More is More

Happy Thanksgiving my friends!

Last night our Pastor encouraged us to make a Thanksgiving list of the many things we are thankful for.  He preached from Psalm 103 to get us started.

Psalm 103

 1 Praise the LORD, my soul;
   all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
2 Praise the LORD, my soul,
   and forget not all his benefits—
3 who forgives all your sins
   and heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the pit
   and crowns you with love and compassion,
5 who satisfies your desires with good things
   so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

I am thankful for my salvation through Jesus’ sacrifice and for the many many ways God demonstrates His incredible love for me.  I am also thankful to have so many wonderful loving people in my life!

I hope you have a beautiful Thanksgiving and have plenty of turkey and trimmings! Thanks for stopping by.

Card info:  Celebrate Life by Taylored Expressions along with a random small pumpkin from a retired SU set. 

Happy Almost-Turkey-Day Wednesday!  I got a chance to play with the Sketch Challenge on SCS today – SC308 – and I made another Christmas card for my stash.

My 4.25″ square card features the little elf and one of the frame images from Taylored Expressions Take Note – Holidays stamp set along with the Take Note Frame 3 Taylored Die.  The little elf was designed to look like she’s sitting on a shelf or something and ever since I got the set I’ve wanted to perch her on the edge of this frame image.  I stamped her first and masked her, then using my trusty stamp-a-majig I placed the frame *around* her.  I colored her with Copics and die cut with the coordinating Taylored Die.

Color combo is Chocolate, Riding Hood Red, Olive and Ivory.  Designer paper is retired SU.  Sentiment is from TE Tag You’re It!  Chocolate border at the bottom is die cut with the Scalloped Eyelet Border Die (Taylored Dies.)

And now for the Shoportunity Announcement:

Starting TODAY through Cyber Monday Taylored Expressions has some fantastic deals for you! Visit the Black Friday Blowout Department to see them all in one place. Here is just a sampling of what you’ll find when you get there:

Stamp Sets – Purchase any 5 full sized Stamp Sets and GET ONE FREE!

Taylored Expressions T-shirts (3 styles to choose from) at 25% off!

Twinkles Special – Buy 2 Multi Colored Twinkles and get a Free Package of Crystal Twinkles.

Stickers and Tags – Purchase either the Sweet Season or Waiting for Santa sticker sheet and receive a set of 10 coordinating die cut tags free.

Key Ingredients Subscription – TE is lowering the monthly subscription fee for a 3 Month KI Subscription from $25.95 per month to $23.95 per month just for our Black Friday sale. Normally you would need to subscribe for 6 months to get this low monthly rate. This is a great time to give Key Ingredients a try!

A la Carte Stamps – Purchase any 3 Animals in Love A la Carte stamps and GET ONE FREE!

AND SO MUCH MORE!!!! Click over to the Black Friday Blowout Department right now to take advantage of these incredible deals. Some quantities are limited, so for best selection shop early! And don’t forget that you get FREE SHIPPING on orders over $75 every day!

Feel free to grab that banner for your own blog to help spread the word about the sale! 🙂

Thanks for stopping by today!  We’re looking forward to a wonderful evening with our church family – a Thanksgiving Eve service, followed by pie night and an outdoor movie.  I hope you have a great evening.

Happy Monday!  Did you have a good weekend?  It was wonderfully rainy here on Saturday – the perfect day to veg out!  And yesterday it was crisp and cold…California cold that is 😉 .  Last night we headed over to Roger’s Gardens in Newport Beach which is a yearly Christmastime tradition for us.  It was a little early in the season, but we figured we should do it while we had the chance.  Roger’s Gardens is a beautiful nursery and at Christmas time they have many Christmas trees decorated with ornaments for sale, as well as lots of other Christmas home decor.  We each pick out a new ornament every year.  This year I got a little puppy (big surprise, huh?) and Curt got a red car (he was hoping for a guitar, but there were none to be had.) It was nice to be there without all the crowds.

