The Amazing Challenge

Here's a layout I completed using my October Counterfeit Kit, and it looks as if I'm going to be on time for a few challenges this time!  First up is this sketch from Creative Scrappers:

I'm also entering at Frosted Designs (this week's challenge is to use mist and/or paint - I misted the rosettes and "Amazing" title piece with Dylusions Lemon Zest and painted the page border with a toothpick dipped in white acrylic paint) and  Ella's Pink Scrapbook Challenge #31 at The Pink Elephant: 3 photos, buttons, and flowers (rosettes count as flowers, don't they?)

Here's a close-up of the journaling and some homemade washi tape:

 and another of the title block:

Oops, just realized I didn't put the date on this page, I believe it was June 2, 2012.  We had such a blast, driving all over the area and completing crazy challenges like memorizing poems, a wilderness walk, stacking wood and bowling bingo.  I plan to do a SMASH page spread with some of the clues and memorabilia I have put away, but just wanted to get these three photos featuring my friend Andrea scrapped before too late - I miss that girl sooooooo much, and I only knew her for a year, sniff!  Thank goodness for Facebook and phones!!!

Oh, before I sign off, have to tell you about the crazy weather her this past weekend.  First of all, it snowed like crazy, and I bet we have a foot of the white stuff out there right now.  Second, the mercury dipped to -21 degrees celsius this morning, and stayed there most of the day - BBRRRRR!  And third, and this was the craziest of all, I was sitting on the couch Saturday night, talking to Jason, when I felt the couch moving - I thought I was getting a mad case of vertigo, which I have had before, when Jason said, "You're wigging out right now, aren't you?"  I didn't say anything for a moment, then said, "I don't know, it felt like the couch was moving!"  I probably would have dismissed it altogether, when Jason said, "I felt it too!"  Then we looked up and saw the ceiling fan moving and heard the dog barking like mad, and realized it must have been an earthquake.  Sure enough, found out via Facebook that there was an earthquake off the coast.  So strange, I have never felt anything like that before!  Anyway, it was a very big earthquake, but no tsunami resulted, and I don't think there was any damage or injuries, phew!

Read More

Li'l Stinker

Here's the next layout I completed using my October Counterfeit Kit.  The pictures really don't do this one justice at all, the pinks should be that bright Picked Raspberry featured in my last layout, but here it looks almost like salmon, blech!  Well, you'll just have to use your imagination!  Once again I had a blast playing with my Cameo, using it to cut the title (I even figured out how to download and use a free font, thanks to a Youtube video I found here), rosettes, pink buttons, butterflies, and these wicked chevron arrows:

And here's a close-up of the journaling, pretty simple this time:

It's true, she's always making faces and using this devil voice she has to sing "Twinkle Twinkle" - it's hilarious!  Here's the sketch I used from Creative Scrappers (yay, I'll make it on time this month!):

Ever have one of those days?  Let me take a moment to tell you about mine!  It was -10 last night, and while we are no strangers to the cold, it just caught me off guard.  Luckily, I unpacked all our winter gear yesterday, but still have yet to find the ice scraper for the car.  So we're late getting out of the house (forgot to budget extra dressing time for the gloves and toques and such), and the car is completely iced up, can't see a thing, and I have a 9:15 appointment for Hunter to get his nards chopped off and his head looked at, so I have to put the kennel in the car, and oh look, it's full of ice!  Poor Hunter, at least the vet clinic is only a 5 minute drive away.  Yes, kids, I know we're going to be late for school, but just blame your mom, I don't mind.  The vet clinic is on the same block as the school, isn't that wonderfully convenient.  Only it isn't, because this vet clinic is closed on Mondays.  Huh, must have made the appointment at the other vet clinic, but where in Vanderhoof is that other clinic?  Let's go ask the friendly people at the tourist info center.  The clinic's another 15 minute drive out of town, and there's an orange warning on my dash saying that my tires are low, fill them up with air.  Well, I would if I knew how (that's what men are for, isn't it?) and if I had the time, but I gotta book it out to Braeside.  Finally find the place, get Hunter booked in and everything seems fine, whew!  Fast forward to 3 p.m. when I pick up the kids from school, and I'm all like, "Hey, Nolan, the vet is going to put a microchip in Hunter for identification, cool, eh?" and he says, "Hunter already has a microchip,  he came from the breeder with one!"  So, I just spent $55 for nothing - lovely, this day keeps getting better.  Oh, and Hunter didn't have just one cyst in his head, it was more like 4 or 5, right down to the bone, so the final bill was $700 +.  Wow, I think I'm just gonna go to bed now, g'night.

