Santa Like Nobody's Watching!

Okay - this might be a surprise to you, but there are only seventeen more Sundays (including today) until Christmas!

(Pauses while you collect yourself).

You okay? Here's the moment where if you were with me right now, I'd get you a cold washcloth for your forehead, bring you some water, and gently pat your hair and your hands while I look into your eyes and ask you if you've accepted procrastination as your personal savior.

Because if you have, this little piece of knowledge has exactly ZERO effect on you, because you're not going to do anything until December 24th anyway! You are FREE!

The peace this grants you is quite something. I highly recommend it.


That right there is the kind of freedom and liberation that only the new Visions of Santa stamp set can adequately express.

I LOVE this quirky and silly set. I describe my stampy style as CAQ - Clean And Quirky - and this is one of my faves in a long time.

I finally had time to play with it yesterday - actually - I didn't have any time at all, so of course that's why I did it. Once you've fully converted to Procrastinism, the light of this feeling will envelop you at all times and bring you joy.

So here is this fully self confident and nutty little Santa, dancing his head off.

I.
Love.
Him.

So fun. I watercolored him with Peerless Watercolors, now that they're all organized in my binder. Very quick & easy.

I know some of you are scared of these Santas, with their complete lack of body image issues, but I adore them - they'd fit right in here in Austin! Keepin' it weird, y'all. It's what we do. Confidence is the most attractive quality on earth - shake it, Santa!

Any time you're ready to join me in the pursuit and exploration of Procrastinism, I'm here for you. Putting something off until tomorrow.

Loveyameanitbye.

First Order, Then Chaos...

It's really pretty amazing the lengths a papercrafter will go to to organize their supplies before actually MAKING something with them.

It's like artistic nesting, sort of.

It happens to me all the time. I buy something new and I'm simultaneously enthralled and paralyzed by it. I know that there's NO WAY I can bust it open and start using it until I've bought JUST the right organizational system for it so that it looks pretty and neat on my shelves when I'm NOT using it -  which is supposed to come AFTER using it - but that's not how it works.

Enter stage left - Peerless watercolors. These are a super fun, very different watercolor product - they come as sheets loaded with pigment instead of in tubes or pans, and so they are great portable watercolors for anyone with an aquapainter and a nomadic soul.

But since they come in loose sheets, you have to find a way to store them before you can start painting. I bought the watercolors MONTHS ago and then used creative avoidance to NOT paint with them because I was indecisive about how to store them.

Then, I saw an awesome video by Jennifer McGuire on a new storage idea - a little photo album that she slipped swatches into the pockets of. Then she stuck the actual watercolor sheets to the top of the pockets. GENIUS. I loved that the swatch was protected while the paint was accessible.

However, I wanted something larger which would lie flat when it was open, because I like to paint outside a lot, and I wanted a bit more room and a flat palette. So I thought maybe a regular page protector would work for my swatches.

Then I had to find the perfect notebook for my page protectors. God forbid I use some boring plastic notebook from Office Depot. That's completely irrational. If you think that's what I should have done, I worry about your soul.

Instead, I decided to alter a beautiful kraft notebook I got from Jam Paper for this sacred task. It's a 1" Designders® binder, and some of you will probably be horrified that I altered it, because the kraft by itself is so pretty. Stifle yourselves and just wait for it.

It's uncoated, so I knew I could paint it, stamp on it, or do any number of things, but I started to get a little obsessed with one of our recent Splitcoast tutorials and decided to cover it with aluminum foil tape.

First, I die cut a bunch of letters from Whisper White cardstock with my Little Letters Framelits, and arranged them NOT so randomly on the front of the binder. You'd be amazed how many (not very desirable) words you can accidentally spell while being "random". After much censoring, I glued the letters on with Tombow Mono Multi. Please notice the absence of vowels. This is critical to not embarassing yourself, trust me. Where there are vowels, there are vulnerabilities.

