Simon Says and other fun stuff

So, I was very happy to get a bit of time to play with some images today. I colored a bunch of them last night and added all types of fun stuff, like liquid applique, flower soft, shimmery flock, glossy accents, etc. It was quite fun. Some of them didn't get any of that stuff, but that's okay. Today, I got the chance to put a couple of the images to use. This card is for two challenges: 1) simon says stamp's recipe challenge. The recipe is quite easy. Thank goodness it does not require actual cooking, because then I might fail!!! LOL. Anyway, the challenge was to make a card using two patterned papers (a solid for matting was also allowed), three types of embellies, and one image. Challenge 2) Mo's Digital Pencil, to use a sketch provided and of course, an image from MDP. I love Mo's work. I think she is so talented and creative. Her images always bring a smile to my face, and this chubby little fairy is no different. I love that Mo shows us that we don't have to be model skinny to be happy and darned cute, too!

If you're interested in giving the challenges a shot, just go to:

simonsaysstampschallenge.blogspot.com

mosdigitalchallenge.blogspot.com

I apologize that the links don't want to work yet again. Blogger hates me. Really.




While I was already on a roll, I did another card with Tilda from Magnolia. I colored and cut around Tilda to place her in the autumn scene.

You can get your own autumn scene digi stamp from Guylou's Inimitability store. The link's in my sidebar. She also sells the scene with a cute cowboy or cowgirl in front of the fence, or without any characters at all. This scene has so many possibiities for both Halloween and Thanksgiving cards, as well as general cards for this fall season. Take a peek into her store...Guylou offers a little something for everybody.


And now I am off to do the dishes, or maybe make a card, or perhaps I should take a nap. I'm babysitting the neighbor's kids for a while tonight. They're awesome kids...very well-behaved and fun to be around. They are kids, though, meaning that they have way more energy than I could ever hope to have, so maybe I had better take that nap.....

Whiff of Joy challenge 89

All of my friends know that I love Elisabeth Bell's stamps. I think she is super talented. Her stamps are not only cute, but they have tons of detail. Some of her images are sweet, some are sassy, and all of them are fabulous. My friend Bren told me about the Whiff of Joy Monday challenge blog and I had to go check it out (and, of course, follow it and participate). This is the card I made for challenge 89, based on this sketch. You can see the DT work and other great entries at http://wojmondaychallenge.blogspot.com/2010/10/challenge-89-janes-sketch.html. Sorry that you have to cut and paste it; blogger is being stupid about adding links to my posts. Well, really, it's probably operator error, but shh...

A day to create...yippeee!

So, yeah, I have tons of stuff I could be doing for my house. The painting is done and now the walls are just bare and naked, staring at me in their new glorious colors. I still need to pick the photos that I want to have blown up and hung on my walls downstairs. I need to go back to Target and Hobby Lobby for more white shelves. I need to try to find the photographer whose work I saw last weekend at the Bridge Bust. I fell in love with two of his photos and dummy me didn't buy them there and then. In my defense, the ones I wanted were blown up to poster size and framed, and we really had no room in my cousin's jeep to haul them home. Four women, our luggage, and other goodies we'd purchased took up most of the space. However, I also forgot to grab his card. Darnit! Anyway, I need to hang the huge, heavy mirror that my mom gave me (love that thing...it's gorgeous). I need to find some blocks for a decorative accent in my bathroom...In addition to these things, I need to pull down my winter clothes from the attic and put my summer clothes away. Yeah, tons of stuff that I could and should be doing today. However, the only thing I plan to do is clean the bathroom. I cleaned all day yesterday, making my downstairs and bedroom much more liveable and pretty. Today, all I want to do is hang out in my scrap room for a bit, and maybe read a little. I've already made a few cards today, but now my energy has deserted me and I'm going to go read. Before I go, though, I wanted to share some cards that I recently made for Doris.

