Winter Wonderland Angels Or Fairies – Guest Design Team Post

Morning all, how are you all this fine morning?  I has a surprise email from Sally of the WW DT last week asking if I could be a GDT for their challenge this week.  I’d put my name down months and months ago and had forgotten all about it to be honest!  Luckily they have an easy challenge this week as I’ve been desperately short on time pretty much all of July so far!  Hopefully the technology is doing its job as I’m actually not here, I’m off camping at the moment!

So, Angels or Fairies.  A nice simple challenge to end July with.  I used this lovely Inkadinkado Silhouette Angel stamp from the Christmas Silhouettes clear set.  I love these large stamps, they look so good embossed and can carry the whole card without the need for lots of other embellishments, which is always  good if you’re in a bit of a hurry!

I stamped with Versafine, embossed with gold EP from JoAnn and accented it with a few little red gems.  I also distressed the edges a little bit with DI Vintage Photo.  The lovely backing text sheet is a free download from Raspberry Road and is part of a pack called Away in A Manger and it’s basically the text the Angel Gabriel recounted to the Shepherds, I also added a little bit of Vintage Photo around the edges too.  The main image is mounted on a piece of chocolate Bazzil and is punched with a Martha Stewart punch.  The ribbon is from Micahels.  The greeting is from a clear The Paper Company Studio set called Vintage Christmas and is also embossed in gold with a little Vintage Photo around the edges and mounted on a little scrap of the Bazzil card.

Pop on over to the Winter Wonderland challenge blog to see all the other beautiful cards from the Design Team.  Thank you ladies for asking me to join you, it’s been a pleasure and an honour.

House Mouse and Friends Buttons, Bows & Bling

Another flying visit from me, this time with a House Mouse card for a couple of challenges.  I’m up to my eyeballs in “stuff” at work and trying to slope off early today for a little camping trip Friday, Saturday and Sunday!

House Mouse and Friends Monday Challenge are celebrating their 100th challenge this time round and there’s a massive blog hop with lots of prizes going up for grabs, their theme is Buttons, Bows and Bling.  My card is based on the current sketch over at Sketch and Stash and I’m using my brand new Happy Hopper stamp for this challenge, and as all the paper is from the scrap box I’m also linking up with Jules Snippet challenge too.

 

Card Recipe:

• Card: Kraft
• DP: DCWV scrap ~ Prima Scraps ~ Making Memories Scrap
• Stamps: Stampabilities Happy Hopper “Bunny Bath” ~ TPC Studio Phrases
• Inks: Memories Black Dye Ink ~ Stampology Onyx ~ Various Distress Inks
• Embellies: Polkadoodles Flowers ~ Gems from Michaels ~ Rhonna Farrer Buttons ~ Bakers Twine from stash ~ Crystal Stickles ~ Tsukineko Black Pen
• Tools: Cuttlebug ~ Scalloped Nesties ~ EKSuccess Round Punch ~ Water Colouring Pen

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Challenges: House Mouse & Friends ~ Buttons, Bows & Bling

Sketch and Stash ~ Current Sketch (plus new stamp)

Jules Crafty Snippet Challenge ~ Use up your scraps

Not Such A Hot WOYWW…….. Thankfully!

Hello again peeps.  I’m happy to finally report that since Monday our lovely temperatures are back to normal for summer in Michigan, so I really hope that our friends in the central belt of America are seeing some relief too!

 

Not many words from me this week, way too much to do as we’re away on Thursday for a four day camping trip at our local race track, this upcoming weekend is our vintage races, and I’ve had a lot to do for that.  Plus, I got asked at the last minute for a Guest DT card for a challenge blog for this Friday, so I’ve running about a bit like a headless chicken!

 

 

So my desk is looking a bit of a mess for me…. the inks are all out again, the stamp from last week is still there and a little pile of scraps that I’ve been trying to use up.  There’s some new stuff here too, I really lucked out at Michaels last week in their clearance section by picking up the jar of Prima flowers for $1.99 and two sets of cling stamps for $1 and $1.49 respectively.