Then, over more than a few episodes of Dead Like Me and NCIS, I applied cut pieces of aluminum tape, and burnished them with paper stumps. The paper stump part is super important - the tape won't bond completely or lie flat over time if you don't take the time to do this. What I noticed about this binder while I was doing this is it does NOT show fingerprints - which is really different from most kraft paper surfaces. Love that. If I weren't altering it, that would be super important to me. It also takes the tape really well because it's a matte surface, so your tape will really be stuck down and won't lift.

I then took just a fine black gel pen and pierced dots into each letter for a little bit of detail. The back of the binder doesn't have letters. This is because I wanted to make it easy on myself - I wanted to quickly know which was the front and which was the back. You'll see why in a minute.

Here's what it looked like with the burnished tape. It's already pretty cool in this state.

 

Next - I painted the whole notebook - front, back, inside - with black acrylic paint and wiped most of it off with a paper towel. This aged it and defined the places where the tape overlapped, as well as the letters.

 

This was cool enough, but I can't really leave things alone, so I needed to add color. 

Out came my Viva Decor Inka Gold - in Green/Yellow, Orange, and Steel Blue. You probably knew I was going to say that since these are my go-to colors in any medium.

Maybe you can see why!

  

OMG isn't that awesome!??? I truly wasn't expecting how much life those colors would add and I LOVE it!

Here's what the inside looks like - instead of doing a lot of small pieces - the outside took a LONG time - I settled on just strips of tape, overlapped. Wiping the paint off with the paper towel is what created those differences in texture you see. So cool. 

Oh - but what are those pages in there, you ask??

Well those are my Peerless Watercolor pages!!

I cut 8.5 x 11 sheets of hot press Fabriano watercolor paper to go inside the page protectors.

Here's where the OCD skills really come into play.

The set I ordered is the bonus pack - which is 40 colors in 2x2 squares. The colors are listed on the package, but they aren't in ROYGBIV order. So I took them out and painted tiny swatches to put them in the one true order. Then I numbered them - the swatch and the square. Then, I put the swatches in ROYGBIV, and used the numbers on the swatch & squares to help me build my book with the page protectors.

You Virgos know how important this is. We cannot create beautiful, haphazard and chaotic art until our colors are in order, am I right?

MMMM. Makes me happy.

Hard to believe this all started with a 3-ring binder, eh?

Here's a little slideshow of the process, complete with a cat butt photobomb.

Now that this is done, I can actually watercolor this weekend, so watch out! :)

Loveyameanitbye.

Beetle Chucking - a Diary

It's click beetle season.

This does not amuse me.

During click beetle season, I spend most days following clicking sounds, finding beetles, picking them up in a paper towel and flinging them outside.

They come back while I'm sleeping and it starts again in the morning. Beetle flinging.

You have to pick them up with a paper towel because the thing they do that makes the clicking sound is quite violent and unpleasant without the paper towel. I do not like it a bit. I do not like hearing them clicking all around the house like I'm living in a popcorn machine either.

They can't be happy either, going along doing their beetle thing and suddenly getting flung. You'd think they'd learn, even with their tiny beetle brains. Nuh uh. They don't.

Unlike click beetles, today's Splitcoast tutorial by my friend Jeanne Jachna is AMAZING! I've been waiting for this to go live for soooo long because I really fell in love with the sample the second I saw it. It's really a simple technique but it's a huge wow.


I decided to use Pan Pastels for my coloring method because I realized that one of the Pan Pastels Sofft tools is PERFECT for applying color horizontally like you need to. It's this one - sort of like an offset palette knife:

So I got to work! I decided to do cool wintery blues and greens. Since they blend so well, I just put down all blue, went back with touches of yellow-green, back with blue, etc. However, the blue I used is actually calle Phthalo Green Tint and the green I used is called Hansa Yellow.

 I embossed our watercolor paper with the Vintage Wallpaper embossing folder - one of my all time faves.




