Retro Rubber Reminder ~ Tie It On!

Good day!

I'm popping in real quick with a reminder post about the current challenge going on at Retro Rubber where I have the honor of being Guest Designer. The challenge is to use ribbon or twine on your creation for the theme, "Tie It On." 

For my inspiration cards today, I give you Christmas in June.

Now there's some ribbon! The bright sun was a little too bright and my card is a bit over-imposed. You can barely make out the card base is embossed with a snowflake e/f and the image is matted in sparkly paper. The stamp was made sometime in the last century. It is from Great Impressions (G241). I can't really say this is a neglected stamp, however, as I really love it and use it just about every year. 

Here's a better view of the sparkle from the paper and from all the pizazziness I applied to the image.

My twofercard:

The stamp set I used for this card is the beautiful "Ornamental Pine" from SU which came out last Christmas. It isn't over a year old, but the sediment is a couple three years old. It is from Technique Tuesday's "Jingle All the Way" stamp set.

For the ribbon treatment, I just threaded one end of a piece of ribbon through two tiny holes on either side of the ornament and then did a Chris Cross and taped it to the back. The panels are popped up.

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This has been an interesting challenge for me. It made me realize that I am consistently reaching for enamel dots or sequins to add a little shashing to my card, where I used to reach for ribbon. Why do I have to use one to the exclusion of the other?

Goodness knows, I've spools and spools of ribbon in my stash to use. Heck, I even have a pair of skizzors dedicated just for cutting ribbon and they were nearly rusted! Okay, not really, but I do thank Retro Rubber for the revelation and reminder!

How about you? Is your ribbon or twine being neglected along with your older stamps? I hope you will bring them into the light of day and join us! The challenge closes on June 19th, so hurry!!

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Here's a little snortle for the day! I can't remember if I've posted it before, but it's okay if I did because it just karacks me up!

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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!

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Retro Rubber GD & More Roses and Butterflies

Good day to you!

I'm as delighted as a bird in a fully-laden cherry tree to be appearing today as Guest Designer for the fun Retro Rubber Challenge! Retro Rubber Challenges just started last November, so they might be new to you. It's a challenge with an aim towards helping us use our (often neglected) stamps that are over a year old. 

Now, if you're like me, you can use your NBUS (never-before-used) stamps and still play in the Retro challenges because time flies and, oops, there's that stamp you bought two years ago and never used. You get the idea. Stop committing stamp neglect. Dust that puppy off and use it!

The current Retro Rubber Challenge runs from today through June 19, so you have lots of time to play along. The theme is "Tie It On."

Here is my card:

The beautiful embossed paper is by K and Company, the square tag was stitched with a Lil' Inker die, the sediment (embossed with a coppery rose) is v.o. from Hero Arts (C2553), and the ribbon is from the dollar bin. 

One of my many goals lately is to turn more of my neglected retro designer papers into cards. Sometimes the patterns are so gorgeous that I can't bear to have just a tiny bit of them show around the edges. This rosy glittery paper is one of those papers that begged to be the star of the card.

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I hope you will check out the Retro Rubber Challenge and join in the fun! You will find an "About Our Challenges" button on their side bar for all the fine print. Just use a stamp (new or used) that's at least a year old and adorn your card in some way with ribbon or twine. EZPZ!!

Also:

• Crafty Hazlenut's Patterned Paper Challenge for June.
• Tag You're It. I was inspired by Tracey's gift tag, so my tag is attached to my card like a gift tag, as if my card were a gift. Which, really, it is.

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My twofer card for today:

In my last post I used the beautiful Altenew "Painted Flowers" and now you can see that I also purchased the "Painted Butterflies." They were on my desk, so I broke them out, too. And I again used the Memory Box cross-stitch die. I used a pale pattern of patterned paper for the base and black for my mat. The beautiful NBUS sediment is from Your Next Stamp.

Are you cocking your head and going "hmmm?"

What you are seeing is a butterfly called "Cymothoe sangaris" or "Cymothoe Excelsia." The common name is "red glider" or "scalloped red glider." The natural habitat is Africa. How it managed to fly onto my paper is like this:

I stamped the butterfly in two shades of light rose and dark rose along with the black ink outline like the designer intended. Then I decided to use my pink Wink of Stella, which is more of a dark rose than a pink. You could even say it's more a red color when you accidentally reach for the red instead of the pink. 

Painting over ink with Wink of Stella will sometimes blend your inks and make the demarcations less noticeable, so you have to be careful about that. Once I was done, I ended up with a very pretty red butterfly with very slight highlighting. Not my intention, but Hammy said to roll with it. Easy for him to say given that he rolls around for a living. 

As long as I had a red butterfly, I figured I might as well plump it up like shiny lipsticked lips so a liberal amount of gloss was applied.

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Challenges

• Addicted to CAS: Butterfly.
• Butterfly Challenge: S is for Sequins.

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Sequins

Can we just vent talk for a minute about sequins, which I endearingly call "sequints" because they make my eyes go all squinty when I use them? Does anyone have a magic formula for where to put the bast sweet things? Not how to adhere them, but where to put them.

I sorta know about the "rule of three" and "in the shape of a triangle" and most times I follow it, but sometimes I'm a rebel and I don't. I'm convinced that when I see one of you has put seven or thirteen sequints on your card, it's because you gave up and just stuck them all over the place. Not that I've ever done that. No.

Whether I put one, two, or three on my card, I find it a difficult task. I can quite literally spend ten minutes making a card and 23 minutes squinting and fiddling and trying out various places to put sequints and dots on my card! Ridiculous. Someone should design one of those template thingies out of hard acetate that you can lay over your card. You know? So that it would show you, "If your main focus pocus is here that your sequints should go here, here, and here." Wouldn't that be awesome?! 

Oh, AND ninety-five times out of ten, even if I use a booger stick or tweezers, they fly up and stick to my ginfers! Oof, get OFF me! They're always somewhere in my clothes because I end up doing the "mosquito dance" shaking my arms and flapping my digits. If that doesn't work, then I do the underarm meet-and-greet whereby I slide my right hand under my left arm and my left hand under my right arm and try to bedazzle my bazooms.

Sigh.

Thank you. I needed that. 

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

As always, thank you for coming 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!

I hope to see you play in the Retro Rubber Challenge!

*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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me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!