 

 

And then when I got home last night I had a lovely little parcel in the post box from Jo with some of her mega roll of bakers twine and a lovely little home made charm, thanks Jo, I love the charm and I’ll definitely be getting a lot of use from the twine.  The only funny thing was my husband saw the Liverpool post mark and wrongly assumed that his Aunt had sent me something and so opened it up!  The look on his face was brilliant when he was trying to figure out just what the heck his 83 year old Aunt had sent us!!

Hop on over to Julia’s for more desks for What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday.

At The Risk Of Sounding Like A Broken Record, It’s Another Hot WOYWW

Yes indeedy it is.  Although I will say again, we’re no where near as hot as the poor people in the middle of the country though.  I grabbed this photo yesterday of what the five day forecast through Saturday is going to be like, just to illustrate the point:

So please excuse my lack of crafting this week and you’d also be excused for thinking that this photo was last weeks desk!  I promise you it’s not, it’s just that I can only get in my room in very small snatches, even with the air conditioning and the fan, so there really isn’t a lot going on.

Usual suspects, another House Mouse image being water coloured with Distress Inks, my collection of Memento Dew Drops in the large pasta jar, some paper scraps I want to try and use up and some more house Mouse and Happy Hopper stamps that I uhm, “adopted” last week!  Well, their adoption fee was 40% off and they came with free shipping so what’s an animal lovin’ girl to do??

And someone last week asked to see inside my stamp cupboard so here it is:

The wood stamps on the left are House Mouse, mainly Christmas and occasion stamps, the entire top row of the middle part is also House Mouse stamps, but general ones.  Middle left are See-D’s and a few general ones, bottom left are mainly Inkadinkado, The Paper Company Studio and Fiskars clear stamps.  Back to the middle, the second shelf is all general but good brands, the third shelf down is general Penny Black, fourth shelf is Penny Black Christmas stamps, next one is general and sentiment stamps and at the bottom are three large sets and some extra side shelves.  On the right, the top shelf is Penny Black clear and clings on the left and Hero Arts clear and clings on the right. Next one down is general Hero Arts and then Christmas Hero Arts.  Bottom shelf on the right is a mix of Fiskars, Unity and Tim Holtz.  I also have a large container full of other Christmas stamps too.  I really want to put in another of the side shelves on the left but I’ve lost the little metal bits that you put in the holes for the shelves to sit on!  As you can see, there’s hardly any room left for the new House Mouse sitting out on my desk!

Hop on ever to Julia’s for more crafting desks of the world, and hopefully by next week the temperatures will have dropped enough to allow me to get back into my room properly and make a mess!

Running on Empty

That’s a bit what it feels like right now.  I have no energy whatsoever to do anything at the moment and it’s completely due to the oppressive heat we’ve been experiencing here in the Midwest of America during the month of July.  We’ve had Heat Warnings, Heat Advisories and Air Quality Pollution Warnings almost every day now, yesterday afternoon we even had a Severe Thunderstorm Warning thrown in too for good measure, which brought some much needed rain, but it was in and out in 30 minutes and then the sun came back out and the rain just added to the humidity as we heated back up again.  It was still 84F when I went to bed last night at 10pm and you could have cut the air with a knife this morning as I went to get in to my car on the drive.  The rest of the week isn’t looking any better either!

This is the forecast with the temps in Fahrenheit:

And if you prefer to see your temps in Centigrade, this is what that looks like:

It’s just not any better is it?  And hardly any rain to speak of either, just two short thunderstorms on the 11th and 18th of the month for a total of 0.66″, instead of just over 3″.  Still, it’s not all bad.  Crafting is definitely taking a back seat at the moment as my little room is a spare bedroom and so is upstairs and just too hot to spend any length of time in there, but we’re still getting out and about a bit, especially at the weekend.  If you get out early you can still go kayaking or for a bike ride and then take it easy for the rest of the day.  It’s a bit hard after work when you’ve been in an air conditioned building all day though, your body isn’t adjusted to the temperatures outside which makes it almost impossible to do anything outside that requires any effort.  The treadmill in the cool basement has come in useful again!

