Artists Trading Cards - ATCs

I love making these!!  I am having a challenge at Pages in Time to create ATCs.  I have decided to use ATCs as a way to try out new things.  Its a bit easier to tackle on a little 2.5 x 3.5 card.  If you mess it up, no big deal.  I really hate it when I mess something up on a 12x12 LO so I find ATCs perfect. 

At the Pages in Time Fashionista Group we all decided that we loved this image of the lady dressed in black and so some of us are going to do ATCs of her.  These are the ATC's that I did.

This first one is my favorite.  It is the Black Widow.  It is a hybrid in that I created the image of the lady by digitally superimposing a spider and a web over the picture and then printed it out. 

Steps:  cover ATC with pp- I used two but you can hardly see one of them.  Then I added some black lace that already had rhinestones attached to it.  Then I added my photo.

I used my Cricut to cut out the chandelier using heavy black CS.  I used silver pigment ink to stipple over the chandelier to give it a metallic look.  Then I used some silver stickles to highlight parts to imitate crystals. 

I highlighted part of the spider web by applying black stickles and I used a very tiny dot of red stickles on the spiders body.  I adherred the chandelier last over the image.  I think the ladies eyes are very haunting so I was careful when adding the web to the photo and when adding the chandelier not to cover her eyes. I inked the title tag and around the entire ATC with black and silver inks. 

I painted the photo and hearts with Range Crackle accents.  I love this effect!  I was afraid that the ink in the photo would run when I applied the Crackle medium but it didn't.  The title is embossed.

I used Perfect Pearls on this one to do the title.  First time for that,  I love the effect but it sure is messy, especially when you open the Perfect Pearls upside down!!  LOL, won't do that again!

This was my first attempt with the Perfect Pearls and it didn't turn out so well.  It is hard to read the title.  I guess it just adds to the mystic of the woman!

Making ATC's is really fun.  Come join me at Pages in Time!

Mom and Dad LO

Well I just whipped this LO together in under 3 hours, that is way fast for me!  I am such a slow scrapper!

I did this LO using my DT kit from Pages in Time.  These pastels are not colors I use alot so it was fun to do something different.

Journal says: 

  I love this picture of Mom and Dad that was taken around 1993.. It was taken one weekend when they were with their motorhome club. I love how Dad has his hat cocked to the side! Mom says the photo was probably taken in 1993.

  Mom and Dad first got a 5th wheel trailer while they were living in Texas. They didn’t keep that one long before they traded up for a motorhome. I don’t remember how many motorhomes they’ve had over the years but it’s at least 5. They travelled all over the US going to FMCA rallies and visiting family and friends. They even came to Alaska twice to visit us when we lived there.

  I imagine I got my love for RVing from them. I love traveling in my “land yacht” where I have my own bed and bathroom! We are retiring this year (2010) and we are going to hit the road!

Supplies used:

MME Dreamy 2 - Sugar & Spice collection -

  Background cardstock, two largest flowers, picture frame

Corner pp with the cute bird is MME, Abbey Road Best Friends

PP behind the photo is MME Ooh La La

Chipboard journal spot - Pink Paislee with journaling printed on vellum

Small flower - Sassafras

Large white chipboard flower - unknown, painted with Holtz white crackle paint

Everything inked with distress weathered wood ink

Studio 18 Rhinestone eye

New LO - Jezebel

Meet Jezebel!  She was a Rhodesian Ridgeback and a very awesome dog.  She has been long gone over the Rainbow Bridge (1995) but she does live forever in my heart.  These photos were taken when she was opening her Christmas bone and the look on her face says it, don't bother me!  I used the BasicGrey Fruitcake collection for this LO.  This layout is for an entry to the Pagemaps Blog, the winner will receive the new Sugar Rush and Origns collections!  Awesome prize!!

Artist's trading cards - Challenge too.

