A Paper Pumpkin Thing Blog Hop

Happy Monday!

I'm just back from working at a show in Boston this past weekend, and while I was there, my friend Pam asked me if I wanted to be part of a blog hop today featuring the Paper Pumpkin Kit for April, designed by Sara Douglass.

I actually had my kits with me on that trip - I love doing those in hotels to wind down from crazy days at shows - it is fun and relaxing to just CRAFT, without having to design anything, and also to come home from a trip with some cards I can mail.

This kit was really fun and different. It came in a super sassy black and white box, with accents of our new ink color - Lemon Lime Twist - that will be in the catalog in June. It was so punchy and high contrast and all the things I love. There was also a little watercolor and a lot of black and white - seriously - all my favorite things. Well - minus cats. Not sure if Sara is a cat person, despite the numerous cats I've photoshopped onto her during her #catvention presentations.

But I wanted to do something using the AMAZING envelopes that came in the kit. I love it when they give us fun envies, which is happening more and more often in these kits. This month takes the cake. Black and white and splattered with a fun striped inside.

I wanted to highlight Sara's adorable color choice with a card that popped into my head as soon as I saw the sneak peek of the box.

It just cried out for a little T-rex. :)

InLinkz.com

Isn't he the cutest??

I did a couple fun tricks to make this card.

First - I cut down the envelope to 4" x 5.25" so I could fit it on a card front, and put glue on the two open sides to seal it closed. Then, I lined up the "wild about you" sentiment in my MISTI until the edge of the white section went between the I and the L.

I stamped the sentiment first in black ink - so half the image shows in the white part - the other half doesn't show on the black envelope. I made sure the ink on the black side was dry, and then used my embossing buddy to be sure it wouldn't pick up stray embossing powder.

I used Post-It masking tape to mask the right side of the white rectangle which would normally be for your address, where the black part of my sentiment was. Then I re-inked the stamp in white ink, and embossed with white embossing to have the second half of the sentiment pop in white.

The T-Rex and the sentiment are from a set that will be in the new catalog called Pieces & Patterns - not available until June 1. It's completely adorable and perfect for this kit! (If you do not already have a demonstrator and would like a catalog when it comes out - fill out my catalog request form.)

To color the T-Rex, I just scribbled the blue and yellow pencils on top of each other on a scrap of watercolor paper, picked some up with a wet Aquapainter, and painted him. This is an easy way to get quick, blended color. Since I was fussy cutting him, I didn't even have to stay in the lines.

Here's what the card kit looks like without a T-Rex. So fun. It came with four mini watercolor pencils and a little paintbrush as a gift.



I really hope we have more Sara-inspired card kits - this one was certainly a home run.

Paper Pumpkin is a monthly kit, featuring both cards and some 3D items - you can pre-pay for a kit, or get a subscription - just note that you have to be subscribed by the 10th of the month to get that month's kit. Each kit comes with paper, adhesive, stamps, ink and accessories - and your first kit comes with a clear block. It's $19.95 per month/kit - with free shipping.

Once the kit has shipped, refills become available while supplies last which contain all of that month's consumables (no stamp set or ink will be included).

So if you want to see some incredibly creative projects that are really outside of the Paper Pumpkin box, visit these lovely ladies to see what they've done with it.

Andrea Tracy-Tucker 

Pam Staples  

Dena Rekow  

Melissa Davies  

Kim Smith  

Kimberley Morris  

Sara Levin  

Cindy Schuster  

Maria Willis  

Jennifer Hill  

Rick Adkins  

Lori Mueller  

Carolynn Sander  

Cathy Caines  

Monika Davis  

Sue Plote  

Megan Thompson  

Tina Riddle  

Cindee Wilkinson  

Rachel Tessman  

Lydia Fiedler  

We are giving away a very special prize to one visitor today - one of your very own Sara Thing Paper Pumpkin kits! If you leave a comment on all these designers' blogs, you will be entered to win this kit and put your own T-Rex on it :). Drawing closes on Saturday, April 29th at 9 PM EST. The winner will be announced on Monday, May 1, 2017.