I want to share with you the Christmas card we made in my class last week.  It’s 5″ x 3.5″ and uses pretty much all Stampin’ Up! supplies.  The dp is retired (from last year I believe) and the felt snowflakes are currently available on the clearance rack.  I spray painted some of them gold for these cards.

And here’s a look at the inside –

I realize it might seem a little strange to some of you to see a snowflake card photographed with a backdrop of greenery, but hey I’m in SoCal.  I’ve got to play the cards I’m dealt.  LOL!

Oh `- you might notice a different blog banner.  That is one that I used 2 or 3 years ago and when the administrators did a blog upgrade last week that banner appeared out of nowhere!  Weird!  I haven’t had a chance to fix it yet (will need help from the Rocket Scientist).

Thanks for stopping by.

Happy Friday!  This will be a super quick post to share my card for Taylor’s sketch – TESC134.  I’m actually typing this at 11:30 pm Thursday night.  The last person just left my stamp class (scroll down one post to see the main project we created.)  I’m not quite sure why I thought we needed to make a card on top of that two -sided acrylic mini accordion album, but you know me – More is More afterall!  (I’ll share the card we made another time.)  Anyway, class was an absolute BLAST!  But boy oh boy am I ever spent!!

 In the midst of prepping for it I managed to sit down and create a card for today’s sketch.  It’s a really fun sketch and I hope to play with it some more. As I took the sketch in my stamp room to start I thought “Gosh I wish my new November Key Ingredients were here!”  And then it dawned on me that I should go out and check the porch.  Sure enough there was the box!  Perfect! 

Sketch – check!

KI – check!

Stamp set – What’s Cookin’ – check!

Nestabilities – Labels 10 – check!

Copics – check!

All the ingredients for a quick card!  🙂

Let’s check out what the rest of the Sketch Crew has in store for us today.  I know it’s the first thing I’ll do when I roll out of bed!

• Alice Wertz
• Lisa Hjulberg
• Lori Craig
• Melissa Sauls
• Monika Davis
• Rachel Sztonyk
• Sherrie Siemens
• Taylor VanBruggen – get the sketch and all the info here to play along with us!

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you have a fabulous weekend ahead!

Happy Thursday!  Not only is it time for the monthly Taylored Expressions Blast from the Past Blog Hop, but I’m also teaching my monthly stamp class tonight!  And as things worked out  one of my class projects for tonight fits perfectly into the theme of the hop “THANKFUL”.   I am super excited about this project  and I hope you like it too!  Click on any of the photos to see them larger.

We will be decorating an acrylic mini accordion album from the TE Store using the TE stamp set Celebrate Life (that’s the Blast from the Past part) as a special home decor project.  We’ll stamp a half sheet one sheet wonder and cut it into the panels and then embellish with photos and sentiments.  Here are some closer looks at the panels.

I stamped the pumpkin with brown Stazon and watercolored it with Mustard and Pumpkin SU dye ink.  It was cut out with the Blossom Nestabilities.

I used photos from our niece’s gorgeous Fall themed wedding.  These pictures were just printed out on regular copy paper on my home computer.  I can always replace them later with better quality photos, but I was actually surprised at how good these look.

Isn’t this such a FUN project?  I needed to keep it simple enough to work in a class setting, but I would like to do another now where I could go crazy using anything I want.  By the way – I tried two types of adhesives to attach the cardstock panels to the acrylic – Scotch Quick Dry and Tombow Multi – and both worked great!  I was worried that might be a bit of a problem, but not at all.

Here ‘s the full list of players in today’s TE Blast From the Past Blog Hop –

I bet you thought I was finished, huh?  Nope!  Not only are we decorating one side of the acrylic mini accordion album for Autumn…we are also decorating the other side for Christmas!!!  Wanna see? Click on the photo to see it larger.

