I'm Present to Present you with Presents!

Hey, Everyone!

I hope Thanksgiving was a blessed day of thanks and giving for all those who celebrated! We had a picture-perfect day in every way: family, friends, weather, and food! It's normal for something to go a rye, but not this time! And since I was smart and took my sister Diana's advice to set my scale back 20 pounds, I didn't even gain any weight!

So let's get on with Christmas!

I had my PTI "Make a Wish" dies out the other day to make a present, and I have lots and lots of scrappy snippets, so I rolled out a few more while I was at it. Aren't they festive?! And so tis the starlit background paper, which is also by PTI. To crown the glory, I used my NBUS word die of the same name from Memory box, cut out of SU shimmer paper. 

EZPZ QACAS. Again. Also addictive. Once you start diggin' all the ways you can lay your presents out on a card and all the patterns you can use for your gift wrap and bows, you've made a dozen cards in no time! "You" being the operative word.

Challenges

I'm entering:

• Addicted to Stamps and More, where the theme is "holiday."
• Merry Monday Christmas Challenge, where my extremely talented and very sweet friend Bonnie is this week's hostess. She chose the theme of "red, green, and white."
• Pixie's Snippets Playground, where all you need to do is use your snippets.
• Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge, where the theme is "Anything Goes."

Just click on any of the challenge links for details on the rules, sponsors, and prizes and then join in the fun!

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New Friends Corner:

Please help me welcome these new friends!

Loli Juan of Workshop of Memories. Loli, mother of one son, is from Palma and she has been blogging since 2009. She discovered card artistry in 2006 and she also loves scrapbooking. Her impeccable CAS cards always have a little something extra that will take your breath away!

Cheryl Taylor of The Craft Nut @32. Cheryl is a busy mother of three sons and she has been making cards and blogging since 2011. She shares her cards on her YouTube channel. Cheryl is very enthusiastic about this fun hobby and loves that there are other nuts in the world who share - no, wait, that's not right. She is happy that there are others who are just as nuts about crafting!

Sybrina K. of There's Always the Other Side. (Love the name!) Sybrina started blogging in 2011. She is a retired educator and co-owner of a fun challenge called "Words 2 Scrap By." Sybrina loves making cards for family, friends, and Operation Write Home. As she says, there is nothing more satisfying than sending cheer, hope, and encouragement one card at a time!

Thank you for joining, ladies, and welcome to the Playhouse!

~~~

I leave you with a couple of photos from Thanksgiving.

I know you love seeing my hunk o' hunk o' Mister man! Here is he washing up after covering the turkey with bacon following his mother's tradition. It's a neat trick we've been using for years. By doing so, we've never needed to cover or baste the turkey and we've always gotten a moist and beautifully brown bird! Sorry, there were too many hungry peoples hanging around it when it was done for me to take an "after" photo.

And here are Henry, Adam, and Duke on a day-after hike in the hills. You can see they were up above the fog line blanketing the valley. Didn't Papa take a cool photo catching the sun rays on their heads?!

~~~

Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy.  LITS!* 

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to leave a comment and/or join as a follower! Please let me know you came by, so I can be sure and return the flavor!

  

 

*Life Is Too Short!

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Jingle All The Way!

Hi There!

I'm taking a few days off for the Thanksgiving holiday so I'm here now to share a couple of creations before the challenges close.

As prolly most of you know, Tracey McNeely holds an annual "25 Days of Christmas Tags" event at her fantastic blog, In My Creative Opinion. Tons of stampers and crafters (even whole design teams) join in and there are lots of wonderful companies sponsoring prizes for the partipants!

I'm pickled tink to be finally joining in with a Christmas tag today. Since I have more than enough schtuff and such on Mt. NBUS, I'm entering just for fun to support my friend before the festagities are over for another year.

Why did it take me so long to join in, you ask. Well, first, take a look at my tag:

 

I ordered my outfit in August to prepare for Tracey's 2014 tag event. AUGUST! The leotard and the jumper finally arrived two weeks ago, but the belt and one elf shoe were missing. For heaven's sake! I spent I don't know how many hours on the phone getting to the bottom of it before I traced it to a feed store in Franklin, South Potato. You can imagine my relief when the Fed Ex box arrived with the missing pieces!

I immediately got dressed and the Mister agreed to take my picture. Now I don't know how your mister is with a camera, but I've watched spiders build entire villages waiting for mine to get ready to press the button. I know it looks like I'm being a tart and asking him if he wants to play some reindeer games, but just between you and me, that's NOT what I'm saying! God bless him.