The next blog on the hop is Andrea's! Hop on over!

Thanks for stopping by today. 

loveyameanitbye.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

2016 was the fastest year EVER - I truly can't believe it's Christmas already. I guess that means it was a fun, full year.

This was the first year in a long time that I wasn't too frazzled to "do" Christmas and Thanksgiving. This year, I enjoyed the real holiday season without feeling rushed or behind on life. I think Falliday Fest at Splitcoast really helped me enjoy the season in its own time. I made tons more holiday themed cards too, which I never get to do. It just has been a great fall and winter. The tree is up, the outside lights are twinkling. I hope I do it right next year too because this has been very fun.

Now, as is my custom on this day, I will show you my Christmas card. This year I made 200 of them, and I really enjoyed every one.

To start with, I created large backgrounds on watercolor paper with fluid acrylic paint, I did this in a marathon crafting session at my sister's house one day.

I really like to do backgrounds and cut them down for my cards. It ties them all together, but still each one is unique. Then I pick a size so that I 'm not wasting any of the background, and cut them into small, uniform panels for the cards.

Then, when I saw the November Paper Pumpkin kit - I knew how to finish them! I ordered enough refills to get 200 of the little tree die cuts, and I used the rest of the kits for my customer thank you cards for the year. So it was an incredible value and perfectly timed.

Over Thanksgiving and the weeks that followed, I assembled them during TV time after dinner - it was strange to watch Bates Motel while making holiday cards, but I love that creepy show. Right now we are also watching The Crown, of course Longmire, and Timeless and the Returned.

The fun part for me is that each card is different, so I oohed and aahed my way through the stacks of them during assembly. I love the way they turned out.

We will be doing this fluid acrylic technique at my June retreat so I can't spill the beans on exactly HOW I made them, but what I will tell you is that I used the same three colors the same way every time, and every one is completely different. (PS - I will open public registration for the retreat at the end of January, after the alumni registration closes.)

My favorites were the brights, like this one. The sentiment is from the Paper Pumpkin kit as well. Inside I stamped the "Merry Everything Happy Always" from Suite Seasons.

links to all supplies used

InLinkz.com

Some came out very muted and beautiful.

On some, some colors became more dominant.

This is just a tiny sample of how unique they all were. Since it's acrylic paint, the watercolor paper became very thick, so it's a pretty sturdy card.

Because of the size of the watercolor paper I used (link above in supplies), I was also left with little strips from each one, so I used those to make my team thank you cards for the year so I got nearly a hundred more from using up those leftovers. In the end, there was very little waste - and when the scraps are this pretty that's a good thing - and the cards were super economical, even though the paint was pretty expensive.

I cannot begin to tell you how much fun this was, and how much I enjoy sending out a little piece of happy mail every year.

To finish them off, I put them all in Audrey Blue envelopes, with round address stickers, and sealed with a piece of glitter washi tape. All that is linked above - and check out the labels - they are SO much cheaper than Avery, and they use the standard Avery templates built into Microsoft Word, or whatever label program you use.

In case you missed it, we did a Crafty Chat on holiday crafting and holiday cards and you can see that here.

Now it wouldn't be Christmas without gifts, right? Taheera Atchia was kind enough to include me in her fun Advent Calendar Extravaganza hop that has been going on all month - and my day is today!

Each day (and you can go back through the other 24 days for a chance to win) there's a designated sponsor, and today's sponsor is My Sweet Petunia - YAY!! So she will be providing today's prize which is winner's choice of a mini or an original MISTI.

This is especially awesome because Christmas cards is really where the MISTI saves me. Prior to this tool - I threw away between 25 and 30 percent of my Christmas card attempts because of stamping issues - uneven inking, crooked sentiments, etc. Now I can not only stamp them quickly, but totally accurately. It has eliminated the waste I used to have - incredibly valuable.

