Getting All Seasonal I

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you are doing well and enjoying your crafty self! 

We are entering the Frenzy Zone of card-making, especially in the u. s. of a. where we celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas in a matter of days. And Thanksgiving is late this year, arriving on November 28. But we get 'er done every year.👻🦃🎄

This week my I.D.E.A.S. schedule features Ink/Color Mediums:

Onefer

First up is a fall sunflower birthday card I made for a very special friend. My little helpers winked the entire flower and leaves, but this time they let me add the schplatters in dark brown to match the sediment from GKW. The sunflower is from Technique Tuesday.

Twofer

Next, we switched over to Halloween. The creepy spider die is from Memory Box. The leaf wreath is a NBUS stencil from Altenew which I thought would be fun colored in Halloween colors. I think the sediment is from SU.

I used my watercolor pencils to color through the stencil and then, after removing the stencil, I lightly brushed the leaves with my water brush and added the veins with a micro black pen. I used my gray Ziggie to add outline dementia. The card was embossed with the Subtle e/f from SU and lightly sprinkled with some diluted black gouache.

Threefer

To finish the seasons, and because it's addicting, I made another wreath with the Altenew stencils, this time for Christmas. I blended with my Catherine Pooler inks in one of my favorite color combos. The leaf veins were added with a stamp from the companion stamp set. After coloring, I again used the Subtle e/f. The layered Joy sediment is from Memory Box.

Cheeky Humor

A couple goes to an art gallery and come upon a painting of a nearly nude woman with her private bits covered with leaves.

The wife doesn't like it and moves on, but the husband keeps looking.

"What are you waiting for?" the wife asks.

The husband replies, "Autumn."

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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! 

*Life is too short!

Challenges:

Addicted to Stamps and More: Birthday. (sunflower)

Color Hues: Purple and orange. (spider)

Four Seasons: A/G Fall. (sunflower)

Memory Box: Happy Haunting. (spider)

NBUS: Wreath stencil.

Stencil Fun: Anything Halloween. (spider)

Fifth Monday ~ Stencil I.D.E.A.S.

Hello Stamplings!

Me again! Happy last day of the month of September, which is also the fifth Monday which means stencils on my I.D.E.A.S. schedule. Happily we featured stencils on our Group of Seven designs Saturday, so this is a follow-up prequel to my last post. Say what now?

Sadly, no matter how many photos I took, I could not capture the schparkle from the metallics that are a part of the Lindy's Magicals powders I used. (That's the difference between Brusho powered inks and Lindy's Magicals powdered inks.) The stencil I used is from Technique Tuesday and the sediment is from Memory Box.

In our Go7 post, we showcased the monoprints we made after inking our stencils. What you see above is the 'print' which happens first if you put a piece of watercolor paper under your stencil when you ink and spritz it and then you simply lift the stencil straight up off the panel. 

It might help if I show you a photo of my stencil all liberally inked and spritzed before I lifted it off to make a print.

After lifting it off that panel, I flipped the stencil over onto other clean panels of watercolor paper progressively, in order to make all the monoprints you saw in my last post. Honestly, it sounds more confusing than it is.

If you are wondering how I got the Lindy Magicals to be placed so accurately in the stencil, it's because I let Hammy and Stanley use these little teeny-weeny spoons that came with a box of resin I've had for a long time. I just told them where to dump the different colors of powder onto the sunflower petals, leaves, and centers. It was sort of like paint-by-numbers and it took us forever, but they haven't played in ages and I've missed them, so it was easy to be patient with them.

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Here is another stencil design that's more my usual QACAS style:

I used an unmarked stencil and Catherine Pooler inks and I simply heat-embossed the sediment in white onto a strip of vellum.

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I know how everyone loves seeing other people's vacation photos,😁so you'll be pleased to know that I did manage to put together some collages of ours. Rather than making this a 47-foot long post, I put them on a separate page. If you are interested, there is a link in the salad side bar.

Enjoy your week! 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! 

*Life is too short!

Challenges:

Allsorts: A/G. Huge congratulations on your 800th challenge!!

I.D.E.A.S.

Just Us Girls: A/G Stencil Week.

Seize the Birthday: A/G.

Stencil Fun: Fall Frenzy.

The Paper Players: Tic-Tac-Toe from Claire. Middle horizontal row.

Week Four: Anything Goes! 😀

Hello Stamplings!

How do you feel today? A nice lady standing next to me in line at the store asked me that question, smiling and looking me straight in the eye. A stranger, but somehow her words, a change from the usual, "How are you?," made me feel like we knew each other and she actually cared about the answer. 

