Twofer Trees!

Hello Stamplings!

How are you? I'm sorry to have been gone for a coupla weeks. We took the charter up to Alaska for a few days just to get away from the triple digit temps and smoky air. 

Then I woke up and realized I had been dreaming. And then I couldn't find my mojo. I know a lot of you have been struggling with loss of mojo since the damnepic started. When you're dealing with Covid, isolation from your family and friends, mad wildfires, unhealthy air, politics, and new blogger, it's a struggle. Then I think about what I would be doing with my time if I didn't have this hobby and my gratitude returns and my mojo juices start flowing again.

Thank goodness, considering I needed to make my Twofer cards to share today because it's the 10th of the month and time for the September Twofer Card Challenge! This month our fun prompt is T🌲R🌳E🌴E🎄S!

Together

The NBUS stamp my two QACAS (quick and clean and simple) designs have in common is "Snow Dust" by Penny Black.

Onefer

For this Thanksgiving card design, I used my favorite direct-to-stamp technique in fall colors. I added a sediment from Stampin Up and then I cut the panel with a fishtail tag from PTI. And I used ribbon! It's also from Stampin Up. Lastly, I adhered the panel to a festive orange card base.

Challenges

• Die Cut Divas: All Kind of Holiday Time.
• Friendship Challenge: Autumn.
• NBUS #18: Anything virginal goes.
• Try Stampin' ~ or Not ~ on Tuesday: The photo only.

Twofer

My second design is an OLC winter birthday card and it uses the entire wooden stamp in all its beautiful snowy glory. I heat-embossed the trees and sediment (from PTI) in platinum and then Hammy suggested I platinumize a border all the way around the card to keep his eyes focused. Thank you, Hammy. It's a feature I love to see on a card, but I forget about doing.

Challenges

• ABC Christmas: S is for Snow.
• Love to Craft: Anything goes.
• Merry Little Christmas: September anything goes.

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I hope you'll get the opportunity to play along this month! The challenge is open until the end of day on September 24th. Remember you can simply use the same tree as a conventional tree on both your cards as I have done today, or you can make one conventional and one unconventional design. Just enjoy and have fun with it!

Please click over to the Twofer Card Challenge to see the amazing and inspiring Twofer cards our talented Team and our Guest Designers Helen and Lisa have made for you!! Thank you for your continued enthusiasm and support! Mwah!

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Backyard Wildlife Habitat

In other news, I captured a coupla Opposites photos for you this week. We have lots of yellow finches nesting in our Oleander trees and they fly down several times a day for a refuel of water, especially on these hot and smoky days. 

(Pardon the quality of the photos which were zoomed with my phone through the Playhouse window.)

Then imagine my surprise (and the surprise of the finches!) when I looked out later and saw this!

We believe it's a Coopers hawk. She stayed there for almost a half hour, long enough for us to worry that she might be injured or fell from a nest too early. But then she gracefully lifted off, flew to the fence, stayed there for several minutes waiting for her tail feathers to dry and then off she went. It was really cool considering we don't live in the country! (I'm sure Lizzy and the scads of other fence lizards we've seen this summer don't think it's all that cool!)

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Enjoy your day, take care, and keep safe! But still, 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!

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CASEing Kelly Blog Hop!

Greetings, my friends!

Today is a very special day here in Blogland for the lovely Kelly Latevola. Today all of the card artists who have been generously featured by Kelly in her "{CASEing Genius}" series on her blog You and Your Big Dreams have gotten together to hold a hop in Kelly's honor for her one-year CG Series Blog'versary!

This hop will not only make KELLY's day, it will make YOUR day as it provides you with incredible inspiration while you hop from genius to genius! And there are prizes for commenters! Enjoy!!

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I have already CASEd Kelly twice before, but I was delighted to be asked to join in and CASE her again!

For her CG series, Kelly always picks three cards of her CASEees and then makes her own CASE from the three, so we are each doing the same for our hop today.