And did you notice all the jingle bells adorning my rockin' bod? Three pairs of them! Well, I made so much noise stomping back into the house that every stray cat in the neighborhood is now in our backyard thinking they heard a dinner bell!

The NBUS bookmark/tag is "Stitched Bookmark Collection Die" from Papertrey Ink. The image and sediment are also NBUS, made by Art Impressions.

So there you have it, Tracey! That's how much I love you! Your event is always fun and it's a delight watching the entire community support you!

I'm also linking to Tag You're It! and with the "Christmas Elves" challenge happening at Holly Jolly Christmas Challenge.

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Next, I made this CAS card with jingle bell garlands:

The wavy garlands are cut from snippets of glitter paper using a NBUS Memory Box die called "Jingle Bell Border." The sediment is also NBUS from the Avery Elle set "Winter Wreath." Everything in this post is NBUS and this one is QACAS, to boot!

I am entering:

• Less Is More challenge. (Next week will be week #200!) The theme this week is "Jingle All The Way!"
• Fusion Card Challenge, where I chose the silver and red photo inspiration.
• The Cutting Edge Challenge. I'm sad to read that this will be the last challenge for them! Thank you, Jackie, and all the Design Team members and Guest Designers for your hard work!
• Pixie's Snippets Playground, where all you have to do is use scraps on your card.

The challenge links will provide you with details on rules, sponsors, and prizes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is my favorite holiday meal! Old-fashioned oven-roasted turkey (yes, in spite of my work history!) with stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and lots of yummy side dishes. 

We are supposed to have a beautiful warm day here tomorrow, which will add to the joy of having friends and family gather in this house as we've done every year since 1977!

Best of all, afterwards everyone will go home except for the twins! We get to play with them for a couple more days and I'm looking forward to them helping me decorate the Christmas tree!

I wish all my American friends and their families a very Happy Thanksgiving! And I want to take this opportunity to thank ALL of you again for your continued support and encouragement, no matter where you are in the world. You keep me keepin' on and I count each of you among my many blessings!

~~~

Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy.  LITS!* 

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to leave a comment and/or join as a follower! Please let me know you came by, so I can be sure and return the flavor!

  

 

*Life Is Too Short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling:

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Mwah!

[Mrs. O, I have no way to answer your question, so please email me.]

PTI November 2014 Hop; Stamp Repurposing Part B

Happy Tuesday Everyone!

Today it's snowin' all up in my corner of Blogland!  I'll get right to it before it melts!

I present my card:

Do you like my polka dotty penguin all winked with black Stella, which you can only see IRL? He came from a NBUS Hero Arts set (see below). My papers are PTI white and black. The sediment is heat embossed in black. It is from PTI's "Think Big Favorites #9 Mini." Here is how the sediment set looks when it comes from the company:

You've seen me repurpose a sediment stamp before by cutting the words apart and rearranging them to fit my design, which I needed to do with "celebrate the season" on this card. I love the font used in these stamps and enjoy using them, so I made it work. Don't be afraid.

A lot of you are here to hop the Papertrey Ink November 2014 Blog Hop monthly challenge, where the theme this month is "SNOW." If you need to just leave a comment and hop along, I understand. Thank you for your visit!

DJKASE

For those of you who have another few minutes, this is Part B of my stamp repurposing. Like Sunday's card, the idea for this card also came about because of the Craft Stamper's challenge this month to use non-holiday stamps for a holiday card.

One of the very talented Design Team members is my friend Chrissie and Chrissie made this breathtaking card:

Chrissie's card

Isn't it extraordinary? Just in overall design, it's magnificent, but what makes it even more extraordinary is that Chrissie's beautifully stylized bird is made from a leaf! Wait. What? Yes, no, you heard me right!

So I had the nerve to DJKASE Chrissie! My creation is not as innovative as Chrissie's in that I only transformed one bird into another bird, but the inspiration started with her. Here is how the bird looked before I turned him into a penguin:

Hero Arts CL337

Once again I performed a bit of surgery, but this time it was to my paper and not my stamp. I simply fussy-cut the doodled bird, removed his tail and headdress and then added a penguin beak and penguin feet. Not a drastic change, but still a lesson in how you can "find" stamps you didn't even know you had in your stash. Like a penguin. A little imagination and shazambam!

Thank you, Chrissie, for the inspiration!