It reminded me of how it is with bloggie friends. It's pretty phenomenal really how we all come to care about each other even though we are technically strangers. It's a joy if we are lucky enough to meet in person, but even if we don't, that fondness remains. Thank you for that!

Onefer

When I saw the challenge post at Seize the Birthday, I wanted to play along. While you can always enter any current birthday card you make, the optional brief this time is double-stenciling. You place two stencils on top of each other and ... well, it's best if you click over and read the post at STB for directions and to check out the beautiful designer examples!

The flower stencil is from Ink on 3 and the chicken wire stencil is from The Crafters Workshop. I have a few friends who love purple, so that's the color I chose, using DI milled lavender and dusty concord. The sediment is from Happy Little Stampers, stamped with CP royal treatment. It doesn't show up much in the photo, but I bordered the card base with royal treatment by walking the rim of the card around on top of the ink pad. 

I decided against using bling or schplatters because: 

a) I didn't want to detract from the cool double-stenciled effect, and 

b) my two little helpers are busy schplashing each other in their jar-lid swimming pool because it's not easy wearing a fur coat in the summer! 

Twofer

This one is a QACAS design I put together with a piece of printed vellum from the last century and a vellum store-bought butterfly from the ol' stasharoo. A vellum-backed sediment from Memory Box and wallah, I Used Old Schtuff!

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I will leave you with someone's genius idea!

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Enjoy your week! 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'll be back on Friday with the Group of Seven Cardmarkers.

*Life is too short!

Challenges:

Beautiful Blossoms (A/G)

Seize the Birthday (Double-Stenciling)

Stencil Fun (Birthdays)

Embossing Week

Hello Stamplings!

And here we are again, having whooshed around to the start of a brand-new week! Every day you wake up is a gift, but Mondays somehow hold more promise. Unless you do shift work and then maybe Wednesdays are your Mondays.

Mondays since February have been more fun for me this year as I've managed to keep up with my I.D.E.A.S. posts. (I think I might have pulled my shoulder muscle a little bit there, patting myself on the back.)

This week is "E" for Embossing Powder/Folders.

Onefer

This design uses both powder and folder. I recently had fun crafting with my friends Colleen and Linda and Colleen loaned me a 3D embossing folder and stencil from an Altenew class she had taken. (As far as I know, it was only available as part of the class.) I used Catherine Pooler inks and a very small and narrow blending brush to apply colors through the stencil to the detailed embossed leaves. 

Hammy and Stanley added schplatters and I clear-embossed the PTI sediment after stamping it with green ink. The background cover plate from Pinkfresh was a thoughtful gift! Mwah! It's called "Floral Grid." It's versatile in that you can either die-cut the flowers as I did here, or use it as an embossed design.

Twofer 

This is the other half of the above leaf panel. (The e/f and stencil contain both branches on one sheet.) After the blending and schplattering was done, I decided to cut the panel in half to create a Twofer and show off that beautiful lightly textured chartreuse background paper I found in my stash. The hugs sediment is from Memory Box.

Postscript

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about this Cypress tree that has a mystery flowering vine trailing all around it hundreds of feet in the air. Several of you guessed the vine name. And then yesterday on our walk, from the other side of the block, I was able to zoom in and get a closer look at the flowers.

So I looked up all your guesses and I think TK guessed it correctly when she said it was a "trumpet vine." Below is a photo I found online of a trumpet vine and it looks the same to me: 

Good eye, TK! Thank you all for your audience participation! 👏 

~~~

And now I will leave you with a funny that you can't "unsee!"

There are some things that you never think about. Like what does Mt. Rushmore:

look like from the Canadian side?

~~~

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! 

*Life is too short!

Challenges

Addicted to Stamps and More (Die Cuts and Stencils)

SSS Wednesday (Bright and Cheerful)

Stencil Fun (Just for Fun - Optional Birthday)

NBUS (Never-before-used-schtuff)

Go7: Elegant Writer Pens and S = Stencils

Hello Stamplings!

Lovely to see you! I like your hair today. Mine looks like it had a fright, but I might not have bothered to brush it. That reminds me of a saying a friend recently saw on a shirt: 

"It's a shock to realize I'm the same age as old people!" 

You might wonder why I'm here on a Sunday when I normally work the Monday shift. It's because my other fun playtime gig with the Group of Seven Cardmakers goes live on the 28th of every month and rather than do back-to-back posts, my Monday I.D.E.A.S. post is down below.🠷 (Grab your chair and your veberage, this is a longer one.)

