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Two Challenges

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I've been following the CASE Study challenge for several months, but finally created a card for the current challenge. Each week they provide a card as inspiration. As soon as I saw these delightful card with sailboats, I knew I wanted to play along.

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I just ordered this sailboat/sentiment stamp by Unity and it came last week. I knew it would be perfect for this challenge.

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Cardstock: from my stash; Patterned paper: "Mabel" by Stella Rose (My Minds Eye) & Celebrate (Teresa Collins); Stamps: Celebrate Webster's Pages (Unity); Twine: The Twinery.  I colored the sailboat with Faber Castell Stampers Big Markers. Although it's hard to see each star in the sentiment has a tiny pearl I colored with a B37 Copic marker.

Although I had the card made for last week's Make It Monday in time to post last night, I didn't get it photographed. I guess you can blame March Madness. The Syracuse game was only seen here on digital TV so I had to watch it downstairs. They lost in a rather sad game with nearly 18 turn-overs.

The challenge last week was to emboss just a part of your card. I used the Woodgrain Impression Plate by Papertrey Ink and embossed only the right hand side of the card. I'm also linking this to Creative Every Day where the theme for March is "nest."

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Conservatory

I used new papers from 7 Gypsies Conservatory 6X6 paper pad, stamps from Cavallini and Papertrey Ink with a bit of distressing and distress inks from both Tim Holtz and Papertrey. The cardstock is Ocean Tides by Papertrey.

Project 64: Scarlet

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Project 64

I didn't get out much this last week, but my first foray outside the house was last Thursday when Tracy took me to the lake for lunch. I knew I wanted to make a quick stop to take a photo of kayaks along Irondequoit Bay for the prompt this week at Picture Inspiration. (That post is coming.) As we were pulling out of the parking lot, Tracy noticed these three kayaks–all scarlet–a much more orangish red that I would have imagined.

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I always think of Snow White's evil stepmother with scarlet lips which (in my picture book) were a deep and bluer red. So this week I have just two offerings for scarlet. Hopefully, this week will be a bit better and I'll be up and running again.

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Super Moon

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Since the full moon tonight was supposed to be the largest in the last 20 years, Tracy and I decided to go out and see what we could do to capture a photo. It was freezing (just a little over 32°) so we weren't willing to stay out too long. I had some notes from my friend Barbara about good settings to try. Another time I would use the remote, but I didn't have the camera set for it and it was so dark in the field near our community garden that I just stuck with the tripod. It would also be nice to have a longer lens, but that's not happening! Nonetheless I'm pretty happy with this shot, and most of all, I'm glad I saw it. As we drove over the moon appeared HUGE and bright yellow, but quickly diminished in size.

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Two Cards for Friday

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I thought I'd post a couple of cards today that went "live" on the Scrap-Mart blog this month.

TravelLight

I just love the Grand Nestability dies for making shaped cards, and so far Labels Eleven is my favorite. I also love this Unity Stamp Set "A Girl and her Adventures" which I've owned for awhile but never used. The cardstock is American Craft and the patterned papers are all from My Mind's Eye.

TrumpetFlowers

Another Labels Eleven shaped card that I made with one of the new Heartfelt Creations stamps. Heartfelt Creations sent the Scrap-Mart Design Team a wonderful collection of images and dies to work with. You'll be seeing more of them here soon. The pink patterned paper is from the new American Craft line "Hello Sunshine." Papertrey's Sweet Blush ribbon matched it perfectly. I added a little rose from a set I bought on sale at Michaels recently. Although it's almost impossible to see, the hummingbird was coated with Smooch Illuminate which gives his feathers the glow our hummingbirds at the feeder seem to have.

Here's a peek at the inside of the card:

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The message is also from a Heartfelt Creations set " Classic Messages," another one I'll use frequently. The flower is a smaller image from the "Angel Trumpet Flowers" set.

 

Happy Birthday & Happy St. Patrick’s Day

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Today's is Tracy's birthday. Not a day goes by that I'm not grateful to be married to such a kind and generous man. But he's gone above and beyond this last week as a super-duper caregiver, so here are extra special birthday wishes!