Then I used White Christmas set - SQUEE - isn't that polar bear cute??? I made the ground and the glow around the little star with Pan Pastel. I filled in the star with gold glitter.

Now here's a little secret. I had completely made this card, photographed it and edited the photo and then I took it apart and did it again. I had originally made the polar bear panel on whisper white - and there was too big a color variation between that and the watercolor paper. I also had stamped the star in soft sky, and it just didn't match the pan pastel. I had almost hit publish on this post and then I stopped and started over. And it's a better card now. THROW YOUR CARDS AWAY! :) The next ones will be better.

Flinging all those beetles and doing a new technique (twice) really work up a person's appetite, so I have to share sort of a miraculous recipe with you.

First, I have to tell you a little story about eggplant.

I love eggplant. Always have. I started learning to cook with it after trying an amazing eggplant tapenade at the CIA in California. After several years of cooking and eating eggplant, the Other and I started to notice that whenever we had eggplant for dinner we both had severe insomnia. This took dozens and dozens of meals for us to realize. But when we did, it was an aha moment. Then we had to figure out why. This might have been in the dark ages before Google, and so it was only a few years ago that I discovered the answer.

Eggplant is a cousin of tobacco, and actually contains a bit of nicotine. Twenty pounds of eggplant has the same amount of nicotine as a cigarette.

So apparently .0125 of a cigarette is enough to turn me into a vampire. Good thing I've never smoked!

Now, I'm careful only to eat eggplant at lunch, never dinner.

But when I have it, I love it, and recently my sister made an AMAZING batch of what I call Italian nachos. My brother-in-law and I ate a really inappropriate number of these - they were sooo good. Somehow she came up with this crazy cornstarch technique that results in an incredible crispy crust on the eggplant that is even better than deep frying and much lighter.

Here's the recipe.
____________________________________________________________________________
Cynthia's Eggplant

Peel (important) and slice one eggplant - I did about ½ inch slices - you don’t want them too thin. Sweat them in salt on paper towels for a few hours - 2 ish? Blotted water with paper towels.

Make a marinade with ¼ C balsamic, ¼ C Olive oil in a gallon ziploc. Put slices in, squish/shake them around, and marinate them in the fridge for 4 hours.

Remove from marinade and coat in cornstarch - including edges.

Put on Parchment, bake at 375 for one hour, flipping once. Serve like nachos with marinara on top.
AMAZING. Whisper my name. (required) Also works great for parmigiana. You will LOVE it! 

Also, did you know that the shorter, squattier eggplants taste better than the tall ones? Truth!

____________________________________________________________________________

Okay - back to beetle chucking.

Loveyameanitbye.

Stamp Etching

So I've been hanging onto my Convention swap photo because I was on the calendar to do my Stamp Etching tutorial today for Splitcoast for a long time. Even though I did give you a sneak peek here.

So it's nice to be able to let the image that started it all out of the closet.

When I was procrastinating doing retreat prep, one night I was watching a video about classical etching techniques. Yes, I'm THAT good at procrastinating. You have to practice a LOT to get this good, trust me.

Anyway, I love etchings because of the fine lines in them - necessitated by the needles that they use to create the designs in wax.

I thought that maybe some fine, detailed lines would really change a big bold image like Blended Bloom. So I hit pause on the video, stamped a flower on a scrap of Coastal Cabana and behold - a new style is born!

I loved it SO much I had to text my friend Melanie and swear her to secrecy, since this was going to be both my swap and part of my on-stage presentation.

She gave me the thumbs up, so off I went!

Did you get one of my swaps? I'd love to hear if you liked it! I'd also like to see if you've tried it - I know a few of you have!

Here's the video, with a few additional samples and some tips.

Now on that note, if you're not already a subscriber to the Splitcoaststampers Weekly Inkling Newsletter - sign up! It has a free video tutorial each week, along with step-by-step instructions, a list of our weekly challenges, hot topics from the forums, and crafty deals. It arrives with your coffee every Wednesday morning and you know what you can do with it??

