More is More

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It’s almost Tuesday!  How on earth did that happen?  LOL!  I have one more project from my class Friday night that I wanted to share.  It’s a super simple 2-4-6-8 box held closed with a mini clothespin clip (thanks to the inspiration of the talented Danielle Lounds!)

My class featured the TE stamp set Hello Spring for all 4 projects and this little treat box also used  Spring Wreath to stamp tone-on-tone onto the box itself.  We filled these little boxes with Hershey foil wrapped chocolate eggs.  If you need a last minute Ester treat, these are super quick and easy to make!  Take a 1/2 sheet of cardstock and score at 2″”, at 4″”, at 6″, and 8″.  Then turn a quarter turn and score (what will be the bottom of the box) at 1″.  Make some little 1″ slits at the bottom and fold up and adhere with sticky strip.  Easy-peasy!

I’ll be back in the morning with a very Special Taylored Expressions mid-month release…something we’ve never done before.  You won’t want to miss it! 

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It’s Thursday, but for much of the day it’s felt like Wednesday for some reason.  Weird!  My April Class featuring Hello Spring is tomorrow night and I have 3 out of the 4 projects prepped already.  I carved out a little time this afternoon to make a card with one of the images I colored while on vacation.  It happens to be from Hello Spring also, as I played with that set quite a bit.   I had several sketches printed out to play with and I chose Jen del Muro’s April Sketch for You to Try.

The papers are used are Doodlebug – from a pack I got at TE before Valentine’s Day. Cardstock is Real Red and Pear.  I’ve had those huge rhinestones (KasierCraft I think) forever!  They seemed to fit here perfectly! What’s not so perfect is that stupid vanilla ribbon.  I totally thought it was white while I was making the card (despite an Ott Lite) and didn’t realize it was vanilla until I got outside to take the photo!  I promise the color difference is not nearly as obvious IRL as it is in the picture.  I might need to cut it off.

The flowers are colored with Copics (R14, R29, RV55, RV63, YG17, BG10) and then parts were covered with Smooch Illuminate or clear glaze pen.

Thanks for stopping by!

Last week we took the 5th wheel out for the first time.  We decided to stay close home and just go for 3 nights for the first shake-down trip.  Friends recommended Malibu Beach RV Park which is just 45 minutes away (or actually 90 minutes in SoCal traffic) and it was AWESOME!!!  We had a full ocean view and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect – especially considering the fact that it poured down rain the week before and rained some again a few days after we got home.  We wished we could have stayed at least one more night and we will definitley be going back.  I thought I would share a few photos.

On the road!  Here we are just pulling away from our house.  Tessa is all set in her car seat and is excited to go on vacation for the first time!

We’ve got our spot and the Rocket Scientist got it backed in just right after a few tries.  We’re going to be finding a big empty parking lot somewhere soon so we can get some practice.

We’re set up and the slide-outs are out.  The one closest in the photo is the bedroom, and the one further away is part of the living room and where my “coloring station” is set up!

Here it is from the other side.  The slide out over here has the sofa in it.

Here’s the view out the back windows.  If you’re sitting down, you just see straight out to the ocean.  We saw lots of dolphins frolicking and one evening just at dusk we saw whales!

There were trails for dog walking.  Tessa liked that the first day, but I think it might have been hard on her little princess paws because she did not care for it after that at all.  She loved being in the trailer with us though!

We took tons of food with us and one night we made pizza for dinner. There was a wonderful seafood market and cafe just down the hill and we splurged and had lunch there one day and dinner there the next night.  YUM!

Is this the BEST PART or what?  I set up a fabulous coloring station and brought all my copics and an Ott-Lite.  I spent hours sitting here coloring.  Aaahhhhhhhhhhh!  The image I used in the TESC this morning is one that I colored on the trip and so was my TE Day 1 sneak peek.  I have lots more done that need to be made into cards still.

