Voiceover Takeover by Paul Csomo + Indoor Garden Obsession

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Hey guys!

I'm back with the second voiceover takeover by my friend Paul Csomo - the co-host of the Varmints Podcast. 

In this episode, Paul tries to figure out what I'm doing with all those rectangles and what exactly Distress Oxides do! For a reminder, he's puzzling through this card in the original video. 

It's so funny to hear someone who isn't a crafter try to figure out what we are doing! I thought maybe you could use a laugh today - so enjoy! Come back after for a gardening tip and the recipe I promised the other day.

We've been talking a lot about my indoor garden on my daily lives in my class group. I am obsessed with this thing. I'm on day 11 and all my lettuces and tomatoes are a few inches tall. My mom has this one, after trying several other brands, and I can see why she likes this one the best. The design is so simple and sleek. It has built in lights and it waters itself from a reservoir. I have the 9 slot one, and I think my mom has the 9 slot as well as one of the 3 slot ones. So nice to always have lettuce and tomatoes without the romaine fear we all had for a while. I bought mine in early March - and they definitely have increased demand right now, but they are constantly updating the site, so I was able to get the plants I wanted with no problem. Here's what it looks like - not much bigger than the full sized Gemini.

Here are my sprouts! So fun! Tip - plug it in for the first time first thing in the morning, because the light is on for 16 hours, so that way it won't be on at night.

Now I promised you a recipe the other day and then didn't give it to you! Shame on me!

Before the pandemic - like JUST before we started sheltering in place, I had made preserved lemons out of some Meyer lemons grown by a relative. I had all these ambitious cooking plans early in the spring.

I was finally this month able to get a rotisserie chicken, so I made this incredible chicken soup with the preserved lemons. I found it on this website - Soup Addict - which really has some phenomenal recipes. If the first recipe I try from a site I randomly found via search, it's usually a keeper. Her seasoning is spot on and it's such a delicious soup. My tweaks to the recipe are here, along with how I preserved the lemons. Five stars from me. I used the Ninja bullet to make the lemon sauce, and I have rosemary in the yard - I do think it needs to be fresh rosemary. You can find the author on Instagram here as well. Her account is beautiful. I love soup.

Hope you have a fun weekend planned. 

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The Science Behind Lost Hubcaps

I've had a lot of cars in my years on the planet earth.

My first car - or the first car my dad loaned me - was a 1976 Buick Century. Rust colored. My expression of my opinion about the appearance of this car was the two fuzzy dice I bought to hang from the rear view mirror. I will say - that hulking beast did set my standards for how a car should ride. Driving a Buick is as close to riding a magic carpet as you'll ever get.

Then there was the 1968 Mint Macaron colored Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. (Yes, even older than the first car). This car was purchased from a dear friend of my mom's mother, from whom I also bought a beautiful four-poster Biggs Company mahogany canopy bed, which still graces my guest room. This was the car that taught me how to jump out at a stop sign, pop the hood, stick a ball point pen in the carburetor flap, start the car, not worry about the flames that shot out, hop back in and drive until it stalled again. Self-reliance is important. At least with these good old American cars you COULD be self reliant and get them running again. Sort of. Someone put a pipe bomb under this car, having mistaken it for someone else's car on our street, and all that happened was the tire had to be replaced. They just don't build them like they used to.

Then I moved on to the 1978 Suburban. Still my favorite car of all time.

Then a Mazda pickup truck, where I learned about Japanese reliability - that thing was amazing. Someone propped it up on blocks at my first apartment complex in Austin and stole all four wheels.

Then after I got married we bought a pickup in 1992 - just a plain, white work truck that ran forever and was SO cheap. Then my first ME car I ever bought was a 1994 Firebird - red. The first of the new body style. I loved that car. Then we had two more pickups, a Yukon, a used BMW (the worst purchase I've ever made and the worst made cars on the planet. If I could have blown that one up myself, I would have.)

All that to say I'm on my 11th car. And not once, in all these decades, all these brands, being rear ended EIGHT TIMES in Austin (city of the world's worst drivers), running over various foreign objects, driving 80 billion miles across the state for work and to Santa Fe for fun - not ONCE have we ever lost a hubcap.

However, I see people with missing hubcaps all the time. And I wonder - what did they DO? How could this be statistically possible that no one I know has ever had a hubcap go missing? Do we have something in common? I don't think anyone in my extended family has ever been missing a hubcap either - so now we are up into the THOUSANDS of vehicles and hundreds of thousands - maybe millions of miles traveled.

I'd love to hear your theories. I wonder this every time I see a sad hubcap on the side of the road, or see someone with 1 or more missing. I just don't get it. I wish the X-files would have addressed this.

I'm spending this Memorial Day weekend listening to tornado sirens and playing with the new host sets. The Floral Wings multi-step stamp was calling to me last night after we were told to take cover in an interior room, so I thought I may as well go out doing something I enjoy.

This new paper makes me SQUEE! LOOK at that writing back there! It's part of the new Neutrals Patterns pack - and it not only comes in all the neutrals, but in SILVER AND GOLD! 4 sheets in each color, two sheets each of two double sided designs. Seriously awesome. Available June 2 if you want to hop in on my open house. (Use hostess code EDU9X7MK at checkout to be included in door prize drawings, no matter where you are!)

