Stamping Saturday

Today would be a great day to stamp...and I might actually get to do that. I pushed my stamping table into a corner in the basement and cleaned if off yesterday so I could potentially do some stamping today. Doesn't mean I will, but at least I can if I want to. Only challenge might be to find where all my supplies are stashed.
Since I don't have any new creations for today, I wanted to spotlight another one of my incredibly talented dear friends: Kisa (Kisamari on SCS). Like Delia, I met Kisa on SCS. She was in a lot of the first swaps I joined and even sent me images from Heartfelt Thanks just so I could join a swap. Being fairly new to the site at the time, I was in awe of the generosity she showed to someone she didn't even know. I think after that I just followed her around splitcoast, joining the same swaps so I could get her awesome cards! Here are a few of my favorites (that I could actually find in my diaster of a stamp room) she has made over the past couple years. If you want to see all of her creations check out her gallery on SCS.


I also forgot to mention that she is the best TAC demo in the world, so if you are looking for a demo, look no further!

Happy Friday

I need to get my stamp room put back together ASAP. I am going a little crazy without it. The house is clean and we have no place to go today which means it would have been a great day to stamp. Oh well, what can you do. I may go down and try and organize my table and sit in the hall and stamp something. Who knows. Our dryer is also not working so I may need to wash some clothes and make a run to the laundrymat to dry them. It has been quite a week.

Since I haven't been able to make anything, I decided to pull out a scrapbook page to share today. I didn't make this page. All I did was add pictures from Beckett's 1st birthday. In my early days on SCS I hosted a few scrapbook page swaps. Little did I know that by hosting a scrapbook swap I would meet one of my now dearest friends, Delia. She is an AWESOME scrapbooker and when I received the pages she made I was thrilled because someone finally made pages that were my style and were usable (honestly a lot of the pages I received I only salvaged portions or pieces from them). I loved this birthday layout she made and all I had to do was add pictures!!! She is now on the scrapbooking DT at A Shade of Blue. To see some more of her great layouts check out her gallery (loganlovesstamps) at ashadeofblue.net.

Check back tomorrow to see some more projects from some of my favorite stampers. Thanks for looking and have a great day!

Gotta love glitter

I absolutely love glitter. Actually I love anything that sparkles. I made this card for one of the challenges on ASB during December. I used it as a birthday card for my friend Kisa. I know it doesn't really have a birthday theme but I thought it was pretty enough to use for any occasion. The glitter was done using a Sakura Quickie Glue Pen. This is one of my favorite products...you can do awesome glitter detail with it. I also used another one of my favorite products...Doodlebug sugar coated brads. I just love sparkle!!! The main image stamp is "Agpanthus Cluster" from Stampendous and the background is "French Script" from SU.
Thanks for stopping by. I hope you all have a wonderful day!

An old card and some new stamps

Since I can't really stamp anything new, I thought I would post one of the cards that I made at Christmas time. Once again, a cute, happy, fun Penny Black stamp! I just love the Penny Black frogs, ducks and chickens. They are my absolute favs and so easy to color!
I also thought I would share a pic of my new stamp set from Verve Visual that arrived yesterday. I'm disappointed that I couldn't ink it up right away but I'm still excited that it arrived. Annabelle is a self proclaimed "superstar" (at 4 years old) so I just had to buy this set. She loves singing and dancing and dressing up like a rockstar so these sayings will be perfect for some future scrapbook pages. I recently bought the DCWV rockstar stack and these will go perfectly together. Can't wait to get back in my stamp room and play with these.
Speaking of my stamp room, the fans are still running but it seems to be drying out nicely. Crossing my fingers that we can put it back together in a week or so.
Hope you all have a wonderful day!!

Today is a new day!

I'm trying to keep a good attitude about yesterday so I'm starting today's post with a bright, happy looking card. This is the first card I made yesterday before the big pipe event. I love Penny Black stamps, they are always so fun and cute and happy! The second card I was working on won't be done for at least a week.

I thought I would also post a few pictures of the current state of my stamp room. Tom and I pulled all of the flooring out in hopes of saving it, there was a lot of water under it so it is a good thing we decided to do that right away. I didn't sleep much at all last night worried that the cap they used on the pipe would somehow fly off and fill our basement with water...luckily that wasn't the case. I still feel so fortunate that it happened while I was standing right there...it could have been worse....MUCH MUCH WORSE.

My stamping supplies are now all piled in the kids playroom. I have a feeling there will be no fun had in that room for a week or so.


Here is the pile of flooring we pulled out. Thankfully it came apart really easily and we labeled everything so that if we're lucky we can get it put back in correctly.

This is the nice hole we had to cut in the wall to get to the pipe.

Here is the wide shot of the room, fans blowing and heater going. I just have to remember....IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE!