Here's how you can win - leave a comment here on this post telling me your favorite thing about this time of year, and also a comment at Taheera's blog for a chance to win the My Sweet Petunia prize. Then, to win the other prizes, leave a comment on each blogger's post and also on Taheera's to win the previous prizes. How fun is that? There's a ton of amazing sponsor goodies - it's a really spectacular series of giveaways. and you have until 23:59 EST on December 31st to enter for all of them. Check back on Taheera's blog on January 1 for winner info!

I hope your holiday season has been fun, full of cookies, and restful. I am off work for the next week so I'm hoping to be back with some fun cards for you after the break!

Merry Christmas!

Spoiler Alert - You Don't Need a Crockpot!

I realize, that once again, I'm broaching a topic that might get me killed like Karen Silkwood.

But the truth must be told, and it's my lot in life to tell it.

Despite what Pinterest says, you don't need a crockpot.

(Try to hold yourself together. I'll wait.)

My poor friend Vicki - who owns like 20 crockpots and has amazing crockpot parties, is having a heart attack right now. However, at her parties, she actually cooks like 12 different kinds of chili, each in their own crockpot. So Veee has a permanent, transferable lifetime crockpot exception to what I'm about to tell you.

I have a very tiny kitchen with the smallest amount of cabinets humanly possible. About 50% of the cabinet space is unreachable, which is a rant I'll indulge myself in later.

It's actually one of the reasons I like my kitchen - because it's open to the breakfast area and living room which is fun and makes it the brightest space in the house. And thankfully, I'm very anti-appliance so that helps.

But for a long time, I had a very nice crockpot. It was a huge one - I raved about it here - where I also shared my amazing pea soup recipe.

I followed all the Pinterest crockpot boards, the Crockin' Girls on Facebook, and regarded my crockpot as the magical shrine the internet told me it was.

Until I realized that that particular emperor has no clothes.

A crockpot is a large baking dish to which heat is applied.

That is all. There are no little fairies that make it cook your food more perfectly than the oven does. It's a baking dish that gets warm. People have been getting baking dishes warm for a long time.

So I tested all my favorite crockpot recipes in a baking dish in the oven to test my theory. For the record, the temperatures I use are 200 for low, 300 for high. That's it. Covered baking dish.

Here are the recipes I used, and each came out perfectly. One of these we eat nearly weekly - the Thai chicken.

Split Pea Soup
Mac and Geez
Whole Chicken
Thai Peanut Chicken
Crockpot shredded chicken

I have a start/stop timer on my oven so I can set it and forget it like the crockpot, and don't even start with me about the oven being more of a fire hazard than a crockpot. Everything that has power to it is a fire hazard. Your compost pile is a fire hazard. Let's not worry so much.

So I've reclaimed about 6 square feet of space in my cabinet with this revelation after selling my crockpot on Facebook.

I do still have my American-made 360 Cookware vapor seal cooker though. This little thing is amazing for smaller sides or prep work. It's so hard to find American made cookware, and so I was thrilled to find this after emptying my kitchen of all Chinese products after Spotty died. You can use it on their base or directly on the stove, so it's a multi-tasker.

But speaking of machines, I DO have a magic machine to tell you about.

This week at Splitcoast we had a Product Focus on Epson's scrapbooking printers. Lori got to play with the printer and told me to pick something to print on "anything I wanted." Now a few years ago I had taken a class with Golden where we ran ALL SORTS of things through Epson inkjet printers - fabric, canvas, even big things with sticks and other rough textures using Golden digital grounds. So I knew they could do amazing things. But one thing I'd never tried is cold press watercolor paper. So I sent her a free printable floral and dared her to print it in a light grey on cold press watercolor paper and send it to me to paint.

It worked like a charm! Up and down over all the texture, every section of the image was not only perfectly inked but waterproof.

AND, Lori has a great tip on how to test your printer ink for compatibility with Copics on her blog - I never knew this until this week. So smart.

