Riding Through the Seasons

Hello Stamplings!

How are you? Have you had a good week so far? I hope so! And I hope you have a great weekend, too, but make sure you write on the calendar to get your flu shot next week if you haven't gotten one yet. This time of year (in this part of the world) brings cooler nights, perfect for sleeping, but also perfect for those darn flu bugs. Note to self.

Once again I've gone seasonal, jumping from spring to Christmas ...

Onefer

What happened was I made this card in the spring and have never posted it. When I made my Twofer below, it reminded me that I still had this one in my folder. The how-to is pretty self-exploratory. I did get a little creative with my slicing and dicing of the pp, just to be different. The hello sediment is from Technique Tuesday.

Challenges

• Double Trouble Paper Crafting: #38 Mad About Plaid.
• Pixie's Snippets Playground: Use your snippets!
• Simon Says Stamp Wednesday: Anything goes.

Twofer

Coastal cabana snow? It must be your screen, Shirley? No, it's just that Hammy loves shades of aqua and red together on a Christmas card. The stencil is from Dylusions, the schparkly silver jingle bells are from PTI, and th ~ what's that? Why is there a bird on a bicycle? That cute owl is from my friend, Jill. Being a wise old owl, he's hitching a ride because his red lamé Santa hat and matching scarf are heavy!

Those are also spose to be silver jingle bells hanging from the handle bars, sized appropopo. Hammy took a marker and tried making those slits jingle bells have, but it just looked like the bike had two eyeballs, so I punched out another set of glitter dots and glued them over the top. 

Challenges

• The Male Room: Use embellishments.
• Rudolph Days: Anything Christmas goes.
• Watercooler Wednesday: Kath's All About Occasions.

~~~

We had the boys and their dogs last weekend, which was their first introduction to Nellie. That wee girl has been through so many new changes and new people, but no worries, nothing but tail wagging and smiles all around!

At least the people are looking at the camera! There are way too many squirrels in this park to even bother trying to get the dogs to look straight ahead! That's Adam and Jack on your left and Henry and Duke on your right.

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!)

Surf's Up, Little Duck Dude!

Hello Stamplings!

Oh, my, what a busy summer this is turning out to be! We have the unexpected pleasure of spending the weekend with the grandtwins again so we're all smiles! We'll be staying close to home this time so they can see a lot of their friends before school starts again on Monday. That summer holiday sure whooshed by! Seems like only a coupla weeks ago we attended their 8th-grade graduation.

It's the 10th of the month, so that means a new Twofer Card Challenge is starting up and I'd like to share my Twofers with you to get you all becited to play along! 

The prompt for August is 🌊NAUTICAL🌊.

The stamp my Twofers have in common is the NBUS surfing duck from Gerda Steiner Designs set called "Catch a Wave." I saw the duck on Trina's blog and had to get myself one asap!

Onefer

Here I gave the surfer rose-colored shades, which Hammy glossified, along with his surfboard. Little Duck Dude is walking on the sandy portion of a rainbow-colored pp panel. It's unclear if he'll have a siesta under that amazing paper-pieced Purple Onion palm tree or simply head for those blue ocean waves. 

The sediment is from the same set. This birthday card is intended for a male friend who has an August birthday in a place where August is hot, hot, hot. Here is the inside with a cute swordfish that is also part of the same set:

Challenges:

• AAA Birthday: For the boys.
• Double Trouble Paper Crafting: Thing 1: 3-2-1 Recipe: use 3 colors, 2 pp, 1 sediment. Thing 3: Create a card with a nautical theme. 
• Gerda Steiner Designs.

Twofer

For my second design, I made a square card with rounded upper corners. I cut the aperture using my NBUS Rolling Wave Collage die from Memory Box and then I placed a piece of stylized ombre colored ocean pp behind the opening. 

I stamped and die-cut Little Duck Dude and then Hammy and I donned our surgical gear and removed his surfboard. There was a small "enhancement" during the process. Cough. While I covered up the boo-boo with a pair of gingham paper-pieced swimming trunks, Hammy glossified his sunglasses and soon the little guy was enjoying himself body-surfing the waves. His straight-forward look seemed perfect for this simple sediment from GKW.

Challenges

• A Place To Start: Use paper piecing in your project.
• Simon Says Stamp Wednesday: Use a die cut.
• TIME OUT: Relaxation.