I chose these three cards of Kelly's:

1. Elephant/giraffe and balloon here.

2. Bunny/bear and hot-air balloon here.

3. Raccoon and hot-air balloon here.

I love Kelly's critter cards that just explode with happiness!

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Here is my CASE:

In a style ala Kelly, I've made a card that has critters, hills and sky, vibrant watercoloring, and lots of happiness! I used my NBUS effelump stamps and dies from Wplus9, a curved die from Lawn Fawn, a sediment stamp from Penny Black, and a kite from SU, watercolored with my Ziggies.

Happiness is spending time with friends and CASEing friends!

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Here is the order of today's hop honoring Kelly. You should have arrived here from the talented Cindy Chiu's blog. Or you can start at the beginning at a2z Scrapbooking. It's a long hop, but I guarantee it will be worth your time in inspiration value as you visit each of these uber-talented card artists!

a2z Scrapbooking 

Amy Tsuruta 

Ardyth Percy Robb 

Brandi Hall 

Char Kochensparger 

Cindy Chiu 

Darnell Knauss ~ you are here ~

Dawn Turley 

Debra James 

Deepti Malik 

Donna Idlet 

Elizabeth Campau 

Ellen Haxelmans 

Heather Ruwe 

Jennifer Loftfield 

Joan Bardee 

Kara Vrabel 

Kara-Lynne 

Kathy Wade 

Katie Gehring 

Kristie Goulet 

Kristina Beagle 

Kymona Tracey 

Laura Jane 

Leigh Penner 

Lin Brandyberry 

Linda Trace 

Lindsay Amrhein 

Lydia Evans 

Maria Sabina Raita 

Marika Rahtu 

Martha Lucia Gomez 

Michele Cunningham 

Michele Ferguson 

Michelle Lupton 

Michelle Williams 

Monica Maier 

Niki G. 

Nina-Marie Trapani 

Rubeena Naz 

Shelly Kurth 

Taunya Butler 

Thordis Dogg 

Vera Yates
The Star: Kelly Latevola

PRIZES

What is a blog hop without some fun prizes?! Leave a comment by 11:59 pm EDT on Thursday, October 29th along each stop in the hop to increase your chances of winning a prize from one of our sponsors:

a2z Scrapbooking 

Altenew 

Create a Smile Stamps

Dee's Artsy Impressions

djkardkreations

Hero Arts 

Ink Road 

Lia Stampz 

Simon Says Stamp

Winners will be notified by email after October 29th.

I'd like to thank Marika Rahtu and Nina-Marie Trapani for organizing this hop! And I'd like to say thank you to Kelly for all the hard work and time she puts into her unique and terrific {CASEing Genius} series for one whole year ~ here's to many more!!

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Watz It Mean?

By the way, if you are new to our little corner of Blogland, CASE stands for "copy and share everything." Also, you may be wondering what the difference is between a Hop and a Challenge.

To me, a Hop is like this post where you see a list of specific card artists and the objective is for you to literally "hop" down the list from artist to artist, commenting as you go. Often prizes are offered. Hops can be just for fun or they can be for causes or to promote product.

A Challenge is a post with an InLinkz button where you, as the reader, can link your own personal creation to the challenge gallery, following challenge guidelines.

To me, it's that simple even though sometimes you will see blogs with an InLinkz button that calls the event a hop. There's nothing wrong with that, but it does get confusing. There is no hard and fast rule, but I think generally that is the difference between the two. Again, this is just my observation, not a law or anything.

If I was going to make a law, it would be about something way more important, like chocolate no longer being allowed to have calories.

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Enjoy the Hop and 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!

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Friends on World Card Making Day!

Hi there! Happy World Card Making Day! 

In spite of phones and texting and Face Plant and Twiddle and so many people thinking they don't have time to bother with sending cards in the mail any more, cards are a maxibazillion dollar industry. For those of us who make our own cards, we have Our Own Day!! 

Here is my card celebrating friends:

The embossing folder is "Linear" by Lifestyle Crafts. The owl and female fox are ... wait. Hold up. 