PROCRASTINATE.

Like a boss.

Loveyameanitbye.

#kindofabigdeal #WACDisney

I love Twitter.

Twitter is somehow cleaner than Facebook.

There's less noise, and more conversations that are one on one and authentic.

There's a wide variety of content, to satisfy even the most #shiny #squirrel personality.

And Twitter has brought me some of the most EPIC challenges.

For example, today, my friend Leslie reminded me of a hilarious blog hop some of us who became friends on Twitter once did - the "Get Ill Soon" challenge - HAHA! OMG I laughed so hard today when she reminded me of this.

You really need people in your life who challenge you to do things, because many times, those things are awesome.

Friday, a Twitter friend - @Clay_Harrison - tweeted a challenge to a few of us. Disney/Pixar/Marvel character - make art and post it.

I ruminated a bit.

I almost used my Undefined hand carved Rocky stamp, since I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy and I loved it.

But then, my friend @ImtheQ posted that she was reading Ms. Marvel. And my wheels started turning. And so did Google images.

But mixed into the Google image search for Ms. Marvel was Marvel Girl.

And OH how I loved the colors in her outfit. So Baylor Bears-y, Green Bay-y and summery and fun.

I could not resist.

So out came my Dress Up Framelits (retired) and my watercolor paper. Out came my Brusho powdered watercolor. Out came my BELOVED Calling All Heros set, my Smoky Slate ink, my #SoSocial stamp set (seriously - how perfect is THAT for a Twitter challenge??), my craft knife and my Crystal Effects.

AND OUT CAME MY SQUEAL!!

I love this card, I'm not gonna lie.

I love the acidic green and yellow of her outfit. I love the bold red of her belt buckle. I love that I was patient enough to let each layer dry so I could do a little detail work on the belt buckle - always hard with watercolor.

I love the confidence.

Being a superhero means you know you're #kindofabigdeal.

They are sure of themselves, which frees them to do great things.

I started reading this book today which starts out with a great quote:

Don't apologize for who you are or the art you create. ~C.J. Rider

Don't.

Make it for yourself.

Be as confident as a superhero. :)

Besides, you look awesome in a green dress and a mask.

Loveyameanitbye.

One of the World's Biggest Unsolved Problems

I really feel like my blog should get a grant.

There's no reason that I should keep pointing out these MAJOR issues affecting our society and their possible solutions for free.

People get grants to study - I kid you not - the link between cocaine and the mating habits of quail. Because THAT matters. THAT impacts the quality of life of the average American. And how mean is it to give cocaine to quail? Senator Tom Coburn - I'd like to invite you to Austin so that I can scary whisper at you until you pee yourself and slink out of the country on a cargo ship in the dead of night. Any time that works for you works for me. I will make time. Call me.

Way to go, government dummies!!

Wait - I mean, eminent humans who should bestow wheelbarrows of cash upon me to study...

KETCHUP EXPULSION.

I like ketchup. I like mustard. I like mayonnaise.

But I do NOT like throwing away 15% of the net weight of all the ketchup I buy because I can't get it out of the blastedly incompetent squeeze bottles they package it in.

I wondered, while making rude noises with my Whataburger ketchup bottle today trying to coax the last few tablespoons of ketchup out, why in TARNATION we don't package ketchup in a jar like mayo so we can scoop the container clean, consuming every last bit. The old glass bottles were FAR superior to these new things that you can't squeeze all the way to get the last bits out. If they want it in a plastic bottle, why don't they put it in a tube like toothpaste that we can roll up?

It's just not working for me.

And before Whataburger ketchup, the best ketchup in the world, I didn't care as much. I'd love the throw the entire Heinz corporation in the garbage, as a matter of fact, so I didn't mind kissing their gross ketchup goodbye before its time. But now - now, I care.

So give me a grant to fix it. I'm crafty -  I will figure it out.

