Anemones And Snow People

Hello Stamplings!

I hope you're doing well and keeping cool! The temps have dropped a little bit here and any wee drop is very welcome! I pray for those impacted by the heat and the horrible fires.

Let's start today with a bright summer design:

I'm pleased with myself for making a watercolor card with this NBUS stamp within a few days of getting it, she says, patting herself on the back. The stamp is from Honey Bee, called "Framed: Anemones." I used my KGT paints and other than that, the stamp does all the work for you because the wide frame is part of the stamp. (Thank you, Emily Midgett.) Handsome little Hammy added liberal winking. In real life, the colors are more vibrant, the shading more pronounced, and the schparkle more schparkly.

Challenges

• Seize the Birthday: Colors: Purple, Blue, and Green.
• Addicted to Stamps and More: Any Occasion.
• Cardz 4 Galz: Get Inky.
• Double D: Colors: Purple, Blue, and Green.
  

Twofer

And now to cool you off, here is a page from a photo album of the Snowfolks. I turned to my Christmas bits binder and found these guys already die cut. Score! I colored them with my Ziggies and made the album design using panels cut with an MFT die. The four panels were placed atop a piece of silver-embossed pp. Hammy went on a deep dive into Miss Elaine Yus's box of goodies and found this old glossy holly embellie which works perfectly in the bull's eye center!

Challenges

• Christmas Kickstart: Show us your Snowfolk.
  
• Pixie's Snippets Playground: AG using snippets (snowfolk and panels). Join us for a cocktail & recipe exchange by the paddling pool! Here's mine: Vodka Lemon Drop Cocktail
  
• Rudolph Days
  
• Shopping Our Stash: WTH Embellishments!

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Oh, Blogger! 😕 Oops, here come's another ant. I mean rant.

• I want to apologize if a bunch of my old posts suddenly popped up in your inbox last week. I didn't do it, honest. Blogger had some sort of mental breakdown again. And it didn't just impact my posts; a lot of your posts from months ago ended up in my inbox, too. No clue why. No explanation from Blogger.
  
  
• Not only that, but I just learned from a friend via the NBUS gallery that Blogger deleted two of her posts with a terse popup saying they violated child safety guidelines ~ which, of course, is totally ridiculous. Worse still, get this: The email said that if she wished to "request a review" of their findings, she could click on a link. When she clicked on the link (in both instances), the popup said this: "400. That's an error. The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That's all we know." Seriously? 

• Not only that, as I mentioned in a post in May, your friends comments might be in your Spam folder. It is located under Comments on your dashboard. At the top of the Comments is "All" with a drop-down arrow. There you will see All, Awaiting Moderation, Published, and Spam. Make sure you check all your folders occasionally. In addition to legit comments showing up in the Spam folder, unpublished comments are also still showing up in my list of "All (published)" comments on the dashboard of my blog.
  
  We always assume the comments in the All list are all published because they should be and, unfortunately, you can't tell by looking at the list of comment if some unpublished comments are lurking in there. So now every few days I have to scroll down the far right side of the list to make sure there aren't any checkmarks that appear as the mouse rolls down the column. If there are, I just click on the checkmark and a popup asks me if I'm sure I want the comment published. Duh! So frustrating.
  
  (This is so hard to explain. Please email me or call me if none of this makes any sense!) I managed to blog for over ten years without having this glitch with comments. Someone at Blogger caused it, so why has it been months without someone fixing it back to the way it was?  

Nothing can be done about these things, but I wanted to give you a head's up so that if it happens to you, at least you know you're not alone. Please share if you do know clues or answers to these things that are happening.  

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After all that, we need a laugh:

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

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse, being a follower, and leaving me some love!

p.s. I'm happy to say my meds got sorted out Monday morning by the two parties involved without any further intervention from me! Imagine that! I appreciated your sharing your experiences and your comments of support. I'm sorry that so many of you have been in similar situations.💕

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL + Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click Page Down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and a pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! (p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!)

Summer Greens, Pretty Flowers, and Winter Dudes

Hello Stamplings!

How are you? I hope you are safe, especially if you are living in areas of the world that are experiencing extreme heat and breakout Covid. The world can't seem to catch a break.