St.Patrick'sDay

His birthday card is a lift from Kara, at KandR Designs. I love her clean and simple approach to cards, and I definitely like hers a lot better than mine! But I liked the sentiment and I wanted a St. Patrick's Day style card. The two greens are much closer in color than they appear on the card. I used stamps from Papertrey Ink (Button Boutique and Luck of the Irish) and American Craft thickers. The inside (which I didn't photograph) combines three stamps that tell him how lucky I am to be his wife, and to wish him a happy birthday.

(It was a much better day as I finally was up and about for awhile today. It was gorgeous here, in the 60s, so we drove up to the lake to have lunch at Don's Originals. It sure was great to get out of the bedroom, but I was pretty tired by the time we got home.)

Project 64: Plum

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Project 64

This week's color at Project 64 was plum, actually a color I like quite a lot.

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Fortunately, I looked around and found some things that matched the crayon (and its scribble) before I went off for surgery. Today I managed to get shots of most of them. The first one is a newbie.

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A good friend who brought dinner over the other night, also brought a lovely arrangement of flowers for my dinner tray. Tracy said, "I think we ought to save these in case they match one of the crayon colors." Good thing he was thinking about it, because one of them is a pretty good match for plum.

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So is my iPhone cover.

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And my favorite reusable grocery bag from my favorite grocery store.  And here's my shot for the week:

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This is one of my favorite necklaces. I wear it on several different chains and have two pairs of earrings that go with it as well. I grabbed the lid from one of my vintage Mason jars for the photograph. Check out the other entries. I love looking through all the other photographs to see what folks have found and to "collect" ideas for composition.

 

Sweet Shot Tuesday

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Last Thursday I went in for some needed surgery. I knew that there would be a few difficult days afterwards, but I really expected to be back on my feet and moving around by now. The truth is that I am relatively pain-free as long as I stay put, but as soon as I try to get up and move around, it’s still pretty painful. Fortunately, I have a super caregiver so there’s been little need to do much. I am truly thankful for a laptop and a huge pile of magazines and books. We don’t have a television in our bedroom, and it’s been six days now since I’ve seen any TV. Except for the news, I don’t really miss it. I am a huge fan of college basketball, however, so I’m hoping to make it to the living room for the beginning of March Madness.

I’ve spent a lot of time perusing blogs and getting lots of inspiration for cards and scrapbook pages. I hope it doesn’t leave me by the time I get back to my studio. I’m also hoping that tomorrow I’ll be able to take photos for last week’s Project 64 (plum).  Here’s my shot for Sweet Shot Tuesday this week. It’s one I took when I was at the George Eastman House to take photos for Picture Inspiration. As I was leaving I noticed all the winter anconites blooming through the snow.

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They were the first sign of spring. Since then our daffodils have pushed up through the soil, and most of the snow has finally melted. Today it was sunny and 50°. I'm so ready for spring!

Online Classes: Take 2

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This week's prompt for Picture Inspiration was to Find Some Rhythm. Tracy shared part of a definition for rhythm with us:  "a harmonious sequence or pattern of masses alternating with voids, of light alternating with shade, of alternating colors, etc." The words "haromonious" and "pattern" made me think of the staircase in the George Eastman House. My brother-in-law gave me a year's membership for Christmas so I can go as often as I like this year without any admission fees. It's quite the lovely gift. I've been three times since mid-February. As it turns out I found two shots, one inside and one outside, that seemed to fit the prompt.

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I love the patterns of the columns, arbor, and all the shadows. I took a few other photos there I'll save for another time. One of the things I'm enjoying a lot with this class is working my way through the gallery of photographs posted by members of the class. Talk about inspiration!

Participating in Finding Your Way has proven to be pretty motivating for scrapbooking. I finished three more layouts for the house album. It's already getting frustrating, however, because I can't find photos I thought I had! For instance, I have photos of how our first house looked when we moved in, but almost none of how it looked by the time we sold it seven years later. We had a beautiful kitchen put in that house, and I can't find any photos of it. I'm sure there are negatives of the photos, but I have several boxes of those and no easy way to examine them. Oh well, I'm trying to embrace imperfection, and just get on with it.