So I just watercolored most of the image in Winsor & Newton Cotman Payne's Grey and then did one flower in blue and added a greeting from the Greetings Thinlits.

One of the most common questions we get in the forums on Splitcoast is printer ink compatibility with different mediums, so it was very cool to see what all this printer could do.

Now I have some important breaking news for you.

Paper Pumpkin is celebrating both its birthday and the shipment of the MILLIONTH kit! So they are doing a little giveaway - if you are already a Paper Pumpkin subscriber or sign up to be one before April 10th, you will get an EXTRA, exclusive stamp set in the April kit! I can't wait to see what it is! You can buy a pre-paid subscription, or a monthly subscription, which can be paused and re-started. Subscribe with me here and get a little surprise in the mail! :)

And if you want to get your paws on one of Shannon West's #imbringingbirthdaysback stamps, just purchase the ULTIMATE bundle before March 31st, and I'll send you one!

Until the end of March, you'll get $155 worth of whatever you want for $99. You'll also get to attend my team retreat in July, which my celebrity chef is returning for. We are all looking forward to her amazing food! Oh, and the stamping I guess :).

And one last thing - recently I've gotten several orders where the customer chose "No Contact" - which means no information is shared with me at all - I don't get your name, your email address, nothing that allows me to thank you or send you a card. This makes me sad. So please know that I appreciate you and would love to send you a card! Feel free to email me if you were one of these. And in the future, click "Yes" on the second question here to let me thank you with a card :).

 So go forth into your weekend, free of crockpots, reveling in your spacious cabinets and full of stampy joy.

We will have a quiet Easter weekend as I prepare for my Salt Lake retreat and OnStage - are you coming? If so I am looking forward to stamping with you!

Loveyameanitbye.

Rediscovering HoJo

When I was little, during one of our drive-cations, my family made an ill-fated stop at a Howard Johnson's. I've alluded to this story before but never told it, and its time has come.

Most of the really outrageous stories worth retelling in our family revolve around either food or a spectacularly awful hotel. Sometimes, unfortunately, both. This, by the way, is why I'm a bit of a travel princess now, in case you thought that attribute was somehow my fault.

It is not.

The problem begins with my dad's digestive system.

It is made of some unusual material which makes him 100% immune to food-borne illnesses. It should be studied, because I believe an E. Coli. vaccine could be developed that would change life on this planet.

M. Night Shyamalan, could write a dark superhero epic about the man who could not be felled by food.

No matter what dark drive-in we stopped at on our journeys, where both the building and the employees (there never were any other customers of course - they were already long dead) looked like the inside of a Stephen King novel, no matter how old the food, or how dirty the restaurant was, my dad was the only one of us who didn't spend the next three days barfing.

The maddening result of this, of course, was positive reinforcement for him, and so he continued to choose poorly on a regular basis, happy as a little lark, getting the remote control all to himself while everyone else was lying on the floor of a bathroom in a hotel in Arkansas.

So one day, we go to a HoJo. I do not remember what god-forsaken town we were in, which you will soon understand.

HoJo was, back in the day, sort of the McDonald's of road warrior restaurants. You could generally rely on their consistency and kid-friendly menu. They had something called an orange freeze, which my brother and I LOVED - it was an orange sherbet milkshake of sorts. I think it even had a little lime sherbet in it too. It was delightful. They sold taffy too. All the food groups a child needs.

For the most part, we lived through eating their food until this fateful day. On this day, I ordered spaghetti and it was quite decidedly OFF. So I stopped eating it. I got yelled at and told I had to eat it, which should really be against the law, or considered terrorism. I was so miserable and it was so awful that my sister finally took pity on me and tasted it.

All the blood left her face as she informed my parents that there was definitely something wrong with that spaghetti, at which point they of course felt bad for making me shovel it in. We left soon after, and my dad put me up on his shoulders on the walk to the car to try to cheer me up.

I barfed all over his head.

I still to this day will not eat spaghetti with meat in it, and it took me until my late 20s to eat even meat free spaghetti.

I will say, however, that I still love two things about HoJo.

