Do you realize, as of today there are exactly two months left till Christmas?! Are you ready?
I signed up for a shaker card exchange on SplitCoastStampers, and I've been working on some ideas. After a couple of epic fails (like glueing the darned thing closed *before* putting in the shaker bits!!) I finally completed a working prototype. Not sure if I want to make 5 more of these, but I do like the end result. And as it happens, this week is The Cats Pajamas Anything Goes challenge. Since this is from TCP set 'Reindeer Kisses' how perfect did that work out, huh? I haven't played in a TCP challenge for ages, so I think I deserve that part lining up for me... since I spent the weekend working on my failed cards. ;) They were both completely different ideas so maybe this one is meant to be!
I could point out all the glitches, but I won't! It's not like anybody reads my blog to learn stuff so I'm sure I can just keep those things to myself, hehe. I colored in the penguin and reindeer with Copics, and used Tumbled Glass distress ink for the 'sky'. I tried a new-to-me trick for the glitter. I used my clear double sided tape (the tape with the red liner that sticks to your fingers like crazy when you peel it off! lol) and covered it with glitter. Sure enough, once you've shaked and rubbed off the excess glitter, it still looks shiny and glittery but nothing comes off. I love that tape, it's pretty much my favorite adhesive. I just bought two 50 meter rolls for super cheap, I think I'm set for a while now. :)
One of my biggest pet peeves is the photography part. I suck at it. My hands are really shaky so I have a teeny tiny tripod that I use, but it's not very stable so I still need to steady it with my hands. And my camera isn't that great. Honestly, some days I get better pictures with my iPhone! So I'm bummed that you can't see that the sentiment is heat embossed. I used Crimson Red Versafine ink and Judikins clear detail embossing powder. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the light to catch the gleam of the embossing so it just looks flat in the picture.
Both the big and little circles were done with the Simon Says Stamp stitched circles. The stitching really takes it up a notch without any extra effort. Really glad I finally bought that set! I just need me some squares... and some rectangles... and, and, and... :D
I hope you're all having fun working on your Christmas cards. I'm not going to start mass producing till my MISTI arrives this week. Super squeeee!
Alright, I'm done for today.
Please indulge me while I talk about something other than crafting for a moment.
My Scotties are my babies. I love them more than life itself. Last May we lost our little girl Jenna to cancer. It was fast and furious, only a week from the time we noticed her appetite had decreased till she passed. She had just turned 6 years old. Six years, what is that? It's nothing, it's the blink of an eye. I still can't talk about it, or even write about it without crying. That's Jenna in my profile picture. My beautiful baby.
In my grief, I turned to the online Scottie community on Facebook. Everybody says their dog breed is the best, but Scottish Terriers are one-of-a-kind, very special creatures. They are stubborn and independent. They only do things if it makes sense to them, but they are fiercely loyal to their family. And it takes very special people to love and understand them.
Scotties are 10x more prone to cancer than other dog breeds. Every breed has it's medical issues, and as I sadly learned, the big C is a big problem for Scotties. In my worldwide online Scottie community, it seems that a week doesn't go by without somebody losing their baby, or having him/her diagnosed with cancer. Even with pet insurance, the costs are astronomical. Dogs respond surprisingly well to chemotherapy if it is caught soon enough, but the problem is money. Who has $10,000 to drop just like that on cancer treatment for a dog? And the costs can go far beyond that.
If you're not a dog lover, you probably won't understand why anybody would spend that kind of money on an animal that will only live naturally between 10 to 15 years. And that's okay, I don't expect people to understand, just to be respectful of those who would give their lives for their fur babies. I'm one of those people. I would have traded my life in an instant for Jenna to live.
Anyhow, there are many dear dear people I have met online and come to cherish through our mutual love. Scottie owners are very giving and generous, especially when it comes to taking care of their big Scottie family. At least once a month, there is an auction or fundraiser for a particular Scottie with cancer. This month it is Kiki's turn. Her momma is one of the sweetest ladies ever. She is a very talented sewer, and she frequently donates her handcrafted cushions to any fundraiser that is going on, or sends one to a Scottie parent in need of moral support. Kiki has a rare form of mouth lymphoma, and if I recall correctly she was diagnosed perhaps a year ago and has been receiving treatment ever since.
So this project is for beautiful Kiki and her momma Teresa. I made a set of 8 tags that I am donating to the Mad Loves for Kiki auction.