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Inheritance

I'm definitely not a fan of my handwriting, but Karen G. is right, it does speed up the process considerably. Now that I've started it in this album, I'll maintain it. The journaling is hard to read so here's what it says: It was cheap and in a nice part of the city. Those facts combined with the fact that I had just been laid off due to decreasing enrollments meant we took on a huge renovation porject when we bought the house on Werner Park. These photos give a flavor of what we inherited. The previous owners wanted to turn the house into a double but couldn't get a zoning variance. They went ahead anyway and cut doors through walls, cut off the plumbing to the upstairs bathroom as well as other poor decisions. I took us years to get through the whole house with needed repairs and remodeling.

I'm continuing to enjoy the Silhouette 101 class. It's nearly over, and I've learned everything I hoped to. This week I learned out to use the print and cut feature. I printed some cute tickets on my printer and then ran them through the Silhouette which cut them perfectly. You'll see them in a project soon, I'm sure.

I'll be away from the computer for the next few days, but will catch up with your blogs early next week. Have a great weekend.

 

Make-It Monday 5

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Make-itMonday

I got to this week's Papertrey Ink challenge a bit earlier this week. The challenge was to do some distressing on the project. It's not something I do often. In fact, I have a distressing tool which I used for the first time today! I must say it worked very well, although the distressing around all the edges of the patterned papers doesn't show up particularly well here.  I also took the opportunity to use one of my new stamp sets: Mat Stack #2 Collection. It's filled with very elegant designs for the mat stack and a good addition to my stamp collection.

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Quite some time ago, I dyed a lot of seam binding with a variety of mists. I chose the colors for the card based on a piece of the ribbon. I used another piece of the My Mind's Eye paper from the Mabel collection and one from Basic Grey's Basic Kraft collection.

 

Clean and Simple

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I love the sketches at Clean & Simple, but haven’t had a lot of time to play along for a while. This week’s sketch is a busy cardmaker’s dream. One piece of cardstock, one sheet of patterned paper from a 6 X 6 paper pad (I used both sides of it), a piece of ribbon, two buttons, one Fillable Frame stamp, and two sentiments (one inside and one out). It was finished in about 10 minutes. I love this color combination, too.

C&S

Cardstock: Dark Chocolate (PTI), Patterned Paper: "Mabel" Stella & Rose (My Mind's Eye); Die: Fillable Frame #8 (PTI); Stamps: Fillable Frames #8 & #5; Buttons: LaDiDah (KI Memories)

 

 

Project 64: White

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Project 64

This week's prompt at Project 64 was white, so I didn't need to carry a crayon around with me.

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Initially I thought I would take photos of my white pitcher collection, but in the end didn't use them at all. Here's what I found.

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Aside from the leaves this meets Brooke's additional challenge of white on white which I use frequently. I bought this cyclamen for a friend, but took advantage of it before I gave it away. Here are a couple of close-up shots.

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Finally I was inspired to set up a little still life.

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I was happy with this, but added one of Kim Klassen's textures, Gray Day Slate, with a blending mode of Hard Light at 80%, and this turned out to be my favorite for the week.

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I'll be submitting this for Sweet Shot Tuesday as well.

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Make-It Monday 4

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This is my second post today. Scroll down for a post on Exploring with Your Camera.

Make-itMonday

This week's challenge was to use some fun foam and create your own stamp with a die cut. I had to go buy a piece of fun foam as it's not something I've ever used. I decided to buy white, thinking I might eventually color it with mist or paint. But I knew right away that for this challenge, I'd use the white for clouds. Several years ago, I bought two sheets of paper by Autumn Leaves called "Wellies and Umbrellas, and I've always wanted to use the images on a card. With the introduction of "Healing Touch Sentiments" (PTI) a couple of months ago, I had the perfect sentiment for the card.

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I'm really pleased with the card, and was amused to have Matt come into the studio and tell me he thought it was one of my best cards. He spent quite a bit of time examining it and asking about the challenge. I used the fun foam to stamp the clouds with Fresh Snow ink (PTI), hand cut the wellies and umbrella, and added the foam clouds. The sentiment is stamped with Pearlescent Rust by Brilliance. They've recently become my favorite inks although I've owned most of them for years.

Capture the Sky

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A week ago my friend, Kat, posted another of her Exploring with a Camera series on Capturing the Sky. I've always been fascinated by the sky so I went through the archives currently on my laptop (many are archived on an external hard drive) to see what I could find. Interestingly, most of the shots were taken with my point and shoot since I always have that in my purse. Here are eight shots of the sky.