I'd have an orange freeze right now, if that germ-infested franchise rose from its ashes and once again sprang up on America's highways.

And I LOVED the color scheme of their buildings.

Classic late 50's orange and aqua beckoned you from the highway, much like Whataburger did in the same decade.

The 50s loved orange, and I loved the LOOK of this iconic chain. I think visual brands are just better - and they most definitely perfected the visual brand. Der Weinerschnitzel was another one in this category - just genius.

I find myself drawn to this combo a lot - especially when I can find a good, deep, reddish orange - almost a poppy color. All that warmth with some cool aqua is just flat out perfection, and I didn't realize until I was making this card today that it is classic HoJo.

I guess, in the end, the inspiration is worth the spaghetti.

This card is made with some leftovers from this month's My Paper Pumpkin kit, which is ADORABLE.

Heck no I wasn't leaving that there!

I used Delicate surface Frog Tape and covered all those pieces up with two pieces of tape. Then I carefully removed the tape, with all those pieces stuck to it, and put them down onto my beautiful marbled paper.

The tape is so delicate I just easily peeled it back and all those pretty little petals were stuck on my card!

If you don't have Frog Tape yet, you need it.

Then I used the Beautiful You die from Concord & 9th to finish my card off. Love that scripty font.

So now I have three other cards I can make with those leftovers and my beautiful HoJo color scheme of Tangerine Tango and Soft Sky.

I have another idea with this kit I will experiment on and see if something fun comes of it.

I hope you have a fun, crafty weekend ahead. I'm plagued with some chores and other non-stampy things, but hopefully I will grab some crafty time too. Maybe even recreate an orange freeze.

Loveyameanitbye.

The Borrowers

I'm realizing how much all the books I read when I was little influence my daily thoughts.

Today, I spent a lot of time chasing my tail.

In my newly organized studio, all like things are together.

All my watercolor mediums are together

All my photopolymer sets are together.

All my acrylic paints are together.

And all my camera equipment is together.

The camera that I photograph my cards with has a REALLY long battery life. Like MANY months - and I use it a lot.

A few months ago I needed to charge it and I couldn't find the charger. Thankfully, I had another Canon charger so I used that, but it's been bugging me.

So today my battery died while I was photographing my card for today's Mix-Ability challenge. I went through my camera box again - and I couldn't find it. I knew what it looked like - it has those collapsible prongs for the outlet and was very compact.

I suspected The Borrowers. Did you read that book? It was one of my faves - I read it many times. I loved the idea of being tiny and running around in little tiny spaces. Maybe that's why I liked Stuart Little. And Alice in Wonderland. But I digress.

I do not, however, like the idea of The Borrowers stealing my camera charger.

After another search, I googled my camera and its charger - and I, with horror, realized it WAS in my camera box. It just looked nothing like what I had in my head so I kept ignoring it and pawing through the box.

That will teach me to get a camera that only needs charging twice a year. I need to spend more time getting to know my charger.

However, I do think this is how great stories like the Borrowers are born.

Creative people who can't find their chargers just make something up. Like a whole children's book.

Today is the Mix-Ability challenge on Splitcoast. Anna is our host and the challenge is whitewashing. We could leave a lot of white space, or add white with gesso, etc.

I decided to use my Luminance pencils - I always start my images with white and also blend with white, so it was perfect for this challenge.

How fun is that?

I love those beautiful little cups from the July My Paper Pumpkin.

Remember that all you need to do to transform a simple line image is fill it with color! I'll have three cups of color please - thank you!

I did a quick video of the coloring process for you. PS - here's the Smudge Guard Glove info I left out in the video :).




I have three pending registrations for the retreat at which point I believe the house beds will be filled. I will update the retreat page for those needing hotel accommodations, but there's not much time left.

Enjoy the long Labor Day weekend if you are in the US. I plan on doing a whole lot of nothing after my class on Saturday.

Loveyameanitbye.


PS - I'll be back with my class winner this weekend!