Pre-ketchup trauma today, I had my stamp-a-stack. I'm doing one each month until Christmas, so my students will have 40 cards done by mid-November all ready to send! We really had fun. I was amazed - there were 15 people, and we were done in 115 minutes, so they made 150 cards in 115 minutes! Pretty wild!

We did three designs: one very simple, one intermediate and one more involved. This is the intermediate card, and I think it was their favorite:

This is the BEAUTIFUL Holiday Home stamp set from the Holiday catalog (you should have it by now) that covers Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween and comes with ADORABLE matching dies.

We sponged the main panel in Pool Party, masking the moon with a 3/4" punch and a Post-It note - I use the ones where the whole note is sticky.

After that we did a fun technique we saw at Convention - you fill a mister with water. Spray a little puddle into your left hand if you're right-handed. Then pick up some water with your right hand and flick it onto the sponged area, creating those little spots of "snow" you see. This way you just get a few little drops, and not a misting of water all over the panel. Very fun.

Then I used the cute candy cane striped paper from the matching Nordic Noel DSP for a little pop of red. The images from Holiday Home are stamped in Bermuda Bay and the embossing folder for the second layer is the Decorative Dots folder.

If you've ever gotten a Christmas card from me, you know that I'm all about this fun color scheme that's both frosty and warm. When you're stamping when it's 104 degrees, the frosty part of that equation is KIND OF a big deal.

If you've stopped by my blog to give me a grant, please click the email button on the right and I'll give you the ketchup bottle of your DREAMS. Promise.

Loveyameanitbye.

Subtractive Art

I have been pondering subtractive art lately.

I have been fortunate to have been in several art demos from Golden, because they have been invited in by some local stores and art guilds I'm a part of.

Their instructors are AMAZING. Real, life-long artists and product experts, and the demonstrations, while free, are incredibly detailed lessons in both chemistry and technique.

At the most recent demonstration, we got to paint little paintings using a variety of techniques - this is really the way that I remember how to do things, so it's my favorite sort of demonstration.

One of the techniques we learned was subtractive painting. We painted a base color, then another color on top of it, and then removed the top layer in a shape - we did a pear - to reveal the color below.

Simple, but awesome.

I started to get obsessed with subtracting things.

Subtracting is as good as adding you know.

You can subtract bad things. Things that waste your time. Stupid things. Things you don't need. Unpleasant things. It's all good.

Aside from removing acrylic paint and stupid, boring, bad things though, you can also remove stuff from your art with items from your pantry!

One thing that is a fun subtractive technique, is salted watercolor. You put down some watercolor, sprinkle salt, and let it steal some of your color. Here's a sample from a watercolor class I took. The texture in the water is from salt.

But you know what else steals water?

Rice.

Alton Brown would love this tutorial. Walter White probably would too :)

I decided to use this technique for today's Mix-Ability challenge. Here's the technique.

First, tape a piece of watercolor paper down onto a board. Your paper will warp a lot if you don't.

Next - add OODLES of water and pigment. You can use watercolor - I used Lukas Aquarelle - or sprays, or anything water-based with a lot of pigment. Paint it on thick and goopy and wet.

Sprinkle rice on it. Then walk away. This technique requires patience. Watch a cooking show. Do laundry.

When it's dry, and not a moment before, brush rice off into a container - it can be reused!

Enjoy the results!

I loved watching this develop - so fun. Sort of like a stampy Polaroid.

I decided to use mine with Kinda Eclectic, since I used fall colors.

So what do you think? Feel like subtracting something?

Come play along :).

Loveyameanitbye.

Mary Kay Ash and a Lesson in Karma

I listen to a lot of talk radio. We have a local station here, thanks to the Johnson family, that has some hilarious people on great shows. Some of them are even friends as a result. As a reformed musician, I also find music distracting because I really focus on it. If I'm working, I like just having voices as my background noise during the day.

So this means I hear all sorts of different shows. There's a gardening show I adore. There are real estate and money market shows, which I loathe. There are local news discussion shows which are great and really Austin-focused.

