The Search Is On

This flying business takes a lot of practice.  I hope I don't get stuck here.  I think I'll try again.

Ahhh.  That's better.  I can see a lot from here.

Oh yeah!  Looks like a good place to land over there.  I might be able to get a little bath in before the parade.

Well, I guess I was wrong about that.  This is bone dry.  Let me circle back a little.

Oooh, this is wet, but it looks like a lot of yucky stuff in there too.  Maybe I'll just check out more of the sights like that roof over there.

This actually looks like a pretty neat place.  You know I don't mean clean neat.  After all, I am a pig you know.  Let me see if there's anything over there to eat.

I'm not really in the mood for these greens right now.  I'd much rather find some friends.

Hey, you girls are sure pretty and I'd love to play with you, but I was hoping to find some of my pig friends around here.  I heard there was going to be a pig parade tomorrow and I didn't want to miss it.

Stay tuned.

Teapot Tuesday 191

Oui, oui.  We are going to France for the tea party this week.  Or at least we're pretending to go to France where we might see something like this......  

We have a guest hostess this week, Philsmom.  You can visit her gallery by clicking here.  She has written a lovely poem for the challenge this week and asked us to bring things that are French.  

The card that I came up with is a conglomeration of images that came from sets that had French images or names, like Carte Postale (retired) and Artistic Etchings.  I used the retiform technique.

My color choices for this are Marina Mist, Wisteria Wonder and Rich Razzleberry.  I sponged and stamped on a piece of Very Vanilla cs and then layered onto Rich Razzleberry and a Wisteria card base.  

The lace was added by punching a couple of small holes and taking a stitch at the corners of that center shape.  I just taped down the ends of the thread on the back.  

I should be visiting the gallery and commenting but I have had a very trying day week and I'm going to get some rest.  Hope you will check it out.  

Teapot Tuesday 190

As Cindy says, there is no limit to the number of teapots out there.  Just look at this one.  A black, white, and red beauty.  Just take a gander at that butterfly.  How sweet. 

Bring a butterfly she said, so I did.  I used one of my new Memory Box dies after I made a mess creating that background.  And let me say, it, or rather I was a mess.   I know that I did not do this technique as it was meant to be done, but I found a piece of transparency to do the fold, smash routine and in the process made a  glorified mess of myself.  

Note to self:  When working with ink refills, try very hard not to sneeze.  A sneeze will cause the ink to disperse where you don't want it, and further, where you don't want it may not just be on the project.  It could be your face.  And you might not find out about it until your color-blind husband notices it.  Oh yes, red ink under the chin and on the cheek.  Not too pretty!

But, I think it made a pretty background.  What do you think?

I stamped the flower from Creative Elements in black Stazon and then added the butterfly and the black stripes. Gave it a layer of black on a Pretty in Pink card base.

See how dimensional the butterfly is.

Join me as I check out the teapot gallery this week.  

Pig Updates

First I want to share a card that I received from my blogging friend Dana in Florida.

She sent me this "just because".  And believe it or not, she drew this image from something she saw.

She is quite a talented artist.  Inside the card were all these additional images - some colored and some not.

Looks like I've got the makings for some pretty piggy cards!  

Speaking of pigs, back to the update.  

I have been working on my pig.  It has been a bit of a process as I have something pictured in my head and now the chore is to be able to create it in real life.  I spent part of today working with a new tool as part of the process.  And my pig has gone through several different "paintings".  I started with a couple of coats of gesso and then decided to add color.  The initial color was too dark so another coat was tried mixed with some gesso.  Well, that too was too dark, so yet another coat was slopped on.  It's not quite what I had pictured at this point, but it's getting there.

Also, I have heard (and seen) that three of the pigs are completed!  And beautifully I might add!  We shall see them all in a little less that two weeks and I am so looking forward to that.  

Happy St. Patrick's Day

This was an asparagus fern that we saw at the flower show last week.  The different shades of green were so gorgeous.  And all that texture just added to the wow factor.  I'm not sure you can see the text I added to the picture though.

After the show I like to stop into the Reading Terminal Market across the street from the convention center, mainly to pick up some delicious mint candies they have in the shape of shamrocks.  They just melt in your mouth.  Well, guess what?  They don't have them anymore!  I was so terribly disappointed not only not to have the mints but to have fought the crowd at lunchtime to walk all the way to the back of the building were the stand is with my hip screaming at me the whole way.  So I tried to find a recipe to create something similar and came up with these Cream Cheese mints. 