We also raced in those temperatures last weekend at the road racing track.  It was brutal, I can’t think of any other way to put it.  Actual temperature was 96F but we were measuring 104F in the paddock as we were getting the cars ready to go out.  Amazingly we didn’t lose anyone to heatstroke but there were quite a few more off track excursions than usual, so I think the drivers were really feeling it and loosing concentration after a few laps.  Looks like rain for the end of the week and then next week is about 10 degrees cooler, so I’m looking forward to both those events happening!!

The flip side of this of course is that I could still be living in England…. and no doubt right about now I’d be complaining about the miserable, wet summer we’re having….. as it is, I’m complaining about the miserable, hot summer instead, lol!  Be careful what you wish for!

The Wednesday Workdesk

Yes, it’s peep time folks, time to take a photo of your work area and show it to the world via Julia and her What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday phenomenon.

My desk is another hot one, although no where near as hot as the middle of America where they’re hitting triple digits in terms of temperatures.  We’re still generally on the wrong side of 90 though but the humidity has been relatively low so I shouldn’t gripe.  My desk this week consists of Christmas supplies as the theme on a few challenge blogs was Christmas in July.  At least thinking of Christmas and working with blues and silvers made me feel a little bit cooler, even if I wasn’t.

 

 

Out on the desk are Christmas paper scraps as I’d also decided not to cut into any new paper for this one, Sizzix snowflake dies, a sketch lurking bottom left, a couple of PB stamps along with the stamped image I was going to use, and a couple of containers of water.  One a rather nice Celtic inspired pottery mug, the other a tall purple water container that’s seen better days due to it rattling around in the back of my kayak quite frequently!  The small Crocus mug is for water colouring, which is what I got on with after this photo was taken.

 

In reality though, I was still too hot, so I went down into the basement and dragged up this tall fan to provide some draft while I was colouring.  The small fan behind it is a heater only that I sometimes use in the Winter for a bit of extra warmth.

 

 

This worked pretty well but I will readily admit to forgetting just how powerful it is as it blew just about everything not tied down off my desk!  Still, at least it saved me from tidying up the mess I’d made!  And if you haven’t seen this before, the Oak cabinet is an old cd/dvd storage unit that we’d outgrown so I brought it upstairs and it holds my stamps.

Christmas In July

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Bah Humbug

Well, it’s one way to pretend you’re cool on a 90 degree weekend!  The other way was to put a bloody big fan in my craft room, but I was still hot, lol!  But a Christmas card it was going to be, even though the heat had completely addled my brain.  Bah Humbug had a simple challenge this week of using mice on your card, I have a lot of mice stamps because of my love for Penny Black and House Mouse, so it’s not like I don’t know what a mouse looks like…… so why I then stamped and coloured in a hedgehog is completely beyond me!!!  I tell you, I blame it on the heat!  So I stamped and coloured again and came up with this:

The LO for this is based on the current sketch over at Christmas Challenges {With Sketches} but I rotated it by 90 degrees to better fit my image, which is Penny Black Warm and Merry and I water coloured it with Distress Inks.  The DP is all out of the Christmas scrap box and is bits of various DCWV Christmas Mat Stacks, the blue card is also DCWV and the glitter card is from Michaels.   The sentiment is from Hero Arts, the glitter snowflake is a Sizzix die and the small snowflake and the border punch are both Martha Stewart.

Card Recipe:

• Card: Blank from Michaels ~ Glitter Card from Recolletcions (Michaels own brand) ~ DCWV
• DP: DCWV various Christmas Stacks
• Stamps: PB Warm & Merry ~ HA Holiday Messages
• Inks: DI Antique Linen, Scattered Straw, Frayed Burlap, Marmalade Spice, Worn Lipstick, Stormy Sky & Dusty Concord, Rusty Hinge ~ Memento Night Sky
• Embellies: Glittered Brad from American Crafts ~ Gems from Michaels
• Tools: MS Border and Snowflake Punches ~ Sizzix Snowflake die ~ Marvy Uchida Round Scalloped Punch ~ Fiskars Corner Rounder Punch ~ Cuttlebug

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Challenges:

Penny Black Saturday Challenge ~ Christmas In July

Bah Humbug ~ Use Meeces

Christmas Challenges {With Sketches} ~ Current Sketch

Winter Wonderland ~ Red & Green Must Not Be Seen (That book the one mouse is holding is actually pink not red!!)

