Dinosaurs keeping it simple!

 This week I got a full set of Distress Watercolor Pencils. There is a learning curve to them, of course.

I started with these dinosaurs that had been stamped and heat embossed onto some smooth Bristol card stock.

The sentiments are from an old Ideology sticker book. I guess with dinosaurs you can go with any number of unrelated sentiments.

Fa la la! etc.

This reindeer is from a stamp set in my collection for years. I think I got it in 2015, but it came out in 2012. It is "Fa La La" from The Alley Way Stamps.  The actual "falala" on this card is from a die cut, possibly Simon Says Stamp. I'm entering this one in the Retro Rubber Challenge as it is an "anything goes" challenge. I never seem to have the right theme going on for them, but this is perfect because it is anything, LOL.

I cut the falala from the gold foil background panel and covered up the hole with the brown patterned paper. After adding the cut falala on top, and the Copic colored reindeer, I decided to add a bunch of small die-cut snowflakes. These are from My Favorite Things and Paper Smooches. I cut them from foil and glitter card stock, and topped each one off with a drop of copper or gold Nuvo drops.

I added red Stickles to his nose, and when it dried flat I added Nuvo crystal glaze to give it more shine and some dimension.

It is kind of tricky to photograph mirror-foiled paper, but you can really appreciate all the shine on this one. It's one of my favorites so far this year. Deck the halls you all. Whenever you're ready, of course.

Starting early on Christmas, for once.

Yes, for once I'm going to have at least some of my Christmas cards done before Thanksgiving. That last minute scramble may mean cool things coming out of the craft room, but it also means the cards go out the week before Christmas. That in turn means they will spend less time on refrigerators and get trashed even sooner. I'm realistic enough to know they don't get saved like precious works of art, so there you have it.

These cards have very little coloring and no fussy cutting, so they go together quickly. I did several of each design.

The green card features the dog from Avery Elle's "Happy Howidays" set. 

The red card below features the snowman from The Alley Way Stamps' Melt Your Heart Out" set from a a couple of years ago.

Both also feature My Favorite Stamps' "Hand Lettered Christmas" greeting in gold embossing. 

Believe it or not, my new Halloween stamp is coming via FedEx later today, so I may even get a few of those done before the spooky holiday, too. Shh, don't tell anyone, I only bought it for the frog and the pumpkins. 

One more time, flamingo!

OK, one last visit to TAWS' Tropic Topic flamingo and palm tree. Those coconuts are just odd looking to me. Here in south Florida coconuts on the tree are not round, nor do they have the 3 dots on them.  But hey, the stamp artist had to take some artistic liberties, right?

Hello you! (Archaeology, anyone?)

Another example of my ancient flamingo stamp from The AlleyWay Stamp's Tropic Topic. I've colored the bird and leaves with my Zig Clean Color Real Brush Markers, cut with the Scan and Cut, and mounted it onto a frame from My Favorite Things' Blueprints 27. The sentiment is from Lawn Fawn's Scripty Sayings.

True fact. Whenever you set out to do something, another thing must be done first. After months of going on a single charge, my Canon SLR battery finally ran out. It had been so long since I've had to charge it that I lost my camera bag in my walk-in closet. So I had to re-organize part of the closet today. Yikes!

The truth is I almost always use my phone camera for everything else but taking pictures of cards to post here. For cards I still love my Canon Rebel XS.

Another archaeology project

I have a very generous friend who recently gave me the gift of Lion Country Safari. It's a local drive-through zoo. She gifted me with an actual annual pass! And me with no safari themed thank you cards. Come to think of it, I don't (yet) have any safari themed stamp sets. Well, My Favorite Things' big retirement sale to the rescue. But I needed a card today.

The flamingo and palm tree are from an old The Alley Way Stamps' set called Tropic Topic. I think I have only used the snake out of that set. The sun and clouds are from Lawn Fawn, and the grassy borders are from My Favorite Things.

I colored the bird and trees with my Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers on real water color paper and cut them out with my Brother Scan and Cut.

Now, I'm off to get this in the mail! Fun fact: I used a shark stamp on the envelope!

Happy shark week, AGAIN!

So, this week I got another cheap no-name die in the mail. This is a scribble styled Christmas Tree. I have sharks on the brain and I immediately thought of Sharknado. I mean, really, how could I resist?

The water colored back ground has been in my paper scrap box for over a year now, as was the shark (from Avery Elle, Hello Chum). The "Smile" die was also cut and in my scrap box. I just had lost the tittle. That's the eye dot, I just wanted to type it. The smile die is from My Favorite Things.

I considered spelling out Sharknado, but I think if people see the tornado they will get it.