Have you ever made Artist's Trading Cards (ATCs)?  This is my first and it was so fun!  I was skeptical about making it at first 'cause I thought I'd rather be doing a LO but I really loved this.  I think its a great medium for trying new techniques.  You can focus a single technique on this small little project.  If you don't like what you did, throw it away as you don't have that much time invested, hopefully!  I just got this great stamp set from Back Porch Memories and an idea popped into my head for my first ATC.

I painted the background with T Holtz brushed pewter crackle paint, then rubbed several colors of alcohol ink into the cracks to give an etheral appearance.  Then I used one of my new BackPorchMemories stamps to stamp the words using archival ink.  Then I adherred the fairy, placed a BG rubon on the left, added stickles to the fairy's wings and bodice, and sprayed all over lightly with marshmellow glimmer mist. I rather like it and think I will do more! 

I am hosting an ATC challenge at Pages in Time and I will randomly select a winner for a RAK.  Do come join my challenge, and check out the other challenges too.  We've got some great challenges going on!  There are challenges for shabby chic, flowers and bling, an exploding box, scraplift!  Come join us!!

Book Cover

I have way too many scraps of paper flying around my SB room with little notes on them of things I need/want to do.  It all sort of gets lost in the shuffle!  So I got inspired by Denise, a fellow DT member at Pages in Time, and decided to make a notebook to keep track of everything.  I am using a small 3 ring binder (about 7 x 9) and this is the from page.  The notebook has a plastic sleeve on the front so I will just slide this in the sleeve!

I love how this turned out!  I love to crowd my pages with all kinds of embellies so I had a ball with this!  I started with Bazzill cardstock that I inked and distressed.  Then the toile pp is Paper Studio. On top of the toile is a  K & Co die cut mat from the Sea Glass collectioon and then the image is Graphics 45 Fashionista Haute Couture.  The paper flowers are Prima sprayed with marshmellow glimmer mist and the brads are MM.  I used a Tim Holtz plate mounted on a scrap of lace that I used when I made my hat for my wedding back in 1981!!  Also used Tim Holtz muse tokens and grungeboard hinges painted with brass crackle paint.  After the paint dried I rubbed the hinges with black ink to make them less shiny.  The two cards to the left of the ladies are are from a K7Co cardstock sheet called Lifes Journey Stamp Collection.  Typewriter letters are also Life's Journey by K& Co.  Black lace is Wrights.  Fabric flowers at the bottom and the checked ribbon are Offray.  Netting and ribbon vine came from Your Scrapbook Stash.  They have some nice vintage  laces there.  Now if this will just slide down in that sleeve, we'll be good to go.  It's going to be a tight fit!!  Thanks for stopping by, let me know you were here!!

National Papercrafting Month blogspot is having an awesome give away. Check it out!  Todays entry says I should tell you about my favorite embellishments!  Well they are bling, lace, and ink!

A Decade of Change

This was a really tough challenge to do a LO about the past decade. I was challenged both artistically and as a writer.  Typically when we SB, we are scrapping happy things and it feels good to add bling and flowers and all those bright fun things but that wouldn't work for me on this LO.  All in all, the decade was very tragic and it was hard to gather all that and put it to paper.  I think I could work on this LO forever but I just wanted to get it done and move on.  Perhaps I'll revisit it one day or maybe make some additional pages.  Anyway, here it is, A Decade of Change.

The journaling says:

OUR DECADE OF CHANGE

2000 – We left Fairbanks, Alaska with heavy hearts. We loved Alaska so much; but we looked forward to the new challenges we would face in Denver.

9/11/2001 – There are three moments in time etched in the minds of those living to witness these events. The first event was the day President Kennedy was assassinated. I was in school and our principal came over the PA system and told us about it. I was just in the 7th grade. The second event was the explosion of the space shuttle, Challenger. I was working in Fort Lauderdale, Florida when I heard the news; I stepped outside my office and could see the split jet trail from Challenger’s explosion. It was a sobering sight. Then 9/11/01 happened, the third event. Along with much of the rest of the nation, I sat and starring at my TV as the 2nd jet slammed into the World Trade Center. I was getting ready for work.