And then there's the Car Pro show.

Now I know what you're thinking. How in the world can she like a car talk show? But I actually really do. I feel like the hosts are honest, they're pretty funny, and I've learned a lot about a lot of different vehicles. Keep in mind that I own the WORST SORT OF AUTOMOBILE IN THE WORLD - the most unreliable, fly-apart-at-the-seams-instantly-after-the-warranty-expires vehicle. So no matter WHAT those guys are talking about, it gives me hope for my automotive future!

But this weekend, they told the most interesting story about Mary Kay Ash and the pink Cadillacs.

It turns out that when Mary Kay Ash decided to launch her pink fleet in 1967, she actually liked the Lincoln she tried out better. So why didn't she go with Lincoln?

Well, my friends, what follows is the best lesson in Karma I've ever heard.

The Car Pro guy explains that when Mary Kay Ash asked the dealer about purchasing a pink Lincoln, that unfortunate man told her to go home and come back with her husband.

I'll wait a minute while you collect yourselves.

Still with me?

Needless to say, she was treated better by Cadillac.

I don't know what happened to this person, but I'm quite certain that that mistake followed him the rest of his days.

I had a similar experience with a leather couch. This was decades ago after we had bought our first house. We wanted a really nice living room set and so we went to the store that was actually advertised on my favorite radio station I listen to every day. The name of this store was the name of the owner - Theresa Mink. It was not cheap, but I was going to spend my Christmas bonus on a nice piece of furniture, and this store was THE leather furniture store in town.

We walked in, and were swooped down upon by a commissioned sales person. At first, I did not want to kill this man.

We looked around and then I had a few questions, so I asked him one.

He turned away from me and started talking to my husband.

Physically turned away from me.

Now, just as in the wild kingdom, I could see that my husband understood that terrible, terrible things were about to happen to this salesperson, and he started moving backwards slightly. His amygdala was probably screaming at him to run, but he did not. However, the salesman, who clearly had no amygdala, did not sense any danger.

I interrupted him, channeling my mother, and said "Excuse me" and asked my question again. Again, he turned his back on me and spoke to my husband, now pale, sweating and nearly unrecognizable.

However, I did not do what I wanted to do, which was to deliver a knee to his nether regions. Instead, I poked him on the arm and said "You just cost yourself a $2K sale (insert one of my favorite words here).

Now - this was SO long ago that people still wrote letters. Which I did. To Theresa Mink, the owner. Her response was the response of a person who would hire a man who would do that. Classless.

Now I'm no Mary Kay Ash, but karma is still a beast, and she is out of business.

Mary Kay Ash, on the other hand, purchased 22,000 Cadillacs and counting. 

 In general, it's just better to be nice to people and not assume you know something about them. Let their stories surprise and delight you, and the world will be a little kinder to you. Perhaps, the world will give you a commission on 22,000 cars. That's how karma works, my friends.

In honor of this revelation today about Mary Kay, I thought I would bring you a little pink.

In my presentation at Convention, I talked about ways to make your sentiment stamps the star of the show. One thing I like to do is create backgrounds for them on one layer cards, and so I came up with a fun sponge dauber floral background, inspired by Donna Mikasa, an AMAZING artist, who made flowers like this with alcohol markers.

And I promised my sweet friend Linda Ostby that I would do a tutorial, so here's a video showing you this simple AWESOME technique!

I hope you try this! And I hope you try different colors - it's so fun.

And in the meantime, remember - the next person you meet may be your Mary Kay Ash! Be kind!

Loveyameanitbye.

Say It Ain't So!

Today marks the final day of challenges for Dare To Get Dirty 2014 at Splitcoast.

(Insert wailing and gnashing of teeth).

The challenges are flat-out amazing, as usual and I'm still having fun catching up. If you're playing along, you have all weekend to finish up - the deadline isn't until Monday night.