I used Emmit Alphabet from My Favorite Things for the inside "Shark Week", and finished it off with a script "Happy" from an old Stampendous set and a "watermarked" grinning shark in the corner.

Happy shark week!

Yes, it's a shark popping up to say, "Hi".  The inside reads:

The shark and front sentiment are from Avery Elle's "Hello Chum". The wood grained panel is cut with Avery Elle's Wonky Rectangles, as is the wavy banner.

The cup is an older die from My Favorite Things.

The inside sentiment was created from The Alley Way Stamp's "Gabfest" and Lawn Fawn "Milo's ABCs".

This card was a mess. I actually dragged the back of it through my Versafine ink and had to use a sand eraser on it. I didn't notice the smears inside until I was editing this photo.

Fairy kisses-Archaeology project, part 1

So, in my project of using stamps (and other supplies) that I purchased and never used, I started with this fairy from The Alley Way Stamps. She's Tootharina, the tooth fairy, but I thought she looked more like a garden fairy.

She's painted with Distress Oxides and coated with sparkle. The background is a pre-printed card from Concord and 9th. The flowers and sentiment are from The Alley Way Stamps' Twinkle Toes, which features their version of a garden fairy.

The stamps and pre-printed cards are no longer available, so that probably fits my criteria for "really old stuff."

Now I can't get that song, "Diggin Up Bones" out of my head.

Call anytime. Really.

So, this week I played with my new Distress Oxide Inks. The first thing I did was this tri-colored panel. I used a Gina Marie die for the panel. I played around with a lot of different white die-cut sentiments, but ended up liking these simple palm trees the best. The palm trees are one of the no-name dies from China that I recently got. More on that story later.

I used a sentiment from an older set from The AlleyWay Stamps.

I have decided that I will go and use most of the stamp sets that I HAD to have, but have never used. And to make the challenge even greater, at least one stamp should come from a set that is no longer for sale. Then it will truly be archaeological.

Of course, I haven't stopped buying new stamps, what do you think I'm capable of here?

Little birdie

Today's card is another from My Favorite Things' Purrfect Friends set. I was delighted when I was in the MFT store last week to see a new paper set with all black and white prints. If they had an entire set of b&w stripes I'd grab that very quickly.  One of the best parts of shopping in the store was that the new products were on the racks even though they weren't on the web site yet. Woo hoo! Of course, I didn't get to play with them until I got home and by that time they were up on the site. The pigs are so cute. I'm just sayin'.

The yellow panel was ink blended with a Tim Holtz stencil, and the sentiment is from an old set from The Alley Way Stamp called Flap Happy. The inside of the card is blank so I can choose the occasion when I need it.

Random thank you notes.

Today's entries are random thank-you notes I made with leftover flowers I colored last week. These are all on Kraft colored bases. The flower above is My Favorite Things' Fancy Flowers, colored with Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers, and the two cards below feature flowers cut with MFT's Stitched Flower dies and water colored with my Mission Gold set. The background on the bottom part was tone on tone stamping with Versamark.

The script thanks is from The Alley Way Stamp's Jibber Jabber set. It's an oldie but goodie.

And here, completely off-topic, is a picture of me and my badly colored sign at the West Palm Beach Women's Rally yesterday.  I was trying to use my Sharpies up, and at least 2 of them DID seem to dry up on me.  When it comes time to making more protest signs, I'll use my Brother Scan N Cut to make the letters bigger and tidier. I'm not afraid of glue!

Hey, how about the felt ears on my bucket hat? It was WAY too hot for knit hats here in south Florida.

Happy new year, and clean off that desk!!

I have a lot of colored images waiting to be used on cards. These dinosaurs have been patiently waiting since some time in 2014. No kidding.

The are from The Alley Way Stamps' Livin' Fossils and Stomper. I remember coloring them and fussy cutting them, but then I put them in the plastic box. You know, the one with divided sections so 

I can categorize all the cut out images I have to use. That's how bad it is.

Here's a few of the images I haven't even gotten into the box yet:

I envy those paper crafters who keep their colored images in a bowl on their desks and actually use up the images in a timely manner. Maybe that should be my New Year's resolution, to use up or FILE away images in the same month I make them. That chef has been hanging around since at least August.

Super quick cat tags!

Wow, I did these cat tags in a last-minute panic-driven moment.

Seems, all the women I was giving gifts to at my library are cat people. Cats and librarians, go figure. Anyway, these came together very fast. As a matter of fact, the thing that took me the longest was lining up the letters on the block for the names. Plus, I dropped the "I" and lost it, AGAIN. Flashlight at an angle to the floor to the rescue, again.