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Actually the sky figures in both the top and bottom of this photo. This was taken with one of my first Canon point and shoots from the deck of our townhouse on Kiawah Island.

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Here the sky is captured in reflection. This was taken with the same camera during a vacation in 2007. I'd like to be there right now!

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I took this one from my car one morning; another point and shoot. The sky was so dramatic I pulled over on my way to work.

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I could never print this photo; there's a lot of digital noise, but I love the colors on the horizon. I took this as we flew into Atlanta one night.

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This I took with an iPhone app; probably the Hipstamatic since I'd just gotten my iPhone. This was from Sarah's patio in California. I'm always looking at the sky there since it's almost always blue–quite different from the typical gray skies of western New York in the spring.

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This is one of my favorites. This was taken with my DSLR on a tripod early on Halloween last year at Conesus Lake as the sun came up.

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And another favorite, also taken with my DSLR on a tripod in the Badlands. I waited a long time that night for this shot, but it was worth it.

What about you? Do you watch the skies?

Online Classes: Take 1

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Despite my intention not to start any new classes, I am in fact taking three. The first is a class at My Creative Classroom on using the Silhouette, and it has been fantastic. I'm learning just what I needed to know and am amazed at the capabilities of this machine. The other two are both at Big Picture Classes. I broke down at the last minute and signed up for Karen Grunberg's Finding Your Way. I'm already happy with that decision because I've decided to use the assignments to work on one of my biggest 2011 FINISH albums. The last is Picture Inspiration because I'm always looking for photography inspiration and conversation. My plate feels too full right now, but I know it will ease up as I get going with each of these.

One of Karen's first assignments was to identify the things you use on your pages so you can focus on making those accessible and stop spending money on things you don't use. I did that when I moved my studio and did one of my first big purges. But before I started the Home Album I gathered up all the supplies (kraft paper for the basics, patterned papers, stamps, and embellishments) from my stash that I thought I might use. It has really expedited the process.

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Here are the first layouts I did for Finding My Way with some Silhouette work as well.

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This isn't the title page which I'll do later, but it's an introductory page to the album. I scraplifted it from a layout I saw on Kelly Purkey's blog a long time ago. I also incorporated journaling stamps and my own handwriting—two things Karen suggests as ways to speed up your scrapbooking process.

Here's a close-up of the journaling.

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Circa1931

This page shows photos we received after a visit from the man whose family built our house in 1931.  The journaling documents the people in the photos as well as how we came to have them.

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One of the things I've learned how to do in the Silhouette class how to cut my own titles using the fonts on my computer. This week we learned how to weld the letters of a script font and create a shadow for the title. The chipboard accent is from Cosmo Cricket Circa 1934, which seems appropriate.

The first week's assignment for Picture Inspiration was to take a self-portrait. I avoid these as often as possible and I didn't take this until the last day possible. But I'm not unhappy with it and will eventually change my avatar since I finally have a photo that doesn't use a mirror. I used my tripod and my remote and took it in my studio.

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Team-up Thursday: Everyday Beauty

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Teamup

It's hard to believe it's Thursday already. The days are flying by! This week's prompt was Everyday Beauty. I walked around the house and took some photos of things that give me pleasure. (No cameras, since I posted those yesterday.) Nancy sent the photo of the wreath on her deck with the note that, "This beautiful wreath has been on my deck since early Dec. and has looked pretty much like this every day!" We can't decide if all that snow for three months is a good thing or not! I chose my MacKenzie Child clock for the diptych. It's the same shape as Nancy's wreath, and one of my favorite things in my studio. Sarah and Adam gave me a gift certificate for my birthday last year, and I knew exactly what I wanted. You'll see by the other photos, that I'm a fan of MacKenzie Child as well as black and white checks!

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Just for fun, here are the other contenders:

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A stack of red paper suitcases that hold Papertrey ribbons and twill and a collection of Letterpress tags.

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Folk art heart boxes on our bedroom bookshelf.

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This funky sheep was sent to me by a good friend. I've had the birdhouse for ages, and bought the MacKenzie Child cream pitcher about a year ago. If (when) we redo our kitchen black & white tiles are on the wish list.

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And two shots of the tray on the coffee table in the living room.