I hosted the very last challenge and holy cow are your cards for it beautiful already!! I can't reveal the challenge here, but you can head over to the site to see how you can see the details and play along!

Now today is ALSO Mix-Ability Friday, with Anna Wight as our hostess, and I combined her sparkly watercolor instructions with my DTGD challenge and I just LOVE the result!

First, I colored the flower from Bloom With Hope with my Viarco ArtGraf water soluble graphite, which has a beautiful shimmer. I love this stuff. I have a severe psychological aversion to regular graphite (non-colored) pencils - they completely freak me out, so this stuff is awesome, because I get that gorgeous grey tone and shimmer without touching an awful pencil. :) I added some clear Wink of Stella for some additional sparkle.

 Of course, photographing it straight on steals all the sparkle, but here you can see the center, which I did a fun trick on. I used the end of my scoring stylus to pick up black acrylic paint and make little dots in the center of my flower. Fun & easy. 

Viarco ArtGraf Graphite [ BLIC ] ArtGraf Viarco Pigmented Tailor Chalk... [ BLIC ] ArtGraf Viarco Pigmented Tailor Chalk... [ BLIC ] ArtGraf Viarco Pigmented Tailor Chalk... [ BLIC ]

What are you up to this weekend? I'll be plotting my Unite & Excite event - SQUEE! and prepping for my Christmas Stamp-A-Stack - are you coming?

Don't forget, I'm doing my Unwind Retreat, Austin edition - at the end of the month as well. Space is limited, so this one is first come first served.

Loveyameanitbye.

Bring Your Own Sunshine

I remember when I was little, my dad used to say "you make your own luck."

It really is true, and the way I knew it was true, was of course, not because my dad told me - we all know your parents are never right - but because I had Eeyore as an example.

(There isn't much you need to know about the world that can't be gleaned from Winnie the Pooh, you know.)

Eeyore EXPECTED bad things to happen to him, and so they did. His expectation was a welcome mat. Also, if you're expecting bad things, everything can be interpreted to fit your expectation, if you're really determined.

Of course, the opposite is true too - if you're expecting good things, everything can be interpreted as a good thing, if you're determined.

I was re-reading this book (I think I need to read it about 10 more times) - Manage Your Day To Day - and the part that really stands out to me is the section on serendipity. Specifically, putting down your phone when you're in public and letting serendipitous things happen. Being open to them. Not being Eeyore.

And then, like magic, this article showed up in my social media feed. Here's an excerpt:

‘Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.'

‘As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. Lucky people, on the other hand, are more relaxed and open, which means they see what is there.’ 

So how can you be more open to serendipity? 

Wiseman has a few tips. Be outgoing — the more people you are in touch with, the more chance encounters you are likely to have. 

Be prepared to deviate from plans. Unlucky people hate to break their routine. Don’t be afraid of failure. Serendipity smiles on people who try new things, instead of worrying about what could go wrong. 

Research is also looking into whether our increased reliance on technology is reducing serendipitous opportunities. Technology is making our lives more efficient, but it’s also making our world narrower, which is the enemy of serendipity. 

I love that there was a whole study on it.

As if I needed more than Eeyore, but still. It's nice to have backup.

Now I'm not saying that if your tail comes off and someone sticks it back on with a nail that you're not going to have a bad day - I'm just saying - more Tigger, less Eeyore is a recipe for good luck! :)

All of these random thoughts because of my new stamp - Ray of Sunshine. :) I LOVE this sentiment. I made this card for Lynn's Dare to Get Dirty challenge this week and I just couldn't wait to share it.

I used the new What's Up punch to punch out a bunch of arrows. I stuck them down to watercolor paper with Hermafix and then spritzed the paper with Tangerine Tango and Daffodil Delight ink mixed with rubbing alcohol. I stamped the sunburst from Kinda Eclectic on the card base with Daffodil Delight before I added the panel.

Here are the rest of the images in those sets:

So there you go, sparkly people! Bring your own sunshine! :)

Loveyameanitbye.