Doris is the owner of this wonderful B&B where we stayed last weekend. Her place is called the Victorian Rose and it's located in Mt Joy, PA. Beautiful area, beautiful home, lovely place overall. As a thank you to Doris, I'm making her some Christmas cards to give out this year. Guylou's images were perfect for paper piecing and maybe a bit unconventional for traditional Christmas cards, which is why I chose to use them. Here's the set I completed:


You can find all of the images at her store (see link on my sidebar, because I still can't seem to get blogger to insert links into my posts. What a PITA).

As always, thanks for reading my long ramblings. I'm a chatterbox both in real life and on the internet! LOL.

Four ladies, thank goodness no funeral

...but it sure felt like there might be one when our balloon pilot decided that we needed to view the world from 10,000 feet. Um...yeah. I am afraid of heights. Did I mention that? I really enjoyed our hot air balloon flight on Memorial Day weekend, but that pilot kept us no higher than 750 feet, which felt more like ten. When you don't have anything to visually anchor you to the ground, your perception of height is way off. This rule falls away when you are ten thousand friggin' feet in the air, though, and everything looks like ants, your toes are freezing, and the cloud cover is riding at your height. Ok, okay, so it was cool. For a bit. Then we could have gone down and seen some of the sights a bit closer to the ground. We did that eventually. Overall, although I sound like a whining, complaining sissy right about now, I'm glad we did it. It was cool to have a different experience than we had on our first flight. It's good to try new things. And land safely.

It's Super Rick to the rescue...or something like that...

Meet Super Rick. He's another cute digi image from Guylou's Imitability store (see link on my sidebar). Yeah, I know I spelled that wrong. I can never spell it right without checking first and I am feeling too lazy tonight. I am tired, cranky, frustrated, and just generally feeling witchy. On a happier note, my house is finally painted. Chuck and his crew did a great job with such a bad canvas. The poor guy had to deal with wavy walls, tight spaces, high spaces, tons of nail holes, settlement cracks, and just general pain in the butt stuff. My house kept spitting problems at the poor guy. He's done now, though, and my living room is a beautiful blue with white trim. My dining room is a cappucino with white trim and the hallways are a creamy color with a light tan tint. Again, white trim. I'm loving it! He's also painted the kitchen and half bath. Now I just have to add the finishing touches, like new curtains and such. I can't wait for it to be done!

Oh, wait, I got sidetracked again. This post is to present Super Rick with his cape. He's colored with copics and his outfit is highlighted with some gold stickles and glossy accents for some shine. What super hero doesn't shine in his own way, right???

Finally finished

I hate when I start a layout and can't figure out how to finish it. I end up throwing them in one of those plastic Iris bins until a later date. Usually, I pull them out when I don't have enough energy or mojo to start a LO from scratch, or if I am in a time crunch to get something done. That's what happened in this case. I had a deadline for a challenge on scrapbook.com, but just didn't have enough mojo to start with a totally new LO. So, I dug through my partially completed stack and found this LO of my niece. All I needed to do was add the title and a few embellies and voila! I'm not happy with it, but that's how things go sometimes. At least I had something to post for the challenge.

The anniversary approaches...

It's rather freaky to me that the one year anniversary of Rick's death is fast approaching. Some days, it seems like he has been gone for so much longer than that. Other days, it's like he passed away just yesterday. It's so hard for me to fathom that I have lived almost a full year without his physical presence in my life; that I am now older than he will ever be; that we won't do the things together that we were supposed to do. I just got back from a trip to Canada. Since he passed away, it was my first trip driving a long distance by myself, staying on my own in a strange city, being away from home for more than two nights, eating dinners on my own in restaurants, and all of the other stuff that comes with traveling on your own. My wonderful friend Terri and her family kept me occupied for part of the trip, thank God. I enjoyed it, but there were some "down" moments, too. You know, those moments where I just thought to myself how much we'd have enjoyed Montreal together. I chickened out before taking the funicular up the Olympic tower. If Rick had been with me, we'd have done it. He'd have encouraged me until I found myself in the darned thing, moving steadily upward. I could still kick myself for passing up the chance of having that view of Montreal, but maybe another time, I'll gather up some courage and do it!