Read More

Self-Soothing

It's amazing how much crafting you can get done when you don't have phone or internet service to distract you!  No kidding, the wind blew our phone line right off the pole, and it took 5 days to finally get it fixed.  Good thing we had no 911 emergencies!

So, this is the first page I made with my October Counterfeit Kit, and I really love it!  I used this sketch from Let's Get Sketchy:

and some of the Basic Grey PB&J papers from my kit.  I cut the navy border, doilies, and title with my (brand new) Cameo (eeeeeee!!!!)  I also added some of those cool labels from my kit - these print out great, and you can find them here and here.  Here's a few close-ups of those clusters and the journaling:

The doilies were cut from plain cream cardstock, then I inked them with Picked Raspberry Distress Ink (hey, did you hear that all those limited edition inks from Ranger are now part of the Distress Ink palette?  This Picked Raspberry is so bright and vibrant, it kind of makes my mouth water, yum!)

Yep, my Brenna Bean is a real thumb sucker, and she twirls her hair while she's doing it - a couple of times her fingers have gotten stuck in her hair!  I had her out and about once, and a lady saw her doing this and said it's a sign of intelligence - maybe that she can do two things at once?  I don't know, I just think it so adorable!

Thanks for looking, and I should have more to post soon - I'm on a bit of a roll at the mo'!

Read More

October Counterfeit Kit

We're past the midway mark of October, and I finally got my Counterfeit Kit together!  Here's the inspiration kit from Gossamer Blue:

When I'm making my kit, I always look to see if I have any of the exact papers from the original.  In this case, I had two - the Echo Park Everyday Eclectic woodgrain chevron (with a small strip missing!) and an almost full sheet of the journaling cards.  From there, I look at colours and/or patterns and see if I can come close.  And this is what I ended up with:

I've got some cardstock in the back row, then the two EP papers, followed by all Basic Grey, the first from Paper Cottage and the rest from PB & J.  I've also got some Spellbinders dies to make labels, and some labels I had previously printed to use in my SMASH books.  I only had one resin flower, so I added some shaped buttons that might be handy for embellishment clusters, and some half-used packs of alphas (Thickers, Stickopotamous, and Making Memories).  And finally, some chevron washi (Queen & Co.), a chevron stamp, some coordinating ribbon, and a package of sheer label shapes that I won as a prize and haven't used - hope I can figure out a way to utilize them this month.

Oh, and the best part of all is I am now the proud owner of a Silhouette Cameo!!!  I've been playing already and I'm so excited to see how I can use this tool to get some layouts and cards done this month!  Stay tuned!!!

Read More

A Card for a Bestie!

Here's the challenge at Seriously Creative Challenges:

Ooooh, colours, lookit all the pretty colours!  That's what inspired me to create this card for one of my best friends:

As always, the photo doesn't really do it justice, but I'm quite pleased with it.  I used this sketch from Try Stampin' on Tuesday (really love the simplicity of this sketch):

And I also decided to enter a new (to me) challenge called Shopping Our Stash - challenge #72 is a Tic Tac Toe challenge, and I decided to do brad/kraft/embossing.  It was so fun to use my new embossing folder from Sizzix - it's double-sided with bricks on the other side!  Stamps are all from Close To My Heart, and patterned paper from Studio Calico.  I stamped the leaves with Distress Stain, which gives kind of a neat effect, kind of messy.  I guess it doesn't really show, but I wanted my leaves to be glossy, and since I can't find any Glossy Accents, I inked up each leaf with Ranger Perfect Medium and heat embossed with clear embossing powder.  Worked pretty good!  What do you think of my asymmetrical idea of having the leaves on one side?  Not sure I'm happy with it, but hoping that my friend doesn't notice or care, haha!  That's the great thing about making cards for people who aren't card-makers, they tend not to notice if you've made a mistake (or 10!)

Well, thanks for looking, and I do hope you join us this month at Seriously Creative Challenges!

Read More

Summer Layout to Share

Quick post today as I still have my MIL and BIL here visiting, and I don't want to neglect them too much.  I've been working on this layout for a while, just playing with the finishing touches and finally finished it last night.  I'm quite pleased with it!  I used some colours that I normally wouldn't choose for this photo, but I just felt like experimenting.  I started off with a new Dylusions mask and some Fresh Lime Dylusions spray to do the border, then just layered various papers until I got the effect I wanted.  The papers are from Studio Calico, Echo Park, MME and Simple Stories.  There's a floral border there from Sassafrass Lass, and another B&W polka dot one from Amy Tangerine that I cut into little flags.  The flowers are made with the ever trusty Tim Holtz Tattered Florals die, and I was surprised to see how easily this die cuts felt!  Fun, never tried that before!