10/2002 – The Washington DC beltway area is terrorized for 3 weeks by a sniper who killed 10 people and injured 3. The sniper was a lone man and a minor child.

12/26/2004 – One of the deadliest natural disasters strikes in the form of a tsunami that killed nearly 230,000 people in 14 countries.

8/29/2005 – Hurricane Katrina roars onto the Gulf Coast leaving behind devastation and a mass of confusion for weeks. While my heart was breaking for all the people who lost their possessions and even worse, their lives, it was the plight of the animals that made my heart ache.

4/16/2007 – A lone gunman goes on a rampage at Virginia Tech University, killing 32 and injuring many others in two attacks that were about 2 hours apart.

Fall 2007 – We decide to sell our house, retire, and move to North Carolina after learning that Dick’s job will likely go away some time in 2008. We planned to put our house on the market in the spring of 2008 but we had an incredible stroke of luck when Dick just happened to be talking to someone outside who was interested in buying a house with a view. Two weeks later, we struck a deal to sell our house with closing on January 31, 2008. We drove the motorhome to NC in November to look for a house. After looking at about 50 houses, we decided to build.

Spring 2008 – We closed on the sale of our house and moved into a rental, owned by the people that bought our house on 2/1/08. We lived in their house until 4/29/08 when we moved into our motorhome to await the completion of our house in NC. We left Denver on June 19, 2008 to close on our house in NC. Dick made several trips to/from Denver that summer to move all of our worldly possessions to NC.

Dick’s job in Denver was definitely going away. The stock market was a complete disaster so Dick decided that he couldn’t afford to retire. It only took him a couple of days to line up work in Stafford, VA working with the Marine Corp on the MRAP vehicle, the follow on vehicle to the Hummer.

3/2/2009 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closes below 7,000 for the first time since May 1997, dropping 299.64 points, or 4.24 percent, to 6,763.29.

3/9/09 – DJIA falls 79.89 to close at 6,547.05, down 53.78% from the all time high on Oct 9, 2007, down 25.37% from the 2009 open.

10/14/2009 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks through the 10,000 level for the first time in a year. The index has risen 52.9 percent since a 12-year low in March.

11/5/2009 – An Army psychiatrist opens fire in Fort Hood, TX killing 13 people and injuring many more.

12/31/2009 – A decade fraught with disasters, natural and manmade, comes to an end. What will the next decade have for the world? Let us pray that there is an end to the war and violence in the Middle East and that humankind will come together embracing each other’s differences.
***

Join us at Pages in Time for this challenge, it is a challenge that makes you think!

Here's a great give away at Scrapbooking Supplies R US!  Check out the giveaway details The Crop Spot/Scrapbooking R Us.  The Giveaway includes the products that Irene Tan, aka Scrapalicious, used to make this awesome LO!  Check it out!

MOM big word mini

Here's my first project for the Pages in Time DT.  Its a mini-album for Mom, BoBunny!  This was fun to make and it will make a great Mother's Day or Valentine's gift.  You can get this at PIT.  I used Pink Paislee's Pop Fashion collection for the papers.  Its just so cute, huh?

My Champagne Buddy

In December we  had a challenge for PIT members to create a sketch  and then the DT would choose a sketch and the DT would make a LO from the sketch.

!

Here is my take on the sketch.  It started out to be a simple LO, but as usual, I couldn't leave it alone and kept adding to it!  I flipped the sketch and sort of went nuts!  LOL, that's me, can't help myself!

