Oooh, Yummo! More Cake!

Hello Stamplings!

Aaaaand we've whooshed back around to another Monday! I hope you've all had a lovely weekend wherever you are!

Did I tell you we are having a bathroom reno done due to a coupla leaks? It was just remodeled fourteen years ago, but apparently the people I hired cut a few corners and I learned another 'you get what you pay for' lesson.😒This new bathroom will outlive us and never leak!

But that's not why you called. You came to see my reminder inspiration cards for the Twofer Card Challenge where the prompt is 🎂CAKE/CUPCAKE🧁!

Last week I featured cake and today I am featuring cupcakes. The stamp my two designs have in common is a fun and silly caterpillar carrying cupcakes. It's an old wooden stamp from Penny Black.

Onefer

I stamped the cupcake-carrying caterpillar in the center and then off the ends because if one cute caterpillar makes you smile, why not have a choo-choo-train of them? I colored the cupcakes with my Ziggies and did a background wash. Hammy winked the cupcakes and also added dots to the segments on the caterpillar which were blank. The Hooray die is cut from an old glossy alcoholic snippet. This is going to my niece who is taking her medical boards as you read this.🤞

Challenges

• Addicted to CAS: Bugs.
  
• HLS CAS: Fun and games.
• Sweet Stampers: Animals or critters or birds.
  

Twofer

And this old girl is one of my all-time fav stamps. She is from Stampendous. You can't tell, but her tutu and shoes and the cupcakes are all winked. After stamping and coloring another caterpillar, I fussy-cut the cupcakes off her back and then piled them up for the frog to hold in her outstretched arms. You can just make out some light stenciling on the olive green card base. The vertical sediment is from Stamps by Judith, also ancient. Not Judith, the stamp.

No NBUS was used for my card designs this time.

Instead I used OWLS (Old Well-Loved Schtuff)!🤣🦉🤣

Challenges

• AAA Cards: Happy 7th Birthday!!!
  
• HLS Watercolor: Anything goes.
  
• Watercooler Wednesday: Marsha's all things feminine.

Come Play!

I hope you are able to play along this month. Remember cakes and cupcakes are not just for birthdays ... stretch that imagination of yours! I'd love to see what you make and I'd love to know about your favorite cake or cupcake recipe if you want to share!

Recipe

Because I used cupcakes this week, I will share one of my sisters' favorite cupcake recipes. It's called Mini Cherry Cheesecake Cupcakes. It's super easy and uses a vanilla wafer cookie in the bottom for the crust. You can find an online version of it here at Plowing Through Life. Enjoy!

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And enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy and keep safe! 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!

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!)

A Puppy and QACAS Christmas

Hello, my dear Stamplings!

I hope that you are having (or had) (or are about to have) a great day whatever you do (or did). Can you imagine how irritating it would be if I did my whole post that way? I won't. But I'm tempted.

The reason I'm tempted is because I'm really, really punchy right now. The Mister and I have been kept up every night for four nights by a rotten critter under our house. It's a small house so every scratch and movement of a pebble sounds like a monster is about to burst through the floorboards and devour us in our sleep. (Gee, sorry if you are reading this at bedtime!) The soonest exterminator we could find isn't available until Monday.😫

Always something! But, never mind. A card will take your mind off that.

I used one of my many Nestability label dies for the aperture on this cute card done up in black on a pink card base. Gosh and golly, I think I have every size of those labels and I never think to use them. (Slap!) I heat-embossed the sediment (from PTI) using SU's blushing bride e/p. The little dog is an ancient button I've had in my stash for years. Hammy added the little bone from Doodle Bug . . . 

Challenges

• AAA Birthday: For a child.
  
• Seize the Birthday: No toppings.
  
• Watercooler Wednesday: Helen's all about occasions.

. . . There is a story behind this card. One of my nieces recently lost her beloved Chesapeake Bay Retriever and to help fill the loss, she got this darling little dog:

She's a Havanese and her name is Mimi. She only weighs four pounds now, but she'll get to seven or eight pounds. Quite a change from an 80 pound dog, eh? Can you believe those eyebrows? They karack me up! 

Here's a closeup of the button:

You'll see that I colored the tan button with my black marker, except for the snout, eyebrows, and paws to make the button look as much like Mims as I could make it, if you ignore the ears. I had a lot of fun creating this card to make it personal for Katherine.

So now we have three Bichons in the family: our Nellie, my niece's Mimi, and her mom's dog, Cisco. We safely got together with them last week for a quick visit and photo op!

Stop it! How cute is that? They are bred to dance on their back feet, even as puppies! You're entirely welcome! You can come back and look at it anytime you get out of shorts.

Twofer

This very QACAS Christmas card was created using Altenew's Vibrant Spray Die Cut Tape! It's a Washi tape in sticker form. I ordered it after seeing my friend Di make a beautiful batch of cards using it. It comes in a wide large roll. I laid a strip of it down the center of a heavy 8.5 by 11 white card and then I cut that down the middle of the tape to get two front panels. I was able to make 64 Christmas cards with one roll of tape!

I know there are roses on the design, but I  thought it would work just fine for a Christmas design because the colors are Christmassy. The sediment is from Happy Little Stampers. And you know who 🐹 has spent the last several weeks carefully placing three little sequints on each card, bless his crafty little heart!