The cats are from Sunny Studio's Santa's Helpers set. I heat embossed them and quickly colored them in with Copic and Spectrum Noir markers. The names were created with Lawn Fawn's Violet's ABCs, and the tags were cut with My Favorite Things' Tag Builders Blueprints 5. I didn't have appropriate ribbon, so I used baker's twine. I have 4 giant spools of twine from The Twinery that I probably will never use up.

If I had had more time, a few sprigs of holly stamped in the corners would have been nice. But this did the job!

I made tags out of these two guys earlier this week for the cookies I brought to work. Too bad I didn't take pictures of the tags. The back read: Christmas Calories don't count. Oh how I wish that were true. These are from The Alley Way Stamps.

My deer friend, and my new toy.

I did it and I'm happy that I did. I gave away my semi-crippled* Silhouette Cameo and bought a Brother Scan N Cut 2. For cutting out stamped images, wow. Just wow. I can't tell you how much easier this is. But I can show you the first images I cut with it!

The tree, the stump and both critters were stamped with Versafine onto Bristol card stock, cut with the ScanNCut2, and then colored with my Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers. The background is from a 6x6 pad of impressionist type images that I got several years ago at Tuesday Morning.

The tree, stump, and critters are from The Alley Way Stamps. Gosh I miss them.

* For the curious, my Silhouette Cameo got it's USB port fried, so all designs to be cut had to be saved to a memory card. Plus, to cut stamped images I had jump through several hoops first, and even then only one side of the page would cut correctly. I had to guess if it was going to be the right or left side today.

Get well tea party

Yep, it's get well time, for me! I brought back a stupid chest cold from my Alaskan cruise, and it is malingering.

Anyway, this card is created from The Alley Way Stamp's "Tea Par Tea" set (from 2014). I embossed the teapot and teacup with copper embossing power onto water color paper. I then colored the m with my Gansai Tambi watercolors. The tiny teabag was stamped and embossed with the same copper embossing powder and mounted using a tiny piece of hemp twine.

I also use My Favorite Things plaid paper and MFT's scalloped frame die. The card base is cut from some Simon Says Stamp paper.

Way to start the Coffee Lover's Blog Hop, right? More tea, please!

You've got this.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want to do, and sometimes I struggle with using the ONE thing I started out to use.  Sometimes the ONE thing is the only thing that really doesn't work on a card.

These birds from The Alley Way Stamps' set "Bird Brain" have been in my colored images box for over a year now, just waiting for the inspiration to strike. I also wanted to use the frames from Lawn Fawn (Flirty Frames) with a mirrored center piece behind the birds. The shiny silver card stock centers just didn't look right, and I lost the impact of the green striped paper, too.

Sometimes it isn't what you thought it was going to be. This is one of those times. LOL at me.

Oh, the other idea I had was to use the "You've got this" sentiment with coffee, somehow. Scratch that, for now.

Summer Coffee Lover's Blog Hop

Today I am jumping into the Summer Coffee Lover's Blog Hop with a card I actually finished last week. I have been out of town for the last week and away from my tools and supplies.

I used one of  my new "on the edge" dies from MFT for the "celebrate" part of the sentiment, and Milo's ABCs (Lawn Fawn) for the Hip Hip Hurray portion. You can't really see it here, but the rectangles for the cups are cut with a stitched photo frame die from Pretty Pink Posh. The "coffee" stamp is from an old The Alley Way Stamps set (Breakfast Club). The mugs are paper pieced with a stamp from Your Next Stamp.

On a side note, who knew there were so many different ways to spell "hurray"? After I started worrying about that, none of them looked right.

Water coloring over embossed text

I just got the "on the edge" set of sentiments from My Favorite Things, and the "HAPPY" just screamed, "Cut me out of white on an angle!". Who am I to argue with inanimate craft items that speak so clearly?

The back panel is white embossed text (Hero Arts) that has been water color stained. Seriously, I just used my Gansai Tambi water colors and picked out a few of my favorites and slopped it down there.

The birthday word stamp and the bird are from The Alley Way Stamps. TAWS went out of business last January, but I have a LOT of their stamps, I was a fan and a subscriber. So, TAWS critters will be on my cards a long time. Yes, this card should have read "HAPPY Bird-day".  I missed that opportunity for a pun. My bad.

More flowers

Yes, more flowers. And brace yourselves, because even more are coming! I got my order from Jo-Ann's yesterday with 2 new old sets from Woodware with doodle-y type daisies and sunflowers.

In the meantime, enjoy more messy water colored flower cards:

The flowers are from The Alleyway Stamps Petal Pushers and Wispy Wishes. The "thanks" is cut with a die from Paper Smooches.