Never mind. I'm here to help you sneak off for a few minutes to a little place we call Cardville in a small corner of Blogland ... 

Onefer

I have accumulated several sheets of acetate and other than making shaker cards, I am clueless about what to do with the schtuff. So I brought some to my recent retreat and we all had a play by first embossing the sheets and then coloring them with alcoholic inks. It was very fun and the results were amazing.

It is hard to photograph acetate, so I leaned the card at a rakish angle. Rakish is one of those words you only see in trashy novels, so for today I'm elevating it to an old-lady blog.😆Brilliant and underpaid Hammy suggested I use a simple sediment to let most of the vivid colors show, so that's what I did. I will link this to the gallery at Addicted to Stamps and More where the brief is Birthdays.

Twofer

This panel was also made at the retreat, this time using colored pencils and Gamsol. It is made from one-half of a full-size image stamped by Linda for us to color. (The other half is similar, but with a "thinking of you" sediment.) This was the most successful coloring I've done using pencils and stumps and Gamsol. The stamp is from Altenew, called "Fragrant Florals," and it was nice to get two clean and simple cards made from one image. After I got home, I added the sediments and Hammy winked them both. 

I will link this to the gallery at The Flower Challenge where the brief for July is CAS.

Threefer

And, of course, I want to play in some Christmas (in July) challenges to keep my stash growing. This chubby happy fella and his trusty Rudolph are pretty self-exploratory. I stamped them in black and then clear heat-embossed them. Then I colored them with my watercolor brushes and Hammy lit everything up with his Winker.

Santa is actually a gnome from Paper Smooches, but I thought if I added a cotton ball to his cap and colored him in red, I could turn him into a Santa! The reindeer is from Your Next Stamp and the OH OH OH, I mean HO HO HO, is from Uniko. Ask me how I know that the stamp says OH OH OH if you accidentally stamp it upside down.😩

Challenges

• CAS Christmas Challenge: Santa.
  
• Krafty Chicks: Christmas.
  
• Less Is More: Color Challenge. Traditional Christmas.

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Seriously?

That's it for cards if you want to sign off, but if you want to hear me vent, you can continue. This might be the first in a new series called, What in the World? 

I'm fortunate enough to have good medical and drug insurance and when it is time to renew my meds, the pharmacy is on top of it. This week the prescription had expired for one of the meds. When that happens, the doctor has to write a new one, so the pharmacy conveniently contacts the doctor for me. That's all fine until it snot:

Pharmacy, via email: We have been unable to connect with your doctor. Please reach out to your doctor and ask them to contact us.

☎ I telephoned my doctor's office. They don't have email and they don't answer the phone. You have to leave a message. But first you have to listen to prompts for ten minutes because "the options have changed." I left a message that the pharmacy had been trying to reach them and I left the pertinent info and numbers.

The doctor's staff called me back and said the pharmacy had not contacted them nor faxed them. I was to call the pharmacy back and have them fax the request to #____.

☎ I telephoned the pharmacy to speak to someone there. But first I had to listen to eleventeen-hundred prompts because "the options have changed." I told the pharmacy person, "The doctor's office says they have not heard from you and you are to fax the request to fax #____."

Pharmacy person to me: "We have tried to reach them. We faxed the request to them on 7/12 and earlier today (7/15) to that same fax #. Please call your doctor's office back and let them know that and we will fax them again right now."

☎ I telephoned the doctor's office again, listened to all the changed options again and left a message again, to wit: "The pharmacy told me they have faxed the request and they have the correct fax#. They faxed it on 7/12, earlier today, and they are faxing it again right now. Perhaps it was filed under someone else's name?"

The doctor's staff calls me back: "No, they haven't faxed it. We only have one fax machine and I am the only one who sees the faxes when they come in."

Me: "It is utterly ridiculous that I am now in the middle of this. Can't YOU call the pharmacy directly and work this out between the two of you?!"

Doctor's staff: "No, I cannot talk to the pharmacy. You have to call them and tell them."

By now 45 minutes have gone by and nothing has been resolved. I am in the middle of a she-said/she-said. And I'm exaspergasted. I don't do stupid. And it's not like doctors are a dime a dozen so I can just fire this one and go somewhere else. Besides, I like the doctor. But what a stupid system.

