More is More

We are in the home stretch for SoCal StampMania coming up this Saturday.  My friends Joy and Emily and I starting planning this event as a local gathering of Splitcoaststampers in the fall of 2004 when we had about 12 people get together for a shoebox swap.  This will be our 4th SCSM (plus we had a MiniMania last fall) and we have 115 people coming this weekend including several flying in from out of state as well as driving from Northern CA.  It feels like there are a million little details to take care of.  (Thank you Leann for the help tonight!)  Emily is going to Vegas with her hubby for a couple of days this week and Joy’s hubby had emergency gall bladder surgery last week and is home recovering now – so just lots going on.  The three of us work so well together – each with our own area to handle – it’s a great team!!

I still need to photograph my class samples from over a week ago to share here, but not sure if I’ll get to it this week.  I need to focus on getting done what really has to get done for now, so please bare with me.

I want to be excited about this weekend, but my personality is to just focus on what needs to be done and not get too giddy so as to remain as calm as possible – I have strong tendencies toward anxiety.  But I am a total people-person and I know when all is said and done I will have had an absolute blast!  I just need to live through this week to get there!  LOL!

Here’s a pic of SCSM3 last year when we has approx. 65 people in attendance (I’m sitting on the floor on the far left next to Joy.  Emily is sitting in the chair onthe far right).  Imagine double that many this year!!!

This week the Ways to Use It Challenge on Splitcoast is Heavy Metal – using metal on cards.  I can never pass up a chance to run copper sheeting through my Cuttlebug, so this week I combined that challenge with the Ways to Use it Challenge (make a bday card using animals in 45 minutes or less).

The main image is another one of my new Whipper Snapper stamps – Spunky Pup.  He was smaller than I expected, but he’s the perfect size for this layout from some cards I saw on Michelle Wooderson’s blog that I just loved!  You can get full recipe info for this card here.

 Curt helped me find copper sheeting awhile back after my friend Val said her husband brought her some  home from work.  Mine came from McMaster-Carr – just put in the part number in the search box – 8944K24.  The sheets are 6″ x 12″ (thickness is .0028″) so you can get 3 full card fronts from a sheet or even more if you are doing partial fronts like on this card.  They come in packs of 25 for $28.34.  With shipping mine worked out to about $1.40 a sheet (so about .30 – .50 per card).  They emboss really nicely with the A2 folders.  I attach them to my cards with my Scotch ATG gun.

Here’s another one I did a couple of month’s ago.  It was Curt’s Valentine and I rubbed the copper with Stazon ink.  The base of the card is copper cardstock.  Full recipe here.

I have 2 more copper cards in my SCS gallery:

Bella Birthday  – for the life of me I can’t seem to find this one in my picture files to post here.  I really need to get those more organized.

and

Copper Martini – this one is in a Dirty Dozen Fan Club Gallery, so you’ll only be able to view it if you’re a member.  If you frequent SCS I highly recommend you join the Fan Club to support the site.

The copper is so much fun to work with.  I want to try it with a bunch more folders!  If you decide to try it. let me know.  I’d love to see what you come up with!

Have you seen the Doodlebug Paper Frills yet?  Omigosh they are sooooo cool!!!  And they are way bigger than I had pictured.  I decided to start with a single color $3.99 package to see what they are like and I was shocked to see that they are a full 12″ long!  I decided to go with the Lily White with the thought that I could make them any color with ink and I was right!  

On this card I inked the zigzag piece with black Versamagic chalk ink (dtp) and the large red flowers were inked with Versamagic Red Magic chalk ink.  The smaller white flowers were individually cut from the small flower strip to make centers for the big flowers.  Then I added Diamond Stickles.  I outlined the flowers with a black marker to coordinate with the black matting of the main image.  These frills are going to be so much fun to work with – so many shapes and endless color possibilties!

The girl in the car is Elle by Rubber Romance.  I just love that stamp line!  The image was stamped twice – once with black ink on Whisper White cardstock and again on Real Red cardstock with Brilliance Platinum Planet ink.  Then the car was cut out and pieced on the white image.  The SU cloud template was used with Cool Caribbean ink and a sponge to create the cloud background. The card base is an SU Caribbean long note and it’s wheeled with the Square Pegs jumbo wheel.

I need to zoom zoom to work.  Hope you have a fabulous Thursday.  Thanks for stopping by.