My girls didn't like the fact that I was away from home and have been my shadows since I got back a few days ago. They've always hated it when we traveled without them, but it's even worse now. They get super clingy. I was told by someone (a breeder, maybe) that siamese are prone to separation anxiety. I saw that in our siamese who died a few years ago and I'm definitely seeing it in my girls now, too. Anyhow, I guess I am done blabbing for the night. Here's a layout that I just finished, to be put in Rick's memorial album. I've only finished 4-5 layouts for it so far. I am not pressuring myself; I just work on one when the need strikes. Thanks, as always, for looking and for any comments.


Ok, for some stupid reason, it won't post in the correct direction, although it is saved that way on my computer. Dagnabbit!!!! Any suggestions, anyone? I can't figure out how to get it to rotate.

Ahoy Matey and all that stuff!

Time to meet a friendly pirate. Can't say that too many of those exist, I guess! This guy can be found at http://guylousinimitabilitystore.blogspot.com/. I had fun coloring him with my copics. I unintentionally matched him to this paper that I found in my stash. Don't you just love when you find the perfect paper hiding out in your stash?


On a different note, thanks for all of the love and support when I blab about grief and loss and all of that stuff. I have my bad moments but I'm pulling through. Gotta keep on, keepin' on. If I didn't do that, I feel like it'd be disrespectful to Rick's memory. We were always on the go, experiencing the world. Only now, I am doing those things on my own or in the company of friends. I miss him every day and probably always will, but neither of us were the type to halt our lives. Life is a precious gift; I don't intend to squander it.

Back to scrapping

So, I'm in a much better place tonight than I was a few nights ago. The moods come and go, which is normal for the grief process. I'm learning to roll with them when they come. Thanks for the continued thoughts and prayers. So, after that last downer of a post, let's get back to the fun scrappy stuff. I went to a crop at Kimi's store and managed to complete five layouts and start a sixth. I wasn't really in a scrappy mood or I might have finished more. Oh, well. I helped one of the other ladies put together some paper robots for her classroom decor. They turned out adorable...we finished 50 of the 125 that she needs. Yowza. That's a lot of robots! It was fun, though, and well worth it to help out a teacher who's shaping the lives of our youth. They don't get appreciated enough, IMO. I also borrowed some stamps from James' personal collection (he was so sweet to share). I colored in a mermaid stamp with my faithful copics, but I've got to get a card made with her yet. Anyhow, here's two of the layouts that I finished at the crop. The first is Sophie, one of our siamese. She has a thing for the gold bows you put on top of presents. She gets super excited about them. It's really cute; she sticks her little tail straight up in the air and twitches it whenever you show her a new one. The second LO is Athena with her daddy. The pics were taken only a few weeks after we brought her home. She was just a tiny little thing; less than 4 pounds. Speaking of my spoiled little babies, Athena is laying on the floor next to my chair, purring away. She's got her belly up to the sky, waiting on some attention. I'd better go answer the call. As always, thanks for looking at my creations!

Some nights just suck

So, this is my first unscrap/uncrafty related post, and mainly just because I feel the need to vent. Some nights just suck. Tonight, I was going through my stack of pictures to figure out which ones I want to scrap at an upcoming crop. This one wallet-sized pic of Rick just fell out onto the floor. I look down and there he is, staring up at me with this big grin on his face. Well, that just did me in. I mean, I guess it's good and it's progress that these rough times aren't coming as frequently anymore. However, when they do hit, they just friggin' suck. They suck! I've got a big project going on at work right now, so hopefully that will provide good distraction for me. In the mean time, though, I have to get through this night. I really, really hate this. Just last weekend, I was feeling good because I did some things on my own, totally independently. Those moments make me think that as awful as this is, I'll get through it. I'll pull through. A totally changed person with part of me forever gone, but I'll just keep on truckin'. Then there's his smile again, and those blue eyes, and the look of happiness with more than a pinch of mischief thrown in. UGGHHHH. Ok, time to head to bed and just cry it out, I guess. Tomorrow is another day, and hopefully, a better one.