A bad day...a REALLY BAD day

I got up this morning with only one goal for the day...stamping, lots of stamping. I shouldn't set goals, as something always seems to get in the way. I spent the morning doing routine housework. After lunch the kids and I went down in the basement to play. My stamp room and their playroom pretty much make up the entire basement. Before I started stamping I took a picture of my very clean/organized stamp room. Take a look:







After taking these pictures I sat down and stamped for a bit. I made a cute birthday card that I will post later and then I started working on another Changito card. It was going great. The card was coming together well and I thought it was super cute. The kids had gotten tired of playing in the basement and went up to the kitchen to play on the computer. While I was working on my card I heard a hissing noise kinda like water flushing or something. I ran up to see what they were doing and they were both sitting nicely on the couch watching tv. I came back down to my stamp room to find that a water pipe had frozen and burst and water was pouring in onto my stamp room floor. I was in a complete panic. I felt like I was in a movie or something. The water just kept coming. Our basement isn't quite finished yet (there is no trim up yet so basically where the drywall met the floor there is a little gap and that is where the water was coming in. Our basement has full exposure with a walk-out and our outside faucet is right outside my stamp room...well it froze and broke and caused a really good day to go south very quickly. I called Tom and also ran next door to our neighbor who just happens to have done plumbing/house repair stuff for 35 years before he retired. He helped me get the water shut off, THANK GOD, and he also cut a hole in the wall and found the broken pipe and capped it off so we could turn the water in the house back on. I have a feeling I won't be stamping for a few days. My stamp room has pergo (I think that is what is called) flooring and water got under it so it either has to be pulled up and dried out or totally torn out and replaced. So much for my stamping momentum. Here are some "after" pictures of my stamp room:







In the corner where all the towels are we had to cut a big hole in the wall...this TOTALLY sucks. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry at this point. I'm just so thankful that I was down there when it happened because if it had happened during the night or while we were out we would have had an awful mess and I would have lost a lot of stamping stuff. Gotta look at the big picture...it could have been worse.

Gotta love Changito

I've always thought the Changito Monkey stamps from Stampendous were super cute but I could never figure out what to do with them. I finally came up with a card that I'm willing to share. I colored the monkeys and vine with prisma markers and added a little glitter to the vine. The monkey square is also popped up with SU dimensionals. The layout is one of the sketch challenges from SCS but I can't remember which #.

-12 degrees

When I got up this morning the temperature was -12 with a wind chill of -23. I don't leave the house when it is this cold out. The good thing about this is...lots of stamping time. I finally got a couple hours of stamping time today. Here are 3 of the cards I made this afternoon. I made the first one and then used scraps from that card to make the other two (hence the same color combo for all 3 cards).

Girls Night Out

In November my sister and I decided that we needed to start having a little time for ourselves so we decided that every couple months we would go to Archiver's for their Friday night scrap mania. 6 hours of fun, uninterrupted stamping/scrapping time (without kids). We went the last Friday in November and had a great time so we scheduled another girls night out for last night. Everything was set, the husbands were taking care of the kids and we could stamp the night away. I went right away at 5 to get good seats and my sister arrived around 5:45 (she had to pick kids up from school, etc. etc.). We started cutting out a few die cuts for some scrapbook pages we had in mind and at 6:45 my sister's husband called to inform her that their 1 year old daughter was throwing up...A LOT. Needless to say our girls night out didn't turn out quite as planned. She had to leave but I decided to stay since we had paid, but it just wasn't as fun hanging out by myself. I did manage to get a 2 page scrapbook layout done though...



These are pictures from out trip to the pumpkin patch in October 2006...yes I am WAY WAY behind scrapbooking. My sister had taken a bunch of pictures of piles of pumpkins and we cut them using the dies at Archiver's to make the letters for the title. The box that says "Schuster's Playtime Farm" is a pocket. I haven't made the card to go in yet but I thought I would write a few comments about the day and stick it in there. That way I can hide my hideous handwriting! I think it turned out pretty cute considering my scrapbooking is extremely rusty.

Oranges

I will add some stamping stuff later today but for this morning I just wanted to pose the question...Why is it that no matter how you peel an orange and no matter where you stand while doing it, it manages to squirt you directly in the eye? It never squirts off to the right or left...just directly in the eye..EVERY TIME!

AWESOME coloring tutorial

I only have a couple minutes this morning but I wanted to point you in the direction of a terrific coloring tutorial. Check out this blog: http://www.simplystamping.blogspot.com/

It is FINALLY here...my camera that is.

After being lost for the last month without a camera, my in-laws FINALLY put it in the mail. We didn't have a camera for Christmas morning, Beckett's 3rd birthday, our first gingerbread house or our first snowman...I am so disappointed. We do still have the gingerbread house sitting on our counter and the snowman is still sort of standing in the front yard but I missed out on some great scrapbooking opportunities with Christmas and Beckett's birthday...I guess that is life.
The good thing is I finally have it back and I actually made a fairly decent card yesterday. I have been in a stamping rut and decided to do one the sketch challenges at A Shade of Blue yesterday. Here is a picture of the card I made. It is fairly simple but I really liked how it turned out.