Every other Wednesday is Stamp Morning at my house.  Even though I have to get up super early, which almost kills me since I’m soooo NOT a morning person, it always ends up being one of my favorite times of the week.  It started awhile back because my housekeepers could only come at 7:00 am every other Wednesday.  OK – don’t freak out that I have housekeepers *eye roll*.  I’ve always worked full time and part of the deal from even before I was married was that as long as I worked and could afford it I would have a housekeeper.  While I love a clean house, I am a terrible housekeeper myself.  A little over a year ago I switched my work schedule to part time due to some family illness issues and somehow I’ve managed to hang on to the housekeepers.  And that makes me really happy!  Makes hubby happy too! But I digress…  While they clean I “lock myself” in my stamp room with my birds (have I mentioned that I share my stamp room with 2 huge macaw cages and sometimes a small lovebird cage?)   I usually try to do some cleaing up in there – putting stuff away – which always needs to be done.  And then I stamp for awhile.  I totally lose track of time and it’s wonderful!  It’s probably the only time I stamp that I’m not thinking in the back of my mind that I should be doing something else.

This morning before my stamp exile I took a quick peek at the Sketch Challenge on SCS.  I had another card in mind to work on, but when I saw today’s sketch I knew it would be perfect for this new Whipper Snapper image “Chicken Trio” I got in that batch a few weeks ago.  I’ve been dying to get it inky!

Just yesterday I got some fun Daisy D paper from eclectic Paperie, so I started this card with the 8×8 pad of Chasing Butterflies.  I pulled all my colors from the designer paper, but of course in the end, not much of the paper even shows.  I used ink and markers on a cd to watercolor with an aquapainter on Naturals Ivory cardstock.  The red hen is a combo of Rose Red and Ruby Red, the yellow one is So Saffron, Marigold Morning and a little Mustard.  The background is sponged with Buckaroo Blue and Summer Sun.  The sentiment was a bit of an afterthought, but it just seemed too perfect so I squeezed it in there.  Card base is Buckaroo Blue and matting layers are Marigold Morning and Ruby Red along with the Daisy D paper.  The cardstock edges are roughed up with the SU distressing tool.  Just added a little doodling and some blue brads to finish it off.

I was very excited to see that I broke into the Stamping Top 100.  I am sitting at 97 as I write this post.  WooHoo!  Thanks to everyone who visits!!!  *big smooches*  (and yes I’m still resisting installing a site counter – standing firm – for now – *wink*)

Happy Wednesday.  I hope you can carve out a couple of hours of uninterrupted stamping time.  It’ll do you good!

What a lovely Sunday!  Today I got to do one of my favorite things – spend the afternoon in a Tea Room with friends.  There is nothing better than a beautiful Tea – scones, tea sandwiches, chocolate and a variety of teas enjoyed over the course of a couple of hours or more.  Bliss!  The occassion for Tea today was to celebrate all the birthdays in my prayer group PACT.  We each buy a gift for one other person in the group.  I wrapped my gift in a large clear paint can by Stampendous from eclectic Paperie.

  I hesitate to tell the story of decorating this because it is truly so goofy I’m not sure you will believe it.  I wasn’t feeling well and it was geting late last night and this needed to be done.  I had a vague notion of what I wanted, but no idea how to acheive it and almost no time to experiment.  I remembered seeing a paint can Taylor had done for Easter and she stamped right on the clear acetate of the can itself.  I wanted that look but was way too chicken to try that.  Ahhhh I’ll stamp on  acetate sheets and just place them inside.  So I started stamping with Versamagic Chalk inks having absolutley no idea if they would dry on acetate.  *insert eye roll*  When I finished the stamping, I liked the pattern I had acheived but I had no time to see if the ink would dry. Hmmmm….I’ll just cover it with another sheet of acetate.  How will I attach it?  No time to think – just use some Scotch Tacky adhesive.  I wanted a cream/ivory background so the stamping would show up more…hey..how about that Prismatics cardstock by Prism Papers?  I cut some of that in Butter Cream, but it wouldn’t sit in the can nicely behind the acetate.  Sooooo I glued the acetate right to it.  Did I mention that I was not feeling well?  Due to some measuring miscalculations there was a weird bottom edge – OK – cover that with some Frosted Pink Prism Paper cut with some decorative scissors.  At this point you may be wondering why I didn’t just stamp directly on the Butter Cream cardstock, however I have convinced myself that that would have looked all together different.

On to the lid.  I had nothing that would cut a circle that big, so I used the old-fashioned trace and cut and cut some more and ended up with a pretty sad looking circle.  I stamped the circle with the flower image from The World Over (SU) and proceeded to color it with Prisma pencils and stuck it on with Sticky Strip.  Still not feeling well by the way.  Covered the ugly edges by easing around some cute pink felt ric rac.  But what’s that you say?  You don’t see that in the picture?  Perhaps that’s because I stuck it to the WRONG SIDE of the lid!!!  No kidding!