Supplies used:

Urban Couture- red pp "silk", red flowers made from same pp

Other flowers cut from K&Co Bailey collection

Red buttons - Dress it Up

Leaves cut from Cricut green collection paper

Yellow diecut - Bazzill

Black CS - unknown

K & Co- Scrap behind photo

Felt bird and butterfly from Colorbok "Friendly Forest"

Paper Studio rub-on paisleys

Letters - MAMBI

Stickles here and there

Prima bling flourishes

A fun little trick I did to give the flowers some texture, I embossed them in my Cuttlebug.  Any embossing folder will probably work.  You could sand the flowers or ink for even more interest!

Thanks for stopping by and visiting my little blog!!

Happy New Year!

Oh a New Year is here, what happened to 2009?  It went by so fast, seems it was just 2008 the day before yesterday!  I had such an awesome holiday season starting with preparing Thanksgiving dinner for my family.  We did lots of entertaining and I loved every minute of it.  WE had 25 people from my Dad's side of the family for a potluck reunion the weekend after Tgiving and then family both Dec 24 and 25.  Then we had very good friends from Denver stay with us Dec 29 - Jan 3 and a New Year's Eve party.  We had so much fun, I think it was the best holday season ever!

Mom and Dad gave all of us this awesome picture of them at Christmas.  It is such a good picture of them, well, of course I could hardly wait to get it scrapped and that was what I did yesterday!

This was my first project using my DT kit at Pages in Time and I'm really happy with how it came out!  The pps and diecut are BoBunny Kitchen Spice Collections.  The paper lace is BasicGrey.  Its actually red lace that I turned over and inked with Ranger Frayed Burlap distress ink.  The fabric/pearl lace is a find at Michaels,  large layered flowers are Prima, the others are K& Co Marcella sticker dimensional flowers,   The brown feather looking things I cut off of silk flowers at Michaels.  They are cool aren't they?  Probably not acid free but I scanned the actual photo so no prob!  I love that bird on the left, its gcd Designs.  I added Stickles here and there and some MM Shimmer flourishes to dress it all up!   What do you think?  I think my Mom's hair looks kind of blue, LOL!!  IRL, she has beautiful snow white hair, definitely not blue!!

These three cute little babies!

LOL, this LO is of my dh and his siblings when they were very young!  Aren't they cute??  Dh's brother found this photo amongst some stuff that came from his grandparents.  There is one other photo that was taken the same day that is a really great photo.  Since the photos were made on Christmas Day, I think I will scrap that one in Christmas pps, but for now, I wanted to use these awesome papers that are from a Studio Calico kit that I won at Sisterhood of Scrap!

I used a ton of supplies on this LO!  The things I used from the kit are:

Sassafras Monstrsoity background pp, yellow check strip, and red pp strip, Jillibean Soup button,  and Cosmos Cricket orange scalloped ribbon framing the photo.

Everything else is odds and ends from my stash:  Coredinations vintage collection orange CS, Colorbok Family Forest die cut,  Heidi Swapp clock face, cardboard painted with Holtz tarnished brass crackle paint ( I love that stuff!), MM frame that I distressed and inked, Inkadinkadoo owl stamped and embossed, then cut out.  I had a hard time feeling any connection to this LO since the photo is not part of "my story" KWIM?  I wanted to journal something but really couldn't think of a thing.  This photo was taken after their father was killed in the Korean war and all I could think about was how sad Christmas must have been for their mother and grandparents. So.....I sure didn't want to go there.

TFL!  As always, I appreciate you stopping by my little blog!!

I hope everyone had a fab Christmas and was able to spend time with cherished friends and family.  We had a wonderful time with my family, and of course ate way too much, as usual!  I took a few pictures and hopefully some will be worthy of scrapping.

But in the meantime, I've been busy trying to get some photos of our new house and related projects scrapped.  I did these pages just before Christmas.   We did so much landscaping the year we moved in and it was so gratifying to see that all our hard work resulted in a lovely blossoms all spring and summer!

