Fourth Friday Fun Challenge

There is a new challenge over at the Paper Garden Projects blog: the Fourth Friday Fun Challenge. Each fourth Friday, there will be a new challenge. This one is all about the bling! You can use glitter, rhinestones or pearls. Anything to make your card blingy. If you've been on my blog long enough, you KNOW I love bling. I love anything that sparkles. The first card here was done with a stamp from the PGP store that is, unfortunately, sold out. I stamped with Memento black ink because I decided to color it with Copics. Memento ink is water-based and Copics are alcohol-based, so that's why I chose the ink I did. If I used Versafine, which is an alcohol-based ink, the Copics would've made the ink bleed and the ink would've gotten all over the tip of my Copic pen. Choosing ink is very important when you stamp. I colored the whole image with Copics and then patterned the background. I learned this in the Copic Certification Class: bunch up a napkin and then put some blender solution on the bunched-up end and blot onto the area you want patterned. The more blender solution you use, the more pattern you see and the more color it (the napkin) "lifts" from the area. This is a great way to add texture to animals for fur, for grass, sky, whatever. For bling, I put Stickles on all the green stars. I also used the Copic Spica (speeka) pens on the rest of the image. That part is hard to see, but it really is there. This card was fun to make. I love this witch. She looks like a lot of fun, doesn't she? When I first saw her, I knew she had to have green hair! This image was colored with Prismacolor pencils. Can you tell I popped-out the hat and sleeves? I wanted to make it really pop, but it looked weird when I popped it out further than it is. For the bling, I used rhinestones. I didn't have the orange ones I wanted, so I colored the clear ones. did you know you could use your Copics to color rhinestones? Yep! You can color pearls, too. I color them while they are still attached to the glue strip on the manufacturer's packaging that way I don't get the ink on my project. Here I used two different orange pens to color the rhinestones. Now that I look at it, it may be a bit over-bling'ed. Is that a word? It is now. Over-bling'ed. haha! So, back to the Fourth Friday Fun Challenge... There is a prize! Here is what you get for this challenge: Just look at all this BLING! Woo hoo! So make up your blingy card and follow the directions HERE on the blog post. Good luck and I hope you win some bling! As always, thanks for stopping by. I really appreciate it.

Trick or Treat

Halloween is almost here and I'm not done with my cards yet. Yikes!

I love, love, LOVE this set of stamps that I got from Paper Garden Projects. The stamps in this set are so darn cute. I wanted to make a card without using all the stamps in the set. I only used two of the stamps here: the door frame with light and the hands holding the candy bowl.

I also wanted to stamp on non-white cardstock. I used a light brown cardstock and stamped with Versafine black ink. All stamps were colored with Prismacolor pencils. I used the stamp-a-ma-jig to position the hands in the doorway.

I added some crystal lacquer on top of the light to make it look like glass. For the sentiment, yes, I have stamps that say "trick or treat" but I wanted something different, so I dug into my alphabet box and came up with these cute little stickers. I'm not really a sticker person, but in some cases, I think they look cute.

I'll be posting other cards soon, including one for the Fourth Friday Fun Challenge over at the Paper Garden Projects site.

And now it involves knitting!

I have been so out of the crafting loop lately, it's not funny. Since I had surgery in June, I haven't crafted much. Have had no desire. That's bad because I have so much crap, er craft supplies, that I can't afford to let them sit. For long. Since I've been back to work (end of Aug.) I've been taking knitting lessons from a coworker, Cindy. She's awesome. Very patient and supportive. No, I didn't start out with a scarf. My first project was a vest made from Noro yarn (from Japan) and at $20 a skein, not a cheap first project. More pics on that in a little while. I have completed all but the one front panel of the vest. I've also completed two scarves. This first pic is me sitting outside on the not-so-warm concrete bench outside at work. I'm working on a beanie for Tony. This is my first project using five needles. It really is a pain to use that many needles, but I do like that the beanie will have no seams. The pattern is very simple using a seed stitch, K1, P1 over and over and over for 10"! I'm up to about 6" now, so not long before I can change stitch patterns and start decreasing for the top of the beanie. I'm thinking of making some knitted "dreads" for the top of the beanie. That might be cute, but maybe Tony doesn't want cute. This is Cindy. She's got some homespun yarn here and she is winding it into a ball so she can knit with it. She got a very cool scarf pattern and it calls for bulky yarn, and boy howdy, this is bulky. It's some kind of wool with alpaca mixed in. Turns out after she knit a bit, this yarn is too bulky and hard to really tell what the pattern is, so she opted for another homespun yarn for the body of the scarf and will probably use this for the fringe. Pics later. So that's what I've been up to these past weeks to a month. Knitting. Oh, I do have a card to post, but will post it a bit later today. Just wanted to get the blog moving again. Thanks for stopping by today!