Jules Crafty Snippets ~ Use Up Your Scraps

Jingle Belles ~ Holiday Leftovers (Use up your bits of papers)

Making A Splash With House Mouse

And to get in the watery mood this morning we took our boats to our local lake for a 2+ hour paddle!  Brilliant way to start the weekend, the lake was almost deserted and the surface was like a mill pond, just beautiful.

So back at home I rifled through the stamps and came up with a new one I got the other month but hadn’t inked yet, called In A Nutshell, and decided that I’d follow in this little meeces paw steps and take it easy for the rest of the day.  It’s been too hot for me since July kicked in, in the low nineties most of the time and absolutely no rain at all.  My craft room is up stairs and usually gets too hot but I dragged a big fan upstairs which has helped keep me cool, but has wrecked havoc with my desk, lol, most of which is now all over the floor!

Anyway, I persevered and made a card.  Naturally I stamped the image on to WATER colour paper and then WATER coloured the image too with Memento inks!  I followed the sketch at Sketch and Stash for the LO, and I worked in a number of punches as Fuzzy Wuzzy want to see punches on your work for this month.  I also raided the scrap box and used up a bunch of those tiny bits of paper that are usually no good for anything but you keep them anyway!

All the papers are DCWV, from the Summer Dreams and Flower Shower matstacks, I have a habit of keeping all the loose bits of “good” paper in with the stack they came out of, but I went through them all and put all the snippets in the scrap box for future use.  The card blank was free from a UK craft magazine and I cut it down a bit to make more of a square.  About the only embellishment are the few gems in the flower centres and at the corners.  I also popped the main image up on foam dots too.

Card Recipe:

• Card: Freebie blank ~ The Paper Company
• DP: DCWV Summer Dreams & Flower Shower scraps
• Stamp: House Mouse “In A Nutshell”
• Inks: Memories Black Dye ~ Memento Summer Sky, Night Sky, Sahara Sand, Gingerbread, Lilac Posies, & Cottage Ivy
• Embellies: Flower gems unknown ~ Silver gems from Michaels ~ Tsukineko Black Pen
• Tools: Cuttlebug ~ Scalloped Square Nestie ~ 2″ Marvy Uchida Square Punch ~ EKSuccess Flower Punches ~ McGill Frond Punch

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Challenges:

House Mouse & Friends ~ Make A Splash

Fuzzy Wuzzy ~ Get Punchy

Sketch & Stash ~ Current sketch and new stamp

Jules Crafty Snippet Challenge ~ Use up your scraps

Crafty Calendar Challenge ~ Under The Sea or a Water theme

A Hot WOYWW

… so not many words from me, as it’s too hot to think straight, and sitting upstairs with a laptop on my knees is giving me a headache, not to mention turning my knees bright red and making me feel really sleepy!!  My desk today is a little bare, or at least it would be if it wasn’t for the little parcels in my mail box when we got home from our four day camping weekend on Monday.

Right in front is a sketch I want to use from Sketch & Stash challenge blog, along with a House Mouse stamp (ignore the Christmas stamp at the back, it’s been there for over a month!).  There’s also an assortment of black and white ribbons, bakers twine, buttons and pins that I won from The Ribbon Girl when they were sponsoring the Penny Black Saturday Challenge a couple of weeks ago, and talking of PB, behind them are three PB clings that I treated myself too, and then to the right are three water colour pads that I got on clearance from Dick Blick.  I went looking for the company after I saw Moy Yin blog about them on WOYWW, as she said their prices were really good, and she was right too, so WOYWW strikes again!

Hop on over to Julia’s if you’d like to join in with the worlds biggest Wednesday desk hop, probably the worlds biggest desk hop no matter the day of the week!  Catch you on the upside.

And The Winner Of The Candy Giveaway Is……

Morning peeps, thanks everyone who entered my giveaway to celebrate the milestone of 500 posts, but of course, there can be only one winner and that person is……

 

 

 

 

and that’s you Sue H of Sue’s Krafty Cards!!  Well done hon, send me an email with your address and I’ll pop your goodies in the post at the weekend.  Thanks everyone for reading the waffle, and here’s to the next 500 posts!