There's some Kaiser rhinestones there, and an Echo Park sticker, some cool buttons from my stash, and look here:

See that butterfly pin?  That's one I won from Channa, and it's just beautiful!!!  I have four more, and I'm torn between wanting to use them all up or just hoarding them forever!  Here's the sketch I used from Creative Scrappers:

I'm really loving their sketches these days, but once again, I missed the deadline.  Huh.  I'm seeing a pattern here...

Oh, I should write out the journaling, because I doubt if you can see it.  It says:  "You two look so peaceful here, sitting by the Nechako River in the sun.  The relaxed mood was broken abruptly about two minutes later, when Brenna decided to pitch herself face first into the water!"  Yep, you can just imagine her surprise and tears, it was hilarious!!!

Read More

Some Quickie B-day Cards and a New Challenge!

Here are a couple of birthday cards I made up the other day, one for my brother-in-law, and one for my mother-in-law (they're both up for a visit for Thanksgiving, yay!):

I completely cased the stamped circle idea from a pin I had pinned to my "Cards" board, so I need to give credit to Katie Gehring - you can find her original card here.  I absolutely LOVE it, so clean and graphic!  But even though I intended these cards to be quick and simple, they ended up taking quite a while because, well, because I'm me and that's how I roll, I guess.  I'm still not completely happy with them, but ... they are what they are.  Here's a close-up of Shirley's:

I used stamps from Close to My Heart, Tim Holtz, Hero Arts, and Hampton Art, and the ink is all Distress Ink.  

Here's Mike's card, and I tried to make it a bit more masculine by sticking to the blues and greens:

Four of the circles are stamped, but three are paper from Studio Calico and Little Yellow Bicycle.  You wouldn't believe how long it took me to figure out where to put these circles, ack!  And here's a side view to show the dimension:

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend - we sure did, even though Hunter developed an abscess on his head, poor dog:

I should have taken a picture before I brought him to the vet to get it drained, it was massive!  He looked like the Elephant Man!!!  But he is now on the road to recovery!

Here is the new challenge at Seriously Creative Challenges for October:

What a gorgeous photo, eh?  Love the ombre look of it!  I sure hope you'll join us this month!  

And one more little tidbit before Nolan drives me absolutely bonkers trying to kick me off my own computer:  I just got an email from Sirius XM letting me know that I have won TWO TICKETS TO SEE METRIC IN VANCOUVER ON NOVEMBER 10TH!!!!!!!!  HOLY CRAP, CAN YOU TELL THAT I'M FREAKING OUT???????  I AM SOOOOOOOO EXCITED I DON'T THINK THESE CAPITOL LETTERS REALLY SHOW JUST HOW OUT OF MY MIND I AM RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!  

Okay, gotta go, take care, and I'll be back soon, promise!

Read More

Creative Accents' October Stamp of the Month

Ack, totally forgot to post these yesterday for the first of the month!  Bad DT member, BAD!  Every month Creative Accents has a Stamp of the Month that they order in for club members at an extreme discount, and this month was my turn to play, yay!  I got this lovely Ranger Melt Art Texture Treads stamp called "Scattered Leaves" in the mail from Tara:

along with some BoBunny papers and washi tapes to play around with.  Now these texture treads aren't like normal stamps - they're made to work with UTEE, and you can either pour the UTEE right on to the stamp, or pour the UTEE into something and stamp into it with the Texture Tread.  I don't have UTEE or a melting pot, so I thought there wouldn't be anything I could use the stamp for, but after playing around a bit, these are the two cards I came up with:

I was totally inspired by Jennifer McGuire's cards she made in this video, although mine looks nothing like hers!  If you look at the image of the Texture Treads stamp up above, you'll notice that there are two sides to it, a positive and a negative.  For this card I inked up the negative side with Perfect Medium ink, embossed with clear embossing powder, then rubbed two different colours of Distress Stain (Spiced Marmalade and Antiqued Bronze) over the whole panel.  I then sprayed the panel liberally with water to blend the stain together.  Then I pieced my card together using strips of washi tape and paper.  I quite like the end result.   

But I really love how this one turned out:

Same basic idea, only this time I inked up my panel first with the same colour stains, heat embossed the positive side of the stamp, then rubbed Walnut Stain Distress Ink over the whole panel.  I love how the colours work so well with that BoBunny paper.  See that little bit of lattice in the background?  That's a new die from Spellbinders I got to play with too!  Here's a close-up view:

Thanks for looking, and I hope you enjoyed my Autumn cards!  I think I will use this same idea to make some birthday cards, I have a few coming up soon and I am totally unprepared (as usual)!  

P.S. - I just heard that my Cameo has shipped, and I cannot wait to get my hands on that sucker - sooooooo many ideas, woohoo!  

Read More