I couldn't face another phone call to the pharmacy, so I blasted off an email to them asking if someone there could please call my doctor's office directly and speak with the staff person in order to get me out of the middle between the two of them!!

The pharmacy emailed me back almost immediately. They told me they called the doctor as soon as they received my email, but ... ta da! All they got was a message machine! 

Aaacckkk! Things don't have to be this hard, people! 

By now it was closing time on Friday, so I had a cocktail with The Mister. I'm sure I'll be playing whack-a-mole with them again Monday morning. 

And I'm sure you have your own "What in the World?" stories to tell! Do you think anyone is studying the disappearance of common sense from modern society? 

~~~

Thank you for letting me vent! Enjoy your day! No, seriously, enjoy! LITS!*

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse, being a follower, and leaving me some love!

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL + Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click Page Down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and a pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! (p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!)

Bursts of Color

Hello Stamplings!

How are you doing? It looks like I took a long break, or I got ran over by a bus, or I'm just getting too old to keep this up? I say that to rat myself out because the truth is, I wrote a post on July 1st and then I forgot to hit publish and I went on my merry way. Do you ever "think" of doing a thing, but not actually do the thing, yet your brain checks it off your mental list as a "done" thing? Yup. 

Also, in my defense, I turned 37 on the 2nd and America turned 246 on the 4th. One of those maths is incorrect. The first celebration was quiet because Dan and the grandtwins got Covid (they are fine now) and the second celebration was beciting because of Jennifer McGuire. She kindly let me know about dozens of amazing sales. Ahem. Did she let you know, too?

If so, then you know how many hours a person can spend visiting company after company, tab after tab ... especially when one has been good and not bought anything new in a long time? It was a lot. A lot of fun. Now I can't wait until the packages arrive and I can be surprised by what arrives because by the time I got through them all, I had forgotten what I ordered. (See sentence 2, part 3, above.) I don't judge myself too harshly because, you know, I have an obligation to lead the way when it comes to NBUS!

In spite of all that and numerous routine medical appointments, a spate of migraines, a bit of company, and a purge of the Playhouse, I made some cards! The ones on display today were schparked by the current CAS Mix Up Challenge, where Linda wants us to use "Things With Wings" on our watercolor designs for July.

My first thought was to play with a stamp I haven't had out in a long time. It's a cool sort-of shattered glass image of a dragonfly called "Libellule Origami" by Art Stamp. I spritzed the stamp liberally with water and then sprinkled on several bits of Lindy Magicals. Then I spritzed the stamp again and stamped it onto watercolor paper:

You can see that the bottom right of the large sheet was my first impression, next to it on the left, my second. Then I respritzed and resprinkled the image a little bit more and then stamped it again in the upper left and then onto two regular cardstock panels. (Only one shows up to the far right.)

Here are three of them made into cards:

My first impression was weak, so I piled on more powdered ink, spritzed, and stamped again (off-kilter). Sadly, you cannot see the beautiful shimmer on these images which is what sets the Lindy Magicals apart from some of the other watercolor powdered inks.

The following were made from the regular cardstock panels:

For this image Hammy and I thought the dragonfly should have an explosion of color coming out from behind😲, but alas, we got a bit too exuberant to be CAS for the challenge!

So we left this one QACAS by only adding a few teeny spits of color, the simple silver-embossed sediment, and a narrow mat, making it the best choice to link to the CAS Mix Up Challenge.

Also linking to:

• Addicted to Stamps and More!: Birthdays. (Note: They are having a DT call!)
  
• Krafty Chicks: Stamp Act.
  
• Seize the Birthday: Metallic.

I had another one to share, but this is long enough. I'll leave you with this funny from The New Yorker:

😀😀😀 You gotta love 'em!

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

As always, thank you for coming by to visit the Playhouse, being a follower, and leaving some love!

*Life is too short!

To open the pop-up comment box that let's you jump to the end w/o scrolling: Click CTL + Home. Click the Home tab under my blog banner which resets the post. Click Page Down to reach the end of the post. Click Comments and a pop-up box opens. Click "Jump to Comment Form" and wallah, no more car pool tunnel! Mwah! (p.s. If you ask me a question in your comment, please remember to leave me your email address so I can respond. Thank you!)