You may recognize the primary colors from the last card I made. I guess I'm on a 'primary color kick', lol. I ran the Sizzix Originals Tags (Scallop Combo #2) die through my Fiskars Fuse and used the largest tag, which is about 4" tall.
I stamped Poochie from The Cat's Pajamas Official Grinch set, and the sentiment is from the Reindeer Kisses set onto each tag. It made me realize that I really should have bought a MISTI when I had Christmas money in January!!!
I then stamped the middle (sweater) section of the Poochie stamp on the argyle patterned paper from a retired Stampin Up! Prints pack. Then I had the joy of fussy cutting eight sweaters (did I mention I hate fussy cutting?). To be fair, I stole this idea from The Cat Pack during Sneaky Peek Week of their winter release. :) Lacking a better implement, I ran a sharpie along the edge of each sweater so that it is black when looking at it from the side. This is a tip I learned from Kristina Werner (she uses a better marker than a sharpie though!)
As you can see, I put a couple of pearl embellishments in the corner, dabbed some Glossy Effects on Poochie's nose, and tied up a bunch of bows out of grosgrain ribbon. I'm pleased with how they turned out, even though I admit I always struggle with 'taking it to the next level'. I'm a very plain and simple kind of gal, and I have to learn how and what to add to give it that extra bit of oomph without it being over the top. If you've endured with me this far, I welcome any comments or suggestions as to what I could have done differently. Bearing in mind that as a beginner I still have limited supplies, and have to make do with what I have on hand. :) I thought of distressing the edges of the tags, but I didn't quite have the right colors. If I'd had some black embossing powder, I might have embossed the sentiment. Shoulda, coulda, woulda right? Still, suggestions are good because it also gives me an idea of what is missing in my arsenal.
It was all going quite well until I tried to fix a minor annoyance... I bet you've never had that happen to you, right? I'm seriously debating redoing this card, but first I need to buy more adhesive *sigh*. I had some more, but in my clean up I seem to have misplaced it. I did say organized chaos, didn't I? I haven't stocked up too much because I'm still trying to figure out what I like. I've been using Elmer's permanent tape runner. It's okay, nothing to write home about. In fact, my first roll got 'gunked' up because I was using it on paper that had Perfect Pearls on it, which is what made me think I should probably try something else before settling on the end all and be all. Adhesive runners seem to be awfully expensive here in Canada. I wanted to try the Tombow MONO Permanent Adhesive, but do you know how much it costs at Michaels? A pack of one applicator and two refills is $16.99. Ahh! Of course I could use this week's 50% off coupon, but I try to save those to buy Copics! Yes I know I can use a coupon a day... but that's a coupon a day I could be using on Copics. ;)
So anyhow, back to my card. The Seasons Givings Blog Hop just happened last week, and it included over 100 bloggers. Wow, this was so neat to discover so many new blogs, and a whole shwack of new-to-me challenges. I bookmarked a bunch of them, and decided to give some of them a try this week.
I was combining two challenges, Verve Stamps' Mojo Mondays and Taheerah Atchia's Cure For The Monday Blues:
I really liked the sketch that Julee Tilman put together for Mojo Mondays, and I wanted to make a very literal card out of it. As for Taheerah's inspiration, I loved the pink cupcakes and sprinkles. I thought the two would come together quite nicely. I like to use pre-folded cards for practicality's sake, but I didn't have one big enough for what I wanted to do. I thought this should be bigger than than a 4-bar, so I grabbed a sheet of Strathmore Bristol 300 series smooth and cut it down to... uh, I don't remember, lol. Okay, I just went and measured, and it was 5"x 8". I know, that's a weird size. Me and numbers don't go so well together. You can also tell why I prefer to use pre-cut/pre-folded cards. :)
I started rummaging though my small supply of paper, and pulled out a new 6"x 6" pad of Graphic 45 Time to Flourish paper that I bought during Boxing Week. I loved the pinks in it, and thought that would be perfect to represent the soft pink fluffy cupcakes from Taheerah's challenge. I eyeballed square and rectangle sizes to represent the Mojo Monday sketch. I used a coral pink ribbon from my stash, and instead of a bow, I decided to use some balloon embellishments. I thought that would give it a celebration feel, which is what cupcakes and sprinkles remind me of.
I used a stamp set by Inkadinkado. I picked one of the cupcakes and the word 'Celebrate'. I stamped in Versamark ink, and pounced it with a raspberry-colored mica pigment (my own secret no-name supply, lol).