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This month the Go7 played with Elegant Writers. They are calligraphy pens with magical qualities when the ink gets wet. 

1.

Note: You can buy Elegant Writers in just black or a pack of black, plus four colors. I stamped this image from Purple Onion in Vintage Photo DI and then I used the Elegant Writers to add touches of ink. Then I drew out those touches with water and a paintbrush. I love the soft colors that happen when you then blot the areas with a dry paper towel.

It's a bit hard to describe the magic, so the best thing is for you to click over to the Go7 blog and check out the videos and the stah-unning examples from the other ladies. I've had my pens for years, so I loved finally using them, but if I'm honest, I think the end result is not that different from other forms of watercolor appliances I have, like Ziggies and watercolor pencils.

Here are two more results:

2.

And for Christmas:

3.

The above stamp from the Colorado Craft Company is NBUS and I bought it in an actual brick 'n mortar stamp store on my recent trip to Portland. It was a blast being able to see the products and touch them! I also met two dear friends for the shopping adventure and for lunch afters!

Linda, me, Colleen

I.D.E.A.S. Week Five (S = Stencils)

4.

Because my I.D.E.A.S. stencil make was going to be included in this post, I used my black Elegant Writer pen to outline this floral stencil. You know, killing two rocks with one stick. (You understand I can't use the one about killing birds, so I had to make up my own.) 

After I outlined the stencil with the EW, I used a small paintbrush with water to draw the colors out from the black outlines. It was cool, but not really dramatic, so I whistled for my little helpers.

This turned out to be a good opportunity for Stanley to practice his spritzing alongside Hammy. After they got the panel quite wet, I laid a paper towel over the top, covered it with a large acrylic block and let it sit for several minutes. I like how the water and then the towel spread the ink and left small areas of the towel pattern on the card panel. You'll have to take my word for that last bit.

~~~

Enjoy your week! 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 if you play with your stencils for this rare fifth week of I.D.E.A.S.! 📌

*Life is too short!

1.  Addicted to Stamps and More (Make Your Mark); SSS Wednesday (A/G).

2.  Alphabet Challenge (B is for Birds); Triple B (Birds).

3.  Christmas Cards All Year Round (Santa); Christmas Kickstart (Santa); Jingle Belles (The Man With the Bag); Rudolph Days April (A/G Christmas).

4.  Just Us Girls (A/G Stencil); Stencil Fun (Spring/Flowers).

March 11: D is for Dies/Die Cuts

Hello Stamplings!

How are you? I hope you've had a good week! I'm being distracted by a baby hawk sitting on the fence outside my window. They fascinate me, but so do my little "pet" fence lizards on the garden wall. I hope he just wants to say hello and doesn't need a snack.🫣

But that's not why I called. When I wasn't being squirreled this week, I was happily submerged in dies and die cuts for this week's I.D.E.A.S. schedule. Lots of holidays and holly days called out to me. Here are a couple of the simple designs I made:

Onefer

The Mister is one hunnert percent Irish, divided by two, so we observe St. Patty's Day. I haul out the ol' crock pot to make a delicious corned beef with all the fixins. The crock pot was a wedding gift in 1971 and it still works a charm. (Shoot, I prolly shouldn't have said that.🤞) 

But I digest. I seem to have donated my only shamrock image, so I called a conference with Hammy and Stanley. Between Stanley's British accent and my aaackronyms, it is slow-going, but we are all enjoying the process of getting to know each other. Together we made our own shamrock using a heart die from Cottage Cutz. I free-cut the stem. 

Cool, huh? I used temporary tape to adhere it to the card front as a mask and then blended soft green ink around it. The "happy" is from Memory Box (Happy Script), cut from glittery green paper and the scalloped rectangle frame is from Pink & Main.

Twofer

I have several Easter cards in the works, but (no surprise!) I got squirreled again and made my first 2024 Christmas card instead. I've been wanting to do a hidden word stencil design, so I did. The Joy is from Concord & 9th and the snowfall stencil is from Sarah's Funky Fossil Designs. I did an ombre blending with CP inks. It was easy and fun!

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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! Happy St. Patrick's Day!

*Life is too short!

Challenges:

Shamrock: Cardz 4 Galz (Use some green), and Colorful Options (Celebrating green).
Joy: Stencil Fun (A/G), The Paper Funday (A/G), Christmas Craft Creations (Stencils or embossing folders), Jingle Belles (Holiday cards to die(cut) for).