The recipe is very easy and doesn't involve any cooking and though they were not exactly what I was looking for, they were tasty.  I did not have a mold to make the shamrock shape so I attempted to create my own by rolling the candy paste into three little balls and a stem.  Unfortunately, when they became too warm, they fell apart.  You can find the recipe I used with this link.

My treat today was a shamrock shaped hot pretzel and a shamrock shake from McDonald's.  I'm afraid the points value for these two things alone puts me over my limit for the entire week but I was looking forward to a little treat.  

Actually, a parent came in to school yesterday afternoon and brought me some Irish soda bread that she made from her grandmother's recipe which she said was authentic because she made it in a cast iron pan just like her grandmother did.  It was full of raisins and currants and was delicious.  (More points overage I'm afraid!)   That was a special treat also.

Triple Play - Teapot Tuesday 189, Jingle Belles - JB12:06a - Neutral Noel, and a Birthday

The Queen of Hearts is ruling over the tea party this week.  I think she might have dismantled Princess Beatrice's fascinator.  

Well, I happened to have an extra-large crown left over from last week's party that didn't fit the queen cat, but it certainly fit the Queen of Hearts.

The heart is a Memory Box die cut that I cut out of watercolor paper and used my aquapainter and ink to color.  (The red and green is the die.)   I decided to play around with the embossing of the background and I didn't want any of it under the heart die cut so it would stand out, so I turned the die over and traced the edges to make a heart pattern the size of the die.  Then I cut two card size pieces of lightweight cardboard from a discarded cake mix box and glued them together.  I carefully centered the heart pattern in the center and then traced it and cut it out.  This made it possible to emboss only the area surrounding the heart.  

The first time I tried this I did not use any ink on the embossing folder and while it didn't look bad, it still didn't appear to have enough contrast, so I added ink with a dauber to the area that would be embossed.  You can do this by holding the pattern under the folder so you can see the area that doesn't get the ink.  Making the sandwich of paper, folder, and plate was a little tricky but I got it done.  

In fact, I liked the way that this came out so much that I decided to used the same background - without the heart however - for my first Jingle Belles card this week.  Looks as though I got a little heavy handed with the dauber on this one.

We were to make a neutral Christmas card based on the photo below:

Neutrals for Christmas.  I really like this.  

Truth be told, the card below started out as my Jingle Belle card but I felt the heart was not right for Christmas.  I happen to need a birthday card for a friend who is celebrating one of those monumental birthdays and thought this would work out fine for that.  

I added the pink ribbon and the sentiment in a pink label and put the panel on a pink base.  (Geez, I sure hope she likes pink!)  

Birthday Gnomies

Happy Birthday HWNSNBP.  

Philadelphia Flower Show 2012 - Hawaii

This was the welcoming entrance to the Philadelphia Flower Show at the Convention Center that HWNSNBP and I attended on Wednesday.  The theme is Aloha - Hawaii and depending on your computer, you will either see this with the lovely shade of deep blue that it was or purple.  (My laptop shows me the true color, but when I look at it from my work computer it is purple - bah!)

The ceramic koi below were quite effective swimming through this display.  (But at $80 a piece in the vendor area I just had to pass on them!)

Again with the blue and purple!  The glass cylinders at the base of this display were filled with blue water  and lit from below and the effect was heavenly. 

Got on my knees for this one.

I loved the white anthuriums in the rainbow-hued cylinders on this next display.  I don't recall ever seeing pure white anthuriums before.  They also had a splendid pink one I'll post at another time.

Several of the competition displays involved walls with niches.  They ranged in size and this was one of the entries from the medium niche category.  Those bubbles are suspended as is the curled matter. 

This wall was covered with leaf lettuce.  Talk about sustainable gardening!

Another competition area is for window displays.  This Art Supply Store window caught my eye.  I think they must have had Georgia O'Keefe working there at some point.

It was so hard taking pictures in the low-light inside and though I took about 4 or 5 of this next display, this is the only one that came out half decent.  It looked just like a lava pit - or what I would imagine a lava pit would look like as I haven't had the real experience.  It was a combination of red plant matter with lighting behind it against the black rock border - stunning.

This is only a portion of the pictures that I took, but we were very lucky to have been able to get in before the crowds came giving me the ability to take pictures without people in them.  

Thanks to my son for the Christmas present of the tickets and a school friend for the early-morning passes.  It was a lovely time.

Teapot Tuesday 188

She sure is Purrfect!  I don't know about that green striped tail though!  Ha!  This week we needed cats. Cats and crowns or cats in crowns.  Queenly cats.  Cats that are going to a lovely lady by the name of Virginia who reads a lot, especially about Queen Elizabeth (although I don't know which one exactly), and who is currently recuperating from a nasty fall.  

