feeling, right? I've always set up my card across the room when I think it might be done. It helps me get the "big picture" better than having it under my nose. Then last year it occurred to Hammy that I could use my point-and-shoot camera to help me better "evolve" my card design because when it is up on the computer screen, I can see it the way you will see it.

In other words, I can take a photo of my card at the very CASest stage, see it up on the big monitor and stop ... or add a little sumpin' sumpin', take another photo, ... etc., etc. It takes a bit more time, but it is very freeing to indulge in experimenting with design this way and it helps me know when I've arrived at that "AHA" moment when I'm happy with my card! (And even if I go too far, I still have a perfectly fine card for donating or giving away.)

So, for instance, Stage One:

Above is how my card today started out. Very very CAS. Just the image colored, spritzed, and stamped, and the sediment stamped in black ink. Which I'm good with. I like very minimalist CAS, but if I cock my head, I start to wonder, hmmm ...?

Stage Two.

,

Above is the same card, but with the addition of winking and splattering and sequints. You will notice that the green colors of the bottle have spread a bit, which winking will do. It's okay (only I wish Hammy hadn't added quite so many splatters), but hmmm, something is still missing ... 

Stage Three.

AHA!! Above is the same card, but it needed some dementia, so I added a bit of a marker line to show the inside bottle bottom and I added a shadow. Wallah! NOW I'm done!

Here is a closeup of the winkle which refused to show in any of the other photos:

Twofer.

In a slew of flowers, I have a spotlight single flower to share:

This is SU's Corner Garden stamp. It's a delight to color, but coloring it can take a while, so if you don't have time, it lends itself nicely to spotlighting. I spotlit one blossom by stamping it on a Brusho background snippet and fussy-cutting it. QACAS!

Challenges

• CASology: Glimmer.
• The Flower Challenge: Spotlight stamping.
• HLS CAS Challenge: Friendship.
• Pixie's Snippets Playground: Use those snippets!

 

Reminder

Since this is such a short post 😇, I'll remind you that we are halfway through the first Twofer Card Challenge! The challenge ends January 24, 2018, at 10:00 AM (PST).

Thank you so much to everyone who has played! I couldn't be more thrilled by your enthusiastic response and the number of you who have already joined in! The gallery is just bursting with inspiration! My awesome Design Team and I can feel the love and support and it means the world to us. More importantly, it's obvious you are having fun and we love that! Mwah!

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

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and a special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower!  Please let me know you came by so I can be sure to return the favor!

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL +  Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click page down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and the pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond.  Thank you!