I then got out some pearl and rhinestone embellishments which I semi-randomly placed on the card. I have a whole bunch of little vials of nail embellishments from when my sister was studying to be a nail technician. I thought she was pretty good at it, but she decided to go back to office work and gave me all her embellishments. I found some teeny tiny hearts which I placed to the lower left of the cupcake. I had these pretty pink shell-type fragments that I wanted to sprinkle in the lower right. I was struggling with that a bit, and then next thing I knew, I had smudged the pigment in the cupcake and the sentiment. So I got some pigment powder out again and tried pouncing a little bit. I figured if that didn't help, I would use my Versamarker and touch it up before adding more pigment powder. Well, next thing I knew, there was pigment powder everywhere. It got down in the shell fragments, which I tried to dust with a brush and just ended up spreading it everywhere. I smudged some of the white background cardstock, and it just all went downhill! I added a little string of pink pearls to the corner where the shells and pigment were making a mess to try to distract from said mess. Then I tried 'erasing' the pigment from the cardstock, and that made it worse. So guess what? We're now smudging pigment all over the white cardstock! It was looking a bit too glaringly white anyhow. ;)
I truly debated cutting around the Graphic 45 paper and regluing to a new piece of cardstock. Alas, that's when I ran out of adhesive, and couldn't find my spare. Yup, a real fiasco. I was going to wait a day or two and start all over again, but who cares?! I'm doing this for me, right? I had fun putting it together (until pigment got everywhere!) and that's all that should matter. I decided to document everything so that I can look back at some point and see how far I've come (hopefully!)
So there you have it. I think it's okay. Could I have done better? Absolutely. Can I give this to my sister for her birthday? Um, I'll think about it! ;)
Feedback is always appreciated, but please be nice. My hubby will be terribly upset if he finds me curled up in the bottom of the closet crying, lol. ;)
Supplies used:
Eek! It has been two years since I last posted, in fact since I ever posted. Time to try again? A lot has happened since then. As you can see in my profile, we lost our princess Jenna last year. Somehow, the desire to make hair bows and cute girly stuff went away. Even though Jenna was my dog, she was my baby girl. When I lost her, something broke inside of me. I was already struggling with depression, and this made me spiral down further. I could not bring myself to crafting anything.
My mom was getting remarried in October and she asked me to make the wedding favors. This was good, it helped bring me out of my crafting darkness. I scoured the Internet and YouTube, to find something that will be beautiful and my gift to her. I wanted to use my Fiskars Fuse to make some sort of container for the favors. I finally settled on a die by Lifestyle Crafts. I ordered a small handcarved rubberstamp Happie Stamp on Etsy. It was a teeny little heart with my mom and stepdad's initials inside. I dug through my craft supplies, and remembered that I had "inherited" my sisters Stampin' Up! supplies when she moved away a few years ago. Amongst them, I found a tag punch. I ended up making little tags out of the same cardstock as the gift boxes, Core'dinations cardstock in Iced Cocoa, and heat embossing the heart on them in copper, which I attached to the little gift boxes. I bought a Spellbinders lacy border die to make paper lace that I glued around the box. I didn't really know what I was doing, so it was a lot of trial and error. I finally ended up running the lace border die through my Fuse using three layers of tissue paper. I had also discovered Perfect Pearls by Ranger, and made a mix of Perfect Pearls and water which I painted onto the lace. This fused the three layers of tissue paper together, which was serendipity because I didn't know if I would have to glue them together or what I would do.
Back to the tags. I used Tim Holtz's Vintage Photo Distress Ink to distress the edges of the tag. I also used my Perfect Pearls mix to paint over the tax which created a resist with the embossed heart. This gave the tags a bit of a different look from the box. Now would you believe that I don't even have a picture of them? I have all the supplies still, so I will try to make another one and take pictures and post on my blog. I was just really preoccupied, because as it turned out, I ended up making my mother's wedding cake as well as her centerpieces.I do have a picture of her wedding cake so I will post that here in the meantime. I won't go into details on the cake making that'll be a story for another day… maybe even another blog (just kidding)!
Anyhow, the whole point of this was to tell you about my path back to craftiness, and a whole different kind at that! In all my OCD anal-retentive research for my mom's project, I discovered the wonderful community of SplitCoastStampers.com. As they say, the rest is history, so now since November, I consider myself to be a fledgling cardmaker and rubberstamper. :)
Supplies used:
