Happy New Year 2025!

Hello Stamplings!

Happy New Year! I'm still alive and kicking! In fact, I'm well-rested and a fatted calf, just like one should be after a wonderful holiday! We had a terrific Christmas and then a long vacation in Hawaii. Lots of photos below, if you're interested ...or not!🥱

It took me a while to get settled and think about making a card and blogging again. The longer I am away, the harder it is to get back into a routine. Or I'm just old now. I ended up deciding that this year my primary goal will be to use NBUS on every card and enter them in my NBUS Challenge. It's where I challenge you ~ and myself ~ to use all the schtuff we accumulate ... or "stockpile" as my friend JP calls it, which is a perfect visual!

Onefer

My card came about with the help of several other challenges. The "corduroy" lime card base is made from paper I've had since the last century and I'm happy to see it shine in this clean and simple card sketch. The die is NBUS from Alexandra Renke called, "Hazelnut Branch Set." The gold sediment strip is from Memory Box.

Freshly Made Sketches, Color Hues, and NBUS.

And The Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers, Seize the Birthday, and Cut It Up.

Holiday Photos

We started out in Maui taking the Road to Hana and spending time with Dan, Rachel, Adam, and Henry. It was a blessing to spend those days together before the lads went back to college. We were off the grid and without television! Bliss!

       

From there, The Mister and I flew over to Kauai to spend a few days with our long-time friends Susan and Jeff in their beautiful condo. They were terrific hosts as we toured all the beautiful sites of this scenic island. And we saw whales!

Well done for making it through! Aren't you relieved that I cut out half of the collages I made from hundreds of photos?! 

In Other News . . .

We came home to a stack of Christmas card mail, which extended the holiday. Thank you all for your beautiful cards! 

Sadly, I got the unhappy news of the deaths of two of my bloggie friends. Many of you might remember the talented Cornelia Wenokor (Fun Stamping). Together we produced a short blog series called, "The Back Stories." Cornelia would make one of her fun cards and then I would create a story to fit it. My other friend Mamie did not have a blog. Both will be greatly missed. 

We also came home to news of the horrific fires in southern California. It was heart-wrenching and scary to watch on television. Thank you for any way you are contributing to the aid relief.

Finally, for those of you who are wondering how Hammy and Stanley are, they are doing great! They are on the way home from traveling to Hammy's relatives as he does every year at Christmas time. Hammy reports that Stanley has been a real trooper!

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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. I'm sending extra squishy warm hugs to those of you dealing with the Arctic Blast!🥶

If you followed my I.D.E.A.S. schedule last year, I wanted to let you know I'm going to use it again this year whenever I can. I found it to be a huge help with keeping me creating on the regular, so the weeks didn't slip through my hands.

*Life is too short!

Group of Seven ~ Stencil Monoprints

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you are doing well! I'm sorry I wasn't here last Monday as planned. All of the week before, I had both computer woes and migraine woes. Layering that onto jet lag made things very, um, trying. 

But it's all good and I got my cicada rhythm back, too. Wait. What? I think I mean Canadian. No, stop. It's circadian. What is? Nevermind. 

Thanks to the Group of Seven Cardmakers, I managed to have some creative fun and I've lots of photos to share with you. For this month, we used our stencils and concentrated on making monoprints. The technique works best with open stencils which are inked using your choice of watercolor medium. After inking and spritzing, the stencil is flipped over onto watercolor paper as many times as the ink will last and gives you a useable image. 

1.

I used a sunflower stencil from Technique Tuesday and Lindy Magicals. 

For the technique reference, I should have first shown you this photo of all four of the monoprints I got. 

And below are the other three cards I made: 

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3.

4. This last one is very faint, but I liked it anyway.

I think you will enjoy trying this with your powdered inks, distress inks, watercolors, or sprays. For more incredible design inspiration, please check out the Go7 website where you will also find more instructions and video information! Group of Seven Cardmakers.

But wait, there's more ...

I went to clean off my stencil and when I started swiping with a baby wipe, I noticed a cool design was transferring onto my scratch paper. I stopped and grabbed three more panels of Tim Holtz watercolor paper and made these patterns, just swiping across the stencil with my baby wipe, cleaning more of the ink off each time:

I wasn't able to get a very good photo because it was evening, but in person each one is really cool. So cool that I didn't want to cover them up, so I made these very simple matted cards with foiled sediments which I've had in my stash:

5.

6.

7.

Such a fun bonus!

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Enjoy your weekend! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!* Unless something unforeseen comes up, I hope to be back Monday with more stencil designs per my fifth Monday I.D.E.A.S. schedule. And I'm also hoping to finally share some of our vacation photos!

Thank you for your patience and your forgiveness for my lack of visiting. Next month is going to be another busy month with visitors first one week and then the next. And then it will be full on Christmas cards!

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

1. Colorful Options: Be bold.

2. Beautiful Blossoms: A/G Floral w/ optional mood board.

3. Triple B: Birds, Blooms, and Butterflies.

4. Simply Clean and Simple: Signs of fall.

5. Cardz 4 Galz: Any coloring medium.

6. Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers: A is for Autumn.

        

This 'n That

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you are doing well and that you've enjoyed this first day of the Merry Month of May! I wanted to get back into card-making and there is one sure thing that inspires me and gets my mojo flowing ~ challenges! I so appreciate all the challenges out there in our little corner of Blogland and all the hard work the owners and Design Teams do to keep them going!

Onefer  

There are challenges ending that call for flowers and some that call for balloons, so I decided to combine the two on one card. Why not?! Especially if you have a bunch of flowers and balloons already cut (and in some cases, colored) in your stash. I don't know why I didn't think of it before and, wait, what? Okay, it was Hammy!🐹Mwah!

I still have a few sheets left in that Lawn Fawn plaid paper pad, but all the other elements of this card, including the sediment, were in my bits box. I only had to put it all together and glossify the flowers and balloons to add some schine.

Challenges

• Cut It Up: What's in your garden?
  
• Seize the Birthday: A/G with the option: Balloons.
  
• Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers: F is for flowers.

Twofer

For my Christmas card, I was inspired by the Just Us Girls challenge where the brief is to "Case a DT Member." I chose to CASE my friend Lisa. (You can find her card when you click on her name.) I used my NBUS "Layered Poinsettia" die from Spellbinders. I actually used two different shades of red card stock for definition, but it looks the same in the photo.😕

In the background are several doilies cut from an ancient PTI die. It might even still be NBUS, too, but if not, I haven't used in since the last century. Thank you, Lisa, for showing me such a pretty way to use them on a card!

Challenges

• Just Us Girls: CASE a Designer.
  
• Krafty Chicks: All Occasions.
• Snippets Playground: Everything except the card base was cut from snippets!

  

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I will leave you with a few collages of my fun adventures in April! The first two below are from visits to friends and friends of friends in the great state of Colorado! I had so much fun, although packing was a challenge because the temps were 82 one day and 32 and snowing the next! I especially loved the snow because we don't get that where I live in California, but I had to enjoy it quickly. It was gone in a matter of hours and the temps rose again.

And The Mister and I finally got away to the coast to celebrate our Covid-belated 50th, 51st, and 52nd wedding anniversaries! 

We managed to find a lighthouse we haven't visited in the past, which was also near the site of an elephant seal rookery.

And on the way, was the site of one of the many "super blooms" of native wildflowers California has experienced this spring because of the unusually high rainfall we had over the winter months. It's even more spectacular in real life and our timing was perfect!

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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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