Honestly, people, I thought that female critter was a fox. Hammy looked through all my critters (and there are a lot of them) and told me it was a female fox. But now that I am typing this, I'm not so sure. Is that a cat? Seriously, is it? Because, darn it, I was going to enter a challenge that calls for "Forest Friends." Sigh. But, wait, there are feral cats, right? Okay, you convinced me. 

So as I was saying the owl and the (muffled) and the toadstools are from Paper Smooches and the male fox is from Papertrey Ink. The friends sediment from My Sentiments Exactly is copper-embossed. The branch is from Memory Box. The googlie eyes are from my googlie-eye stash. The critters are watercolored using my watercolor pencils. 

Here is a close-up of the coppery shine and winking:

Challenges

• Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge: Anything Goes.
• The Card Concept Challenge: Forest Friends. (Clean & Graphic. I think.)
• Virginia's View Challenge: All Things Colored.

Look Who's Here!

Could I be any happier embracing my bloggie friends in front of the Playhouse?!

A lot of you have already seen two of these talented bloggie friends gracing the pages of my blog before. They are Harriet on my right and Kim on my left. And on Kim's other side I'm squeezing none other than the fabulous Greta! On Thursday we were all delighted to meet each other live and in person!

Greta is from Oregon and she is just as charming and fun-loving as I imagined she would be from her wonderful blog, GG Creations. If you don't know these three ladies, you are missing out on a lot of mega-talent and inspiration!

Greta's sister Laurie lives nearby and she also joined us. She kindly took the photos for us. Thank you, Laurie! It was a pleasure to meet her, as well!

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I think everyone also knows how much I love cinnamon rolls, right? Well, sweet Kim made and brought us all cinnamon rolls to have with our coffee AND she made another pan just for the Mister and me! What a friend to have, right?! Thank the Lord for elastic waistbands and PALEEESE do NOT tell the Mister about this pan of rolls! He'll never know and anyways, I've only got his best interest at heart because he's pretty much confined to the bed, so this much decadence would not be good for him. Cough.

My sisters are going to be so drooling when they see this! And, yes, they are that good!

One last share for you:

Greta brought us gorgeous handmade frames which she made by foiling and die-cutting fun foam and I wanted to show you mine. Isn't it pretty? You'll see other examples of this awesome idea in several recent posts on her blog!

New Friends Corner

This post is running long, so I will be back to introductions in my next post.

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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 when the Mister is up and running again. I'm happy to say we've been drama-free the rest of this week and his leg is slowly improving!

*Life is too short!

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Nautical Martini and August SOS Card Chain Reveal

Greetings!

I'm so glad you stopped by! I have drinkie-poos for everyone today and you can even take a turn at the Inkspray Nozzle!

There is a great photo inspiration challenge over at TIME OUT Challenges that is almost ending. When Hammy and I saw it, we gasped in unisonhood and knew we'd have to play along, thusly:

Here is the photo inspiration:

 

How fun is that?! And, yup, I pretty much straight out copied it! I originally had my little life preserver hanging from the glass just like in the photo, but it took me so long to get a decent photo that consendation appeared on my glass and my little life preserver gave up and slid down. Sorry.

What we have is a martini glass stamp by an out-of-business (OOB) company. After stamping, I took my night of navy marker and colored the blue lines. A little Modpodge and we've got the appearance of vodka. The life preserver is from Technique Tuesday's "R&R" set and the sediment is from Your Next Stamp.

Done! Cheers!

But then I noticed that Less Is More, another favorite challenge of mine, is having a Lucky Dip event with the theme of "Sprays and Mists." Now I'm what you might call a spray novice. But, well, shucks, if I add some watercolor red spray that was a gift from Loll, I can play along there, too! How hard can it be? Said the hamster.

Placing my perfectly clean and crisp white card in a box outside and behind the Playhouse, I aimed the spray bottle and shot. Just the once. Apparently, I hit the life preserver because now my card looks like it has life preserver juice all over it!