I used BasicGrey Urban Prairie mostly on both of these layouts. I love the background pp on this LO and decided to create a larger version of the bird on the paper. I think it turned out quite cute!  The fencing is cardboard painted with Tim Holtz crackle paint and it looks really great IRL.  That big chartreuse flower is Heidi Swapp and it was way too bright for my taste, so I dabbled it with white paint and smeared some pink stickles on it.  Then I added a Prima flower and voila, I like it much better!  The letters are layered Cricut Printing Press mounted on green CS scraps.  They just didn't pop enough so I outlined them with a black pen.

I really like the lace effect around the chevron on this LO.  That was easy to do, I just cut a straight lace strip with my border cutter.  Then I cut each of the lace segments apart and attached them one by one.  I also learned how to weld letters with my Cricut Design Studio for this LO.  I've had that program for a year and have hardly used it so I was glad to accomplish that!  I think I will use my Cricut more as a result.

We have really good friends visiting us from Denver next week.  We are so excited that they are coming!!  So I must get up off my rear and get busy!!  Happy scrapping ya'll!  ;-)

Christmas is in the air!

Its kind of cold and wet outside, feels like Christmas!!  I did some baking this week, finished buying one last item this morning, all the presents are wrapped except for one that is coming in the mail, and all the decorations are up!  Hurray, I LOVE Christmas!! Friday I had so much fun; that's when I did my baking.  I also made a really cute little card to accompany a tray of home baked goodies for the dogs'  veterinarian and staff.  They do such an awesome job taking care of my babies; I appreciate them so much.  I really think veterinarians are so special and because their patients don't talk they really have to have a 6th intuitive sense!  We are still having issues with Chili and pain management.  She was doing well until the beginning of this week when she started going downhill again.  So now she is off the muscle relaxer and on a pain med, a cox inhibitor if I understood the vet, and has responded really well to this.  She is herself again today, was even playfully nipping at Chena's flanks.  So here's the card the poodles gave their vet.  Its simple, done mostly with Jolee's but appropriate.

The the design team at Pages in Time is having a  Secret Santa gift exchange so I thought it would be fun to alter something to use as a box.  I altered a cardboard canister than Viactiv calcium chews come in and I think it is so cute....sort of hate to part with it!! 

I made it using left over BasisGrey Dasher paper.  The lid is plastic and was purple so I used Ranger alcohol inks to color that silver.  I cut out flowers and used pop dots so that everything would have alot of dimension.  I stamped a couple reindeer on the background paper and embossed (new technique for me, was way fun!) with embossing powder.  I gave the reindeer a red nose with Stickles and also used Stickles here and there for added interest.  I also added a few of Tim's fragments here and there for extra dimension.  Finally I punched two tiny holes in the lid and used a twist tie to attach the bow to the lid, that way the cannister can be reused!  This was such a fun project and it is the first thing I have altered!!

So I have been in such a shabby chic mood that there is dust everywhere in my scrap room.  I decided to change it up a bit and get back to some more traditional SBing.  I finished this one up early this am using Bo Bunny Flutter Butter paper which is so GORGEOUS!!

And that's what I've been doing these last few days.   I hope everyone is enjoying this holiday season and not getting too stressed, after all, 'tis the season to be jolly!!

BARK!

Well I've been scrapping alot, but not much barking!  LOL, my dogs are so funny.  They quickly learned that my Dad would give them dog cookies so now when he comes over, they demand that he go to the cookie jar and give them a cookie  before he sits down.  They nose his leg, then go to the kitchen, they come back and nose him again and give him "that look" and back to the kitchen.  This goes on until he goes in the kitchen and fulfills their request!  On Thanksgiving Day when there were alot of people coming over, the dogs decided to capitalize on this idea and demanded that every person entering the house go to the kitchen and give them cookies!  Well, we dubbed this the dog tax, so now all who enter must pay the dog tax!  Animals are so funny aren't they?  I always wonder what will they come up with next.  They are so intelligent, it's like living with small children!