~~~

There smores. As it happens, Mr. Doodled Bird had me and the hamster giggling all over ourselves, so I made another snowy Christmas card using the stamp just as the artist created it. For this card, he became a Christmas Doodled Bird:

Hammy was beside himself over the sparkly red tail feathers. He thinks it's a riot that it looks like the silly bird is standing on top of a roaring campfire! But bird doesn't care, he has a big present to open! His present is made with PTI's "Make a Wish" die. Those snowflakes are white metal brads from SU onto which I glued minischool stars.

The snow on my cards today was created with a NBUS jar of "Aleene's snow." It was fun!

Challenges

In addition to the PTI hop, I am entering:

• Simply Create Too, "Snow, Snow, Snow or All White." (Card 1)
• The Friday Mashup, "Weather Related, Metallic Element." (Card 2)
• Inkspirational, "Christmas With a Twist of No Red or Green." (Card 1)
• Rudolph Day, "Two Christmas cards." (Both)

~~~

Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy.  LITS!* 

And, as always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to leave a comment and/or join as a follower! Please let me know you came by, so I can be sure and return the flavor!

  

 

*Life Is Too Short!

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Christmas From a Repurposed Stamp, Part A

Hello, Stampers!

Welcome! This date brings us to a point on the calendar where we are literally down to a month of Sundays before Christmas!  

I have been itching to make this card since I saw my friend Shirley post about the Craft Stamper magazine's "Make It Take It" November challenge, which is to use a "non-Christmas stamp to create a Christmas-themed image."

This is my entry:

I'll bet there are a lot of you SU fans who instantly recognized where my sweet filigree "ornaments" came from, yes? Without further a dew, here is the non-Christmas stamp I used:

This Allium flower stamp came as part of a three-stamp set, whose name I've forgotten. I have to say I'm quite pickled at how well it doubled as a Christmas stamp! I found the little ribbon in my "Bows" stamp container. It is unmarked, but I think it might have started life as a SU image, as well.

The awesome sediment is a NBUS Penny Black stamp which made a perfect shelf for hanging my "ornaments." Every part of the design was heat embossed and the bows were given an additional coating of Wink of Stella sparkle.

There are a couple of days left in this challenge, if you want to join in the fun! The link will take you to the post with all the details. The sponsor is The Artistic Stamper.

I had fun repurposing another stamp, too, so I'll be back with Part B in a separate post in a couple of days. As you all know, I never seem to have enough time to use up my stamps for what they are intended, let alone for what they aren't intended, but I recommend trying this exercise. I think you'll have fun looking around to see how you might stretch your stamps this way!

Craft Stamper is allowing participants to enter other challenges, so I'm also linking with:

• Penny Black and More Challenge, where the theme is "Anything Goes."
• STAMPlorations Blog, where the theme is "Stamps & Layers."
• TIME OUT Challenges, where the theme is "Embossing, with the optional twist of sparkle."
• Uniko Studio Challenge, where the theme is "Christmas, Anything Goes" with an optional sketch. 

If you would like more information on rules, sponsors, and prizes, please click on the links!

~~~

New Friends Corner

Here are three more new friends for you to meet! They are happy to provide you with lots of inspiration!

Louise van Vuren of Cats, Cards, and Cupcakes. Louise, mother of three and wife of Tom, has been blogging since 2012. Not surprisingly, she is on several design teams and has won many awards. Louise loves the clean and simple card style and is always enthusiastic about trying her hand at new techniques!

Pat of Stamp, Paper, and Ink. Pat has been blogging since 2008! Needless to say, Pat has won many, many awards and served on numerous design teams. Her cards are uniquely designed, often whimsical, and always impeccably made!

Ellie of My Creative Moments. Ellie is another long-time stamper and blogger. She started stamping over a decade ago and started blogging in 2008! Like Pat and Louise, Ellie has won many awards and often served as a guest designer and design team member. Her talents with layering and coloring will awe you!

Thank you for joining, ladies, and welcome to the Playhouse!

~~~

Critter Update

When the Mister was raking yesterday, he reached for some stray leaves along the window ledge and almost gathered up this praying mantis:

It was incredible watching her swivel that E.T.-like head and have those two wide-set pinpoint eyes look right into mine. The design is just fascinating. I took a piece of paper and moved her over to a tree so she wouldn't get scooped up in the leaf cleanup.

Now I wonder if maybe that was a bad place to put her considering birds live up there. Out of the frying pan and into the fire? Shucks. It's not easy being a bug.

~~~

Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy.  LITS!* 

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse and special thanks to you if you take the time to leave a comment and/or join as a follower! Please let me know you came by, so I can be sure and return the flavor!

 

*Life Is Too Short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling:

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Mwah!