Really, is that what you spray artists do? Cuz, wow, you know, you could really mess up a perfectly good card if a big blotch of splat went awe rye. I'm not prezackly loving where my splatters splatted.

Do you spray your blank white card first until you get great splotches and splatters and then stamp and so on, so that you don't ruin all that work? Yeah, that's prolly what I was sposed to do. Said me, shooting a withering look at the hamster.

I tried to make him get in the spray box, but he wasn't born yesterday.

Today's Twofer

Since today is the first day of September (eek!), it is time for the reveal of the card I made for the August 2015 Card Chain Challenge at Society of Stampaholics:

Here were the prompts provided to us by our fearless leader Deborah:

 

As you can see I used both the colors and the sketch. For my vertical stitched strips, I used a die from MFT Die-Namics. The white panel was stitched with a die from Lil' Inkers. I taped together snippets of the colored paper and cut the friends word using a die from Sizzix.

The little leaf embellishments were cut using a die from Impression Obsession, after which they were glossed and winked. Here is a close-up showing the bejewelling result:

Challenges

• House of Cards
• Pixie's Snippets Playground: Use your snippets!
• Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge: Trio of Colors.

And before I go, here is the beautiful card that I received in the card chain swap from Marga:

Made by Marga Lopez Barba of My Crafty Inspiration

It is gorgeous! Thank you again, Marga!

If you are interested in joining in this fun card chain swap for September, there are still a few days to sign up here!

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Only a week away!!

Details

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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:

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If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave
me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!

Facets of Friendship

Hello! 

We've whooshed around to another Friday! This is the end of our 32nd week out of 52 weeks in 2015. That gives you pause. And a few hives.

I've had my sister Diana visiting me for a few days. As she tucked into a jigsaw puzzle yesterday, I scampered out to the Playhouse to whip up a little sumpin and sumpin for you.

Today's Onefer

This was a QACAS card made using a piece of gorgeous designer paper from "Fancy That" by My Mind's Eye. The beautiful sediment is "Your Sunny Smile" from Stampendous. The ribbon is from my stash. The stitched suns are from Lil Inkers. You can't see it but each of the little dots on the paper is a metallic shiny gold, so this whole card vibrates with gold sparkle!

Challenges

• CAS-ual Fridays: Pretty Patterns.
• TIME OUT Challenges: Friendship is Golden.

Today's Twofer

Now that I have you feeling all warm and toasty inside from that beautiful card of friendship, allow me to burst your sweetness bubble in exchange for a snort of snarkiness:

Usually I put away my NBUS products when they arrive because otherwise I wouldn't have any space to create, let alone have a hamster, but I have kept this NBUS AI stamp on my desk for months, dying to make it into this exact card. The stamp is one of the great Art Impressions "Golden Oldies" stamps, which I watercolored with distress inks and a water brush. The sediment is a v.o. stamp from River City Rubberworks that hasn't seen ink in ages.

I especially love how this image reminds me of those Hidden Picture games. Can you see the goofy bird she has on top of her head? What about the two couch pillows and the clothes hanger that she shoplifted inside her blouse?

Challenges

• Addicted to Stamps and More: Anything Goes.
• Shopping Our Stash: Show Us Your Snark.
• Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers. The Sistahs are linking arms with SOS.
• Stamp Ink Paper: Designer's Choice. (How could these not be favorite stamps of mine?!
• STAMPlorations: Stamps and Watercolor.

New Friends Corner

Today I'm really pleased to introduce you to a brand-spankin-new member of our little community in Blogland!

Ruth Doman of KangaRuth. Ruth is from the United Kingdom and she just started her blog like yesterday! It would be so much wonderful fun if huge numbers of you reading this today would pop over and follow Ruth and leave her some bloggie love! She'll be thrilled and you'll feel fabulous, too!! Thank you, everyone!

And thank you for joining me, Ruth, and welcome to the Playhouse!!

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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:

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