Fun, clean images.

This was SO quick too  - it's a 3.5 minute card, which I detail in the video, along with my easy trick for getting the shadow on the vase. Enjoy!

In other news, we had my team video call today, and I have to say - one of my team members just switched to a MacBook and holy cow - we can see her AND her cards now! Before, she would show us a card and it was just like 8 giant, fuzzy pixels. So if you want a good video chatting device, Mac is definitely the way to go. All of us chatting on a PC don't look nearly as good!

Today we've gone about 6 hours with no rain. It won't last, but it sure was a nice break.

Here's a photo shot in Terlingua yesterday from the porch of the Perry Mansion. This, my friends, is what it's like to go through a storm in Texas.

Photo by Gabriel Campos, via Traces of Texas

Stay dry my friends!

Loveyameanitbye.

Happy Birthday, You Old Elephant!!

Not you, of course.

I'd never call you an old elephant.

Unless you made me mad, and then I might.

Either way, I'd make you an awesome birthday card.

Today's Mix-Ability challenge on Splitcoast is to splatter. So I thought I'd use a cute Polaroid™technique I saw on Pinterest to create a little old timey circus themed Polaroid and splatter it with my Color Spritzer Tool.

 

I did a quick video on this card, which you can see here if you don't see a player below. If you want to play along with the challenge, use keyword MIX7 when uploading to Splitcoast.

When you're done - check out a few little springy sights from my yard.

This is the most beautiful two week period of the year. I plan to spend most of it outside.

Loveyameanitbye.

A Terrible Beauty is Born...

So we have this super duper gardening radio show here. I don't consider myself a gardener even in the loosest sense of the word, but I LOVE this show. I learn so much and I try to be out running around in the car when it's on on Saturday mornings.

Yesterday, I sat in the car in the parking lot at Staples, delaying my 75% off envelopes coupon purchase I was so excited about to listen to a story about a horrible bug.

It's called a sparrow wasp.

You know you hate it.

It's called a sparrow wasp because it's the SIZE OF A SPARROW.

Its mission in life is to destroy Japanese beehives, killing the bees and stealing their honey and their babies to feed to ITS babies. Awful.

However, listen to THIS.

The bees know that this hellacious beastie sends a scout before the other beasties come destroy their hives. When they sniff the little sparrow wasp pheromone, they run out to the door of their hive and wait for it to come in.

When it comes in, about 500 little teeny honey bees surround it and flap their wings. A bee wing flap creates so much energy that they heat the wasp up to 116 degrees and generate just enough carbon dioxide that the combination is EXACTLY what it takes to kill that little you know what. Can you bee-lieve that??? Real life David and Goliath! That might not be what Yeats had in mind, but it is definitely a terrible beauty!


Isn't nature incredible?? I was cheering for the little bees at the end of the story.

Go bees!!

I felt very nature-y after that so I decided to play with my fun little Nesting set from The Cat's Pajamas.

I played around with the nest in a few different colors and then settled on clear embossing it and rubbing Crumb Cake ink all over it for a resist.

The bird is stamped in Poppy Parade, and the eggs are that delicious Pool Party. I went with dots all over, with Crumb Cake prints pack paper and polka dotted Real Red ribbon.

Don't forget to stay tuned here next week for live convention coverage, prizes, contests, cookies & kittens! :)

Hope you're having an un-bee-lievable weekend!

This Post is NOT About a Congressman in (or out of) his Underpants!

Surely that's a relief to all of you!!

It's actually about some more sneak peeks - again, not of anyone in their undies. Perhaps our elected representatives should take up stamping, so that they have an awareness of what is appropriate to share on the internet!!

Like, for example, patriotic cards! I saw the Patriotic Linky Party on Craft Test Dummies and I just had to bust out the pennants for some red, white and blue fun.

Stamps: Fabulous Phrases, Pennant Parade (upcoming) Paper: Just add Cake (upcoming) 

Ink: Poppy Parade, Basic Black, Pacific Point Blue, Whisper White

Accessories: Petite Pennants Builder Punch (upcoming), Stars #2 die, Itty Bitty Shapes Punch Pack, Cherry Cobbler Twine, 1/16" Circle Punch, Corner Rounder, bling, Perfect Polka Dots Embossing Folder

Now I did have some unclean thoughts (not related to a Congressman) while I was blinging my stars, but I really like them so I soldiered on. To me, they look like cupcakes with those silver sprinkles.
Mmm... sprinkles.

I stamped the first "celebrate" in black, and then stamped it in red and blue, stamping off twice moving away from the center. I love that font. I stamped the pennants in white craft ink before punching them out.

When I went outside to photog my card, the sprinklers had just finished costing me $200 and my rosebush looked beautiful!

How's that for a beautiful start to a Wednesday?



Hope it's all coming up roses for you this week!

Oh PS - I'm teaching a bleach techniques class at Scrapology tomorrow evening - contact them if you'd like to join us!