For this side we’re using TE Winter Wonderland and Sparkle & Cheer in Baja Breeze, Riding Hood Red and Not Quite Navy.  I got the felt snowflakes from the SU Clearance Rack recently (but you could certainly die cut your own) and the large alpha stamps are retired SU.  Notice how I used the blossom die back to back for the pumpkin on one side and the snowflke on the other?

Let me know if you’d like to see more detail on how this project is done.  I might even try to make a little video over the weekend.  These would make great gifts for teachers, co-workers, and friends.  I can hardly wait to help my class create these tonight!  Thanks for stopping by.

Happy Wednesday!  It’s been a busy day – all good.  Just got back from a little walk with the pup.  It’s about 60 degrees out – perfect cool air with the scent of fireplaces burning!  So happy to have this cooler weather after that silly heat wave…just hoping these temps stick around!

Early this morning I carved out some time to stamp just for fun…just ’cause I wanted to.  I don’t do that nearly enough anymore.  I used to play the Sketch Challenge on SCS almost every week and now I rarely play.  As soon as I saw today’s sketch (SC306) I knew I had to create something with it!  I grabbed the Tinsel & Twig Project Pantry from TE.  I had been hoarding it, but finally realized that Christmas will be here before you know it and I need to use up this beautiful kit – no time like the present!

Next I looked through my Christmas and holiday stamps and landed on this adorable image from Panguin Pals (TE). I colored the image with Copics and went over the lights and the star with Spica Glitter pens.  The ribbon on the present was covered with a clear glaze pen.  The penguin’s hat was accented with Sugar Sparkly Fluff adhered with a Quickie Glue Pen.  The image was cut out with a circle nestie and then layered onto a lacey circle and then a blossom nestie (see Spellbinders here.)  All patterned paper, cardstock, pearls are from the Project Pantry.  Ribbon is SU.  First I tied a knot and then with an additonal piece of ribbon I tied the bow around the know and that gave me the double tails.  I believe that ivory crochet trim came from Joann’s.

One more Christmas card for my stash.  I’m trying not to freak out about Christmas cards, but I am waaaaaaay behind.  I usually make 80-100 cards in 3 or 4 designs/batches.  I can hardly stand to make more than 25 or 30 of one design because I do NOT enjoy production stamping.  Usually by now I would have at least half, if not more, of my cards completed – and all of them done by the first week in December.  This year I don’t even have them designed or know what color cardstock I am going to use.  Acccccckkkkkkkkkk!  And I have NEVER skipped sending out Christmas cards….NEVER.  Even in years of great difficulty when I barely had my head above water…cards were sent.  So this is no time to wimp out!  I think I may send less than usual this year, but one way or another…Lord willing…cards will be made and cards will be mailed!

Check back with me in a month or so on that one.

Thanks for stopping by.

Happy Friday!  It’s time for another one of Taylor’s fun sketches – it’s TESC133.  I hope you’ll play along with us!

My card today is 5.25″ square and features Sparkle & Cheer along with the Tinsel & Twig Project Pantry (cardstock, patterned paper, ribbon) both from TE.  I stamped the tree in Versamark on patterned paper and heat embossed it with gold embossing powder.  I stamped it again on Eclipse masking tape and cut out a reverse mask to put around my embossed tree.  Then I used a sponge dauber to sponge Old Olive ink all over the tree.  Clear rhinestones colored with a red Copic were added for sparkle.  I rubbed the edge of the image panel in Versamark ink and heat embossed that with gold ep also.  The border punch is EK Success Arbor.  For the little circle embellishments I gold embossed the tiny snowflakes,  punched them out with a tiny little scallop circle punch and added rhinestones. I used a gold Zig painty Pen around the edge of the large red panel.

Let’s see what the rest of the Sketch Crew has in store today:

• Alice Wertz
• Jami Sibley <–you are here
• Lisa Hjulberg
• Monika Davis
• Rosie Hughes
• Sherrie Siemens
• Taylor VanBruggen <–get the sketch and all the info to play along here.

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you have a great weekend!