This cat was inspired by another punch art cat I saw recently.  Hers is a little bit country and mine is a little bit rock-n-royal.  She's got the widow's peak and neck ruffle of Elizabeth I and the look of the current queen.  She's got her crown courtesy of Tiny Tags and the placard, which I intended to look like a scroll, says it all.  

Virginia's favorite colors are dark blue and burgundy so I tried to get that in also.  The embossed panel was made by smearing the embossing folder with Marina Mist ink before I embossed the pattern thus having the recessed areas a little darker.  

I was trying to keep myself to a limited amount of time creating this card.  But sometimes creativity just needs more time.  I had a country cat all ready to go and then I took another look at the inspiration teapot and I thought that I could make the cat more like the teapot so I started from scratch again.  I even squeezed some time in the stamp room before work today but it just wasn't enough to get it done.  But, I have to say that it felt good doing a teapot challenge again.  I've missed quite a few of them lately and that makes me sad.   

Well, I don't think I'll get to the gallery tonight, but you can go on ahead of me and take a look by clicking here.  I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Jingle Belles - JB12:05a & b Stuck on You

For this Jingle Belle challenge we were supposed to use stickers or brads in our creation.  I have been trying, trying, and trying to clean out my craft room, aka the stamp cave, aka the stamp castle, aka the stamp..... oh, well, you get it.  Anyway, the process will be tedious at best due to the multitude of "stuff" that has accumulated.  But................lucky me to find a package of cute Mary Englebreit Santa stickers that fit perfectly for the challenge this go around. 

This card is based on a layout I saw at Butternutsage a few days ago.  I thought the three squares would be perfect to highlight the three different Santa stickers.  They are mounted on some Real Red cs that I used the Postage Stamp punch on.  The background is embossed and I added a little flag (I think they are technically called guidons) for the sentiment.  The ribbon and three little pearls were the final accents.

Now these pictures below are my second offering for this challenge (check this link for more pretty samples), although the color is not what you might be seeing.  The dark color is Early Espresso which IRL is not really this dark.  But, you will see that I used some tiny little foam stickers that I also found when cleaning.  The body of the deer is my pinky fingerprint which looks like I am really in need of some lotion to get rid of those cracks instead of whorls!  The legs and tail were just drawn on with marker. 

I added "Thank You" to these because I am always in need of Christmas thank you's as I work in a school office and even the child who brings me a bag of candy deserves a thank you. 

So I went crazy (well, not really crazy, just taking advantage of a good prompt and an easy card) and made two of these to stash away.

Really, take my word for it that they are much prettier IRL!

So now I'll be checking out the gallery and you can join me by clicking here.

Sunday Zentangle 3-4-12

Happy (Flying) Pig Day

The whole squadron is present and accounted for.  Well, not really all present.  There's more in the wings awaiting their flight of the day. 

I found this cute pig die and face stamp from Peachy Keen.  The die part is actually the head, arms, hooves, and a bit of the torso.  The little dress is made from two of the larger petals from the petal punch.  The legs are the small oval punch and the wings are made from the scalloped oval and trimmed.

On the back I made a little loop using the word window punch and added some gold cording as a hanger.  Then I printed out the little poem and punched it out with a 1 3/4" circle punch. 

My friend Sabrina sent me the coolest stamp with flying pigs.  We both couldn't believe that I didn't already have it. 

I picked up this pre-printed cardboard picture frame and gently pulled off the saying they had on it so that I could add my own along with the stamped image in place of a picture.

Now I am going to confess that the background was not what I had originally planned, however, somehow I got ink on my hand and when I was watercoloring the image I left little dots where I didn't want them.  So, I just kept adding more.  I've got this on my list of things to get done for my pig ladies next year!

Here are some more additions to my flying pig collection.  An ornament from another special friend.  I love that they share what they find!

This is a little mould that I purchased through Etsy with the intention of making some paper clay ornaments/pins.   Another project for the future.

This decal from another Etsian for my car window (don't tell HWNSNBP!).

And then there's the pajama bottoms that I found while on a shopping expedition with a friend.  Do you think I could get away with wearing these to physical therapy today?  Hmmmm, maybe not.

In any case, my wish to everyone today, although it's late in the day - "The Sky's The Limit"!   Press on and follow those dreams.

Please check these links for more information on why I celebrate National Pig day:

Celebrating Pig Day 2011

National Pig Day 2010  (this has links to all my previous Pig Day posts)

And be on the lookout this month for progress in the Pigs on Parade event I've got going.  I hope to be posting pictures of my progress decorating my pig.