~~~

I hope you'll join our linky party at Twofer Card Challenge #19 with your two sea-worthy cards following the rules. The talented Design Team and our Guest Designer Natalie have made super cool 🌊NAUTICAL🌊 Twofers to inspire you!

~~~

I'll leave you with this photo of one of the grandtwins from our recent beach trip. Who is it? I'm glad I forgot to share it with you the other day because it's perfect for this post!

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!)

Happy St. Pat's, a Balloon Bunny, and a Rad Dad!

Hello Stamplings!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! We always celebrate this holiday because my sainted MIL, Genevieve, was a hundred percent Irish, making the Mister fifty percent Irish, our son a quarter, and so on. I'm Irish by marriage. Plus, we all love corned beef dinner.

Time for my annual soda bread story: It became painful obvious early on that I was only Irish by marriage because of how my Irish Soda Bread turned out. One could use it to build a stone wall around the premises that would last for centuries. Everyone was too polite to tell me and then one year we went to my SIL's for Irish dinner and I was enlightened when she served beautiful tender soda bread. "Me, lass," I cried, "how does thee make this heavenly confection?" And, thus, I learned my recipe was wrong and it's not sposed to bake for hours and hours. Is there a dish you found out years later that you had been making wrong?

I don't always make St. Patty's cards, but yesterday I found I had the prettiest shamrock Washi tape so I had to make this:

Since it was too late to add my one Happy St. Patrick's Day sediment, I added a simple strip of a minty green sediment Washi tape which says, "Make today awesome." Now I can use this card for any March occasion. That's a Brusho background from my stash behind the sweet NBUS flower from "Floral Squares" by Pink Fresh. You might notice I'm trying to use my stash of Brusho makes, as well as my pp. I feel like I should use up what I have before I have another play with Brushos.

Challenges

• Card Concept Challenge: Shamrock blessings. My style is clean and simple, slightly layered.
• Double Trouble Paper Crafting and Heart 2 Heart: The wearin' o' the green.
• Krafty Chicks: Shades of green.
• Sweet Stampin': St. Patrick's Day/Green.

~~~

Now we will return to our regularly scheduled program which was to remind you that we are at the halfway point over at Twofer Card Challenge #14 where the brief is BALLOONS.

 The balloon my reminder cards have in common is a die from MFT.

Onefer

I've used more of the beautiful DSP from Our Daily Bread, and a sediment from Paper Smooches. I used the balloon to create the body of my bunny. The head, ears, and feet are from a PTI die. The tail was shaped by Hammy. As you can see from the size of the irises, my bunny is just a wee thing.

Challenges

• Cardz 4 Galz: Hares or rabbits.
• Simon Says Stamp Monday: Feminine/Girly.
• Sweet Stampers: Easter or spring.
• Uniko: Spring (optional: Easter)

Twofer

Using the same balloon and some cool DSP from the pad "Hey Mister" by My Mind's Eye, I created my second design for Father's Day. The metallics look like gold and copper, but in real life it's all copper. Very QACAS and, well, RAD!

[As you can tell, I'm trying to tackle PP Mountain. Hammy and I are really chuffed whenever we manage to use something from NBUS Mountain and PP Mountain on the same card! I still get requests from some of you to start up my NBUS challenge again. I could do a NBUS/PP/LOAF Challenge. That last one is a new one I thought of and it stands for, "Loved Once and Forgotten." How often have you done that?! Wait. What? Yes, I see that: if I do a LOAF challenge, then I'll simply have to change NBUS to BUNS. I mean, right?! What would that stand for? How about, "Beautiful Unused New Schtuff?" Hmmm, ... .]