Challenges

• Altenew Washi Challenge: Wild with Washi contest.
  
• Just Add Ink: Inspiration photo. I thought the colors were perfect.
  
• Krafty Chicks: Christmas.

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Enjoy your day and have a great weekend! No, seriously, enjoy, but be safe! LITS!*

Can someone please tell me when the Medicare commercials will STOP???!

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!)

Sunshine or Moonshine?

Hello Stamplings!

I hope this finds you doing well!

I just realized that now you're going to be expecting a recipe for moonshine. I asked Dr. Google and my, is it ever a long and involved process! I'm surprised there isn't a shortage of booze on the shelves by this point in the pandemic, so Justin Case, I'm going to stock up on corn mash.

🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞🌝🌞

(Interesting that the moon emoji is larger than the sun emoji.)

We have a fun, wide-ranging, far-reaching, and imagination-stretching prompt for you this month at the Twofer Card Challenge. It's sun🌞 OR moon🌝. And note: there are a lot of summertime/beach themed challenges abounding in Blogland right now, so the more challenges, the merrier! 

Here are the two designs I came up with:

The item my two cards have in common is a NBUS Hero Arts die called, "Safari Sunset."

Onefer

Everything about this card is self-exploratory. Onto a piece of jungle-y pp, I layered the sun cut from more pp and inlaid with clouds. The giraffe is a stamp from Fiskars, stamped onto pp from Bo Bunny and then fussy cut, and the sediment is from W Plus 9.  EZPZ!

Challenges

• AAA Birthday: Tic Tac Toe. (masculine, die cuts, patterned paper.)
• The Male Room: Happy 7th Birthday!!
• Seize the Birthday: Anything goes.
• Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge: Happy 10th Birthday!!
• Stamping Sensations: August challenge: Make it masculine.

Twofer

This Christmas design on the other hand ... I mean, I don't even know what to say. I knew what I had in mind, but it took some convincing for my ginfers to put it together. Quite a few bits went into the circular file and a few handstands had to happen, but eventually Mr. Muse was happy with the black and white winter sun and the Swiss dot snowfall. The peace die is from Winnie & Walter. Hammy added the star to balance the design. Peace out.

Challenges

• Christmas Kickstart: Snow is falling.
• Pixie's Snippets Playground: Anything snippets goes.
• NBUS #17: Anything never-before-used goes.

  

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I would love to see you play with us and enter your beautiful sun or moon designs in the gallery at TCC!

Please remember that you can make two conventional designs or one conventional design and one unconventional design using the prompt. We have winners for both categories. The fabulous Team ~ and our talented Guest Designers Mac Mable and Linda W. ~ have made conventional designs to inspire you over at the August Twofer Card Challenge! Mwah!

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In other news, we were surprised recently when two peacocks came strutting by our house!

They just calmly walked on by, even with me standing in the driveway, holding Nellie. Sadly, they were so calm, they didn't fan their tails for us. They must be someone's pets and I hope they made it home okay. Never a dull moment in Sublurbia! [ETA: Maxine tells me these are peahens, not peacocks and like so many birds, the ladies don't have much to show. Thank you, Maxine!]

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Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!* Stay safe and keep well!

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!)

Celebrating Christmas in July!

Hello Stamplings!

How are my fellow Covid Shut-ins today? Weary? I don't even have any uplifting advice to make that go away except to suggest you turn on your favorite kind of music and enjoy!  Try not to get a black eye like I did.  

I'm all about QACAS Christmas today. You might think, oh, thank goodness, I'll forget that it's 96 and humid outside. Or you may think, oh, no, no, no, forget about it, I am not looking at Christmas cards in July. You go on then with your bad self and I'll see you next time. No worries.

Onefer

This is a one-layer card made with a NBUS stamp and die set from Simon Says Stamp called "Winter Scene." It was the most fun Hammy and I have had since the time that Greyhound bus filled with members of a British football team took a wrong turn and ended up in our driveway. (That was back when they still allowed drinking on the bus.)

This set has the frame and hills as one stamp and then separate stamps of mountains, reindeer, trees, a house, stars, moon, and four sediments. After I colored, Hammy handled the winking. There are many possibilities for laying out scenes and we told each other stories as we created.

In this scene, we are looking out one of the windows of Santa's house and we see Wilbur and Walter, two of the reindeer out for a nighttime stroll. The problem is they have no sense of direction, as you can plainly tell, and they can't agree on which way to go. Because of that, Santa doesn't use them to pull the sleigh. Well, you ask, why then are they there? Many people don't know this, but Santa has a whole stable full of shelter reindeer that nobody wants. They live long and happy lives because of him. 🥰

Challenges

• Jingle Belles: Colorful Christmas Inspiration. (The banner and the reindeer.)
• Less Is More: OLC Christmas in July.
• The Paper Players: Events you celebrate. Congratulations on the amazing 500th challenge!!!

 

This QACAS Christmas card features a NBUS nativity scene called "Heavenly" by Penny Black. I die cut it from gold paper and then used MFT stitched dies for the popped-up oval and the rectangle panel. The sediment was heat-embossed in gold.

Challenges

• CAS Christmas: Nativity, hosted by Marcia.
• Krafty Chicks: Clean and simple (CAS).
• Sweet Stampers: Christmas in July.

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Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS* so take care!

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!)