I used the set Flower Collage Trio from TAC and Noteworthy from SU. The base cs is Bazzil. The rest of the paper came from my scrap bins...some misc dp, white and SU Chocolate Chip. I used some Art Institute Lion's Mane glitter on the center of the flower. I absolutely LOVE their glitter.

Here are a couple misc. cards I've made during the past month:




All three of these were made for different sketch challenges on ASB.

I have a ton of housework to do today but hopefully I will find some time to do a little stamping too. I hope you all have a wonderful day!

Crossing my fingers

I think my camera should be in todays mail. I will be anxiously waiting for the sound of the mail truck coming. Plus I am hoping the 2 winter sets from CC Designs will be in todays mail too.
I haven't stamped in almost a week except for stamping a few Changito images so I am definitely ready to get back in the stamping groove.
I may try and stamp a little this afternoon but we'll see if that really happens.
I hope you all have a great day!

Have I mentioned that I don't have my camera

Still no camera. Oh well, one of these days you are going to see a post FULL of pictures.
Nothing crafty done here today. Just some MAJOR MAJOR house cleaning. Fun, fun. Not!
At least our house is VERY clean. I'm hoping the clean house means I get to play in my stamp room all day tomorrow.
The weather here is totally crazy today. After getting near record snowfall in December, it was almost 50 degrees yesterday. This morning we woke up to thunder and lightning. Some counties in WI even have tornado warnings. We got TONS of rain today and A LOT of our snow is gone. Now we have fog to the point of zero visability. Joy. Glad I'm not going anywhere tonight.
I hope everyone is having a wonderful Monday.

Off to bed early tonight.

It has been a long weekend and I am completely exhausted. Yesterday was a day full of dishes, laundry, vacuuming, scrubbing floors and a tiny bit of shopping. Today was just as crazy. My former boss and her kids came over to make gingerbread houses. I bought all of the ingredients to make these weeks ago but never found time to make them before the holidays. I baked the gingerbread pieces last night (I was up until midnight...yikes!) and we assembled and decorated them today. We decided to go with a Valentine theme since we missed Christmas. They turned out super cute but of coarse...I still do not have a camera. Go figure. If I don't get mine back soon I'm going to buy a fancy new one. I bet if I tell Tom that mine will show up VERY quickly. Well, I'm off to bed early. Hope you all had a great weekend!

New Year's Resolution

WOW! Day two of being an real blogger and I actually found time to post something. Because of the Christmas break I am babysitting my almost 1 year old niece this week so my "me" time is even more limited than usual.
After the stress of the holidays and all of the extra "expenses", I decided that my New Year's resolution would be to do my best to stick to a very small craft budget. I even went as far as deciding that I would not buy anything craft related in the month of January. As soon as I made this decision I realized that I am just about out of Tombow Mono Multi adhesive. I can't make it the entire month without that so yesterday I had to make a purchase from my favorite adhesive vendor scrapbookpal.com. I also remembered that I wanted a couple CC Designs sets so there went another $22 to allthatscraps.com. So much for my no craft purchases in January. To make things even harder on me I saw some adorable cards that Mary Webb (mwebb on SCS) made using the nestabilities dies. They are now VERY high on my wish list. CC Designs just came out with 2 new valentine sets that I like and to top everything off I just got my new TAC catty from Kisa (kisamari on SCS) in the mail today. It is going to be a long month but I'm going to try and play with all of the toys that I already have.
To keep me busy I have been trying to do the daily challenges on ashadeofblue.net.
I love the homey atmosphere of ASB and the daily challenges are a lot of fun. As soon as we get our camera back (I'm praying that it gets here SOON!) I will post some of the challenge cards I've made in the past few days. I hope you are all enjoying your day.

My First Blog Post

Today I decided that I would jump in the "exciting" world of blogging. First thing of coarse was to come up with a really clever name that no one else had already picked. Easy, right. Wrong. I sat here for an hour trying to come up with something clever, funny, etc....NOTHING. Just as I was about to give up I remembered something that happened to me a few years ago. I had been stamping with my Stampin Up! Brilliant Blue ink pad and the lid popped off. If this has happened to any of you, you know that the new style SU lids are a MAJOR pain to get back on. I fought a hard battle with that ink pad but in the last second it took the lead in the battle by flying out of my hands and hitting me in the face. I finally got the darn thing on but the ink pad will never be the same. A few hours later I stopped at my husband's workplace for some reason. As I was standing there talking to my husband, one of his coworkers approached me and said "Do you know you have blue ink on your ear". I had washed my face but didn't realize that my ear lobe was completely blue...hence the name of my new blog...INK ON MY EAR.
My hope for this blog is to share with you my love of family, friends and stamping.
Keep checking in for more updates. (Pictures will be a few days since Tom managed to leave our digital camera at his parents when we were there visiting before Christmas. I'm hoping they get it in the mail to us VERY SOON!)
I hope you all have a wonderful day!