Challenges

• Cardz 4 Guyz: To die for~need to use at least one die cut. I used three.
• Little Red Wagon: Boyz II Men.

~~~

I would love to see your two designs using the same BALLOON stamp, die, or stencil over at Twofer Card Challenge #14. You have until the end of day on March 24, 2019 to play.

Please do not be put off by the new Inlinkz sign-in requirement when you go to link your cards. You will only have to do that one time and you'll be set for all future Twofer challenges. I don't know why they had to "fix" a format that I thought worked beautifully, but I must have been gone the day they called to ask my opinion. Don't you hate it when that happens!

~~~

Triplets now!

Both mom and dad tend the nest and feed the babies. I always thought birds regurgitated the food for the babies, but eagles just tear off a hunk of fish and give these tiny birds big pieces! That littlest guy has some catching up to do and it's hard to watch sometimes when he/she gets overlooked during feeding. But this pair at Fraser Point successfully fledged three babies in 2017 and again in 2018, so we have to trust they know what they're doing.

~~~

Thank you if you made it to the end! This was epic, even for me! 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!)
 

Batchin' It With Christmas Cards

Hello Stamplings!

Gosh, how quiet Blogland is as we all hunker down to work on our cards! How are you doing with yours?

Over here it's been a week of interruptus and I need that right now like I need a bee in my bloomers.

First of all, on Sunday I cleaned up my desk feeling all smug because all my cards were sent out and I even had four left over. Then I discovered two sheets of labels that had slipped under other papers on my desk. 😱

Monday morning I walked into the Playhouse and was greeted by the sight of itty-bitty creepy ants all over the floor as they filed in out of the cold and rain. They were dispatched, but the Playhouse was filled with fumes so I did what I could in the Bighouse, which wasn't a whole lot. 😒

Tuesday was doctor appointments and then the faucet in the hall bathroom started dripping. That meant a lot of interruptions over several hours because the poor Mister ran into one problem after another with what "should have been a five-minute job! Bleep, bleep!" 😠

Yesterday, I slipped on the floor and wrenched most of my torso and all my extremities. Wait. What? Is that everything? Well, that's what it feels like. 😧

Some weeks are like that. That's why God invented potatoes. And people smart enough to turn potatoes into wodka. And, no, I hadn't been in the wodka before I fell.

Through it all, Hammy and I were not to be deferred and we managed to make more cards in between apostrophes:

Yes, more uber QACAS! This NBUS stamp from The Ton is so gorgeous simply heat-embossed. The sediment is from Stamping All Day.

This design was so easy, I made a bunch of them using different card and different e/p:

    

Challenges

• Double Trouble and Three Amigos: Any kind of embossing.
• Lost Coast Portal to Creativity: Cold and frosty.
• Stinkin Inkers: Winter Wonderland.
• TIME OUT: Joyful.

~~~

Then we cleaned off the table again and started this QACAS design:

This NBUS image and sediment are from the "Botanical Blocks IV" set from Papertrey Inc. I made a big batch of these in several colors, but I didn't get a chance to photograph them together because they were sent off as fast as they cooled off!

Then I took a break and went visiting and I saw this pretty card made by my friend Cat. Great minds! I realized that it would be even QACASier if I did it Cat's way, so I did:

Thank you for the inspiration, Cat! These cards were heat-embossed in platinum. It's simple, but very shiny and lovely in person. Sorry for the over-exposure. For some reason this card looked yellow and it's pure white so I brightened it. I took these photos inside on a cloudy day and it's the best I could do what with being gimpy and all.

Challenges 

• CAS on Friday: Make a Christmas card.
• INKspirational: Anything Christmas Goes.
• Less Is More: OLC Holiday.

~~~

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!)