I can’t belive I’m posting this pic – especially after telling Curt not to take it!  But it’s just so much of what the trip was about – sitting in my robe, dog in my lap, drinking in both the ocean view and the new Paper Crafts special edition gifts magazine.  Aaaahhhhhhhh…I wanna go back!

I just love this photo taken right outside our back window.

Tessa wants to go again!!!

I titled this post “Camping…sort of” because I know that many of you will tell me that this isn’t camping and I get it.  I do.  But in my book, this is the ONLY WAY to camp.  When I met the Rocket Scientist, he and his friends were really into super-rough-it camping in the middle of the desert with NOTHING.  I actually told him on our 2nd date that I would NEVER camp.  I wanted to be upfront about it.  I told him I wouldn’t stop him from going, but that if my not going was a deal-breaker to let me know!  And I was serious!  I’ve always said camping is a hotel with no room service!  So while I recognize that this is luxury camping for sure…it’s the only camping I ever want to do! 🙂

We’re already looking at places to book for our next trip.  Do you RV?  If so, I’d love to hear any tips you have and I’d especially love to hear of your favorite recipes to make for dinner in the RV.

I hope you have a great weekend.  I hope to get a little time to turn some of those images i colored into cards that I can share with you here next week!  Thanks for stopping by!

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Happy Friday!  It’s time for a new Taylored Expressions Sketch Challenge and TESC136 is a good one with inifinite possibilities!  I hope you’ll join us – you have 2 full weeks to play along and there will be a prize drawing.  TE stamps are NOT required to play!  Get all the info in the TE Forum on SCS or on Taylor’s blog.

I turned the sketch on it’s side so I could use an image I colored while we were on vacation last week.  I’m loving how this turned out.

This card features Cozy Cottages, which is the curent TE Giving Tree set.  That means that partial proceeds from the sales of this set are donated to Habitat for Humanity (through end of this month.)  My image was colored to coordinate with Cosmo Cricket Circa 1934 paper pad.  I LOVE this paper line (TE seems to be out of stock)  – the colors and the vintage feel.  The fence was die cut out of patterned paper with the Taylored Die Picket Fence Border and I added some Liquid Pearl lines.  The birdhouse was trimmed out and popped up on foam squares.  I hand-cut the clouds because I could not for the life of me find my cloud dies.

Let’s see what the rest of the Sketch Crew has to share today:

I’m really excited for the announcement of the new Sketch Crew Member!  Plus Taylor will announce the winner of the drawing for TESC135.  Both announcements will be made in the TE Forum on SCS – be sure to stop by there.

Have a great weekend!

Today is the day!  The April Release products – stamps, dies, and card kits – are now available at Taylored Expressions!

Before you go off to shop, the Baker’s Dozen has a whole new round of samples for your inspiration and I get to play along again today!  I whipped up this card last night after finishing up the TE Newsletter.  Those of you who know me, know that I don’t “whip up” cards.  I’m sloooooooooow and I don’t work well under time pressure, but I so wanted to play today!  So to streamline my creative process I started off with the new Emma’s Shoppe Taylored Card Kit (cardstock, patterned paper, ribbon – CHECK), the new Treasure Life Stamp Set and coordinating Apothecary Jars Taylored Die set (focus – CHECK), It’s a Banner Day 3 stamp set and Banner Day 3 Die (sentiment – CHECK),  and a print out of MojoMonday 185 (sketch – CHECK).  And here’s what I came up with:

Now, I’ll admit that if I had more time I would have like to have been a little fussier with the details, added some machine stitching, etc…but overall kinda cute I think.  🙂  The border at the bottom is the TE Large Scallop Border Die – I just took a handheld circle punch and punched a hole in each scallop.  I’d like to think the *blob of balls* in this jar is some sort of yummy candy!  *grin*  You can’t tell in the photo, but I covered the jar with a Copic Atyou Sparkle Pen and then coated it with clear glaze pen.  Looks cool IRL!