At this point I am tired and frustrated and still not feeling well.  Ok let me leave the lid alone for a minute and work on a tag of some sort.  Hmmm….how about a coaster tag.  I took some of the Butter Cream cardstock and ran it through the Cuttlebug with the Happy Birthday embossing folder and sponged it with some of the Versmagic ink and attached to both sides of a coaster.  Punched a scallop cirlce out of the pink and stamped and cut out a flower.  The intention was to hang this from the can somehow, but I was compeletely out of umph.  I decided to leave it til morning (which is really funny since I’m NOT a morning person and knew I had very limited time this morning).

Sunday dawns.  Stick the “tag” to the lid, add some ribbons and a Lil Davis pink chipboard letter and call it good.  Oh my heavens!  Not exactly what I had in mind, but at the rate I stamp what I had in mind would have taken me a week!  Of course my friend thought it was cute (including that I decorated inside the lid! LOL!) and I just acted like I whipped it up no big deal!  A better woman would have put it aside to start over on another time and just used a gift bag today, but not me – I’m way too stubborn for that!  *grin*

I couldn’t help but be intrigued by a little game some friends have been playing – Take Two.  Julia Stainton, Lindsey Botkin and Trudee Sauer have been having some fun (check out their blogs from my blog roll!)….so my friend Taylor and I kind of decided to *steal* their idea (I hope they don’t hate us *wink*).  We call it Double Take.  We chose a stamp set and a color combo and you’ll get to see both of our “takes” on it – thus a Double Take!

For today we chose Doodle This since neither of us had played with it much yet at all and a color combo right off the SU Color Coach: Rose Red, Almost Amethyst, So Saffron, Chocolate Chip.  You can see Taylor’s card here.   Oh I can’t wait to see what she did!

  My card is sized to fit in an envelope made with the SU 5-in-1 Template, however it ended up with so much dimension that I don’t think it will fit in any envelope period!  LOL!  I started with an idea I wanted to experiment with.  I stamped the flowers on Au Chocolat designer paper and watercolored them.  After cutting them out, I embossed each flower with 2 layers of UTEE.  They are soooo shiny and the curled a bit and took on a nice shape pretty much on their own.  I simply attached them to a saffron panel (stamped with some stems) with glue dots.  The top portion is stamped with Dots & Daisies BG and the little flowers are colored in with Amethyst marker.  The bottom portion was stamped with Paisley in Rose Red classic ink.  I used a Sakura Stardust Gel Pen to highlight the stems and all around the card – very nice touch of sparkle.  The sentiment from Warm Words was punched out with the SU small oval punch and matted on a large Chocolate Chip oval.  There is a small strip of the Au Chocolat paper in the middle with a bit of Rose Red grosgrain ribbon.  Finished the whole thing off with the ticket corner punch and some saffron brads.  I’ve gone back and forth between really liking this card and thinking it’s goofy!  LOL!  Do you ever do that?

Tonight is my monthly technique class, so sometime in the next day or so I’ll share the samples from my class.  For now I need to get busy to finish my prep work!  Thanks for stopping by!

I’ve been wanting to give a shout out to my friend Sam Carnathan who created my watermark!  Sam has a degree in graphic design and she does custom blog banners and watermarks.  Her training has given her a special eye for detail.  Her main focus in banners is to make it pleasing to visitors while not distracting from the art you create and post to your blog.  You can see my watermark by scrolling down to the previous post.  She also did blog banners for Taylor and AmyR.  I am currently unable to have a custom banner as the SCS blogs are still in the testing phase.  You may have seen the one I made myself a couple of weeks ago, but it was a problem and had to be taken off.  I do look forward to the time I can have an awesome custom banner too!  Sam is wonderful to work with and you can reach her through her site Customize.  I promise you will love her and her work!

And now for the winner of the Blog Candy.  I had a momentary glitch when I realized that the post numbers you are seeing in comments is different (and sometimes out of order) from what I had been seeing.  I determined the best thing to do was use the list I was seeing 1-185!!  Wow!!!!  I LOVED reading all your comments and hope you’ll all visit frequently.

And without further ado…

Per Random.org the winning number is 110 Brenda Trent

Brenda said

“Jami –
I found your blog after stalking you for a long time on SCS. I love everything that you do!!! You’re so creative and your blog is always so much fun to read.”

Thanks Brenda!  I’m e-mailing you for your mailing info.  🙂

Tune in Friday morning for a FUN  post!  Thanks for stopping by!