I love working with these card kits because everything is cut to size with the card-maker in mind.  It’s especially fun to make sets of cards for gifts with these kits.  I had planned to have a set made for yesterdays blog hop, but it just didn’t happen.  I still plan to make one and I’m dying to see what everyone else does with these card kits, so I have a challenge going up this morning in the TE Forum on SCS.  If you purchase either the Emma’s Shoppe or the Hello Luscious kit you can play.  You’ll have 3 weeks to enter – so plenty of time to receive your order – and there will be a PRIZE to be won!  I hope you’ll grab a kit and come and play!

Now let’s see what the Baker’s Dozen has cooked up today!

• Charmaine Ikach
• Cindy Lawrence – Guest Designer
• Danielle Lounds
• Jackie Pedro
• Jodi Collins
• Karen Giron
• Karen Motz
• Melissa Sauls
• Regina Mangum
• Sankari Wegman
• Taylor VanBruggen – has full views of all of the sets and dies
• Tori Wild
• plus Whimsical Wishes illustrator Nancy McKinney

Thanks for stopping by!  And now it’s time to shop!  Enjoy!

We had a WONDERFUL little vacation last week and I’ll try to get back with more about that later, but now it’s time to kick off April Sneak Peeks for Taylored Expressions and I’m excited to play along.  Today we are showcasing two full-sized rubber stamp sets – Treasure Life and Dream Big – along with an A la Carte stamp, the new Stars Impression Plate and a new Taylored Die Set to coordinate with Treasure Life.

My sample today features both Treasure Life and the Apothecary Shelf A  la Carte Stamp (sold separately).

 I took copic markers on vacation with me and this is one of the images I colored while we were gone.  I decided to keep the 5.25″ square card fairly simple to just show off the stamped images.  The little “cloth” hanging over the front of the shelf was cut with a scallop rectangle Nestability and I inked the edges with Not Quite Navy ink on a sponge.

Here are the copics I used:

BG70 worked great to outline/highlight the glass of the jars.  To be honest I had intended to cover all the jars with Glossy Accents, but I needed to take the photo while I still had daylight and just didn’t have time to allow for it to dry.  But I’m happy with it as is.  🙂

Treasure Life includes 7 different jar images of varying shapes and size, plus it has several different “fillers” to play with.  One of my favorite fillers is the blob of balls (yes, that’s a technical term!) that you see in my middle jar.  Those balls could be so many different things!  To make them fit perfectly in any of the jars, you can just simply cut a reverse mask to fit around the jar and then stamp the *blob* right over it.  While I was playing with the set I went ahead and cut masks and reverse masks (at the same time) for most of the images, so now I’ll have them any time I want to use the set.

Here I have them just stuck onto the original plastic that the set came packaged in.  You can see that the one in the upper left hand corner is the one that got the *blob* stamped over it.  I hope that makes sense.

Beyond the pretty images in this stamp set, there are also sentiments for several ocassions all in a beautiful font combo.  Plus there is a new Taylored Die set to coordinate that will die cut 4 of the jars for you.  Cool, huh?  I’m anxious to play with those, but alas I didn’t have my Big Shot in the 5th wheel on our trip.  LOL!

Let’s check out what the Baker’s Dozen has cooked up today:

• Charmaine Ikach
• Danielle Lounds
• Jackie Pedro
• Jodi Collins
• Karen Giron
• Karen Motz
• Melissa Sauls
• Regina Mangum
• Sankari Wegman
• Taylor VanBruggen
• Tori Wild
• and Nancy McKinney who illustrated this set as part of the Whimsical Wishes collection at TE.

Everything being showcased today will be available in the TE Store on Thursday morning at 8 am PST.  Full sets will be revealed on the TE Facebook page sometime Wednesday night – so make sure you’ve clicked “like” over there!

Thanks for stopping by!  Hope you have a fantastic day and enjoy the hop!