Teapot Tuesday 172

Cars, buses, trucks - what little boy doesn't love em'?  Well, if you visit our Teapot challenge thread this week you'll learn of two little boys who do love cars, buses, and trucks and their mother who, unfortunately just passed away only weeks before they celebrate their 6th birthday.  So as teapotters do, we will try to make this birthday a little special for them and send them birthday cards - one for each!

You're not seeing things, these are the same two cards in both pictures, I just rearranged them so it would look like the cars were traveling from one card to another.  Hopefully the boys will have a little fun doing the same.

So join me know as I visit the gallery and see all the other wonderful little boy birthday cards. 

Lighthouse Challenge 2011 - Sunday (10/16)

Day two of the Lighthouse Challenge. 

The lens at the Barnegat Lighthouse Museum.

Barnegat Lighthouse - Old Barney

Sea Girt Lighthouse

Sandy Hook Lighthouse

North Tower of the Twin Lights

Center of the Twin Lights

South Tower of the Twin Lights in Atlantic Highlands

The view of Sandy Hook from the Twin Lights

The NYC skyline

From Branchburg, New Jersey we started Saturday morning on the Delaware with a view of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, traveled and visited all the sites ending the day in Barnegat.  On Sunday, we traveled to Long Beach Island to begin the remainder of the challenge at the Barnegat Lighthouse Museum.  The day ended overlooking the Atlantic with a view of New York City in the distance and with the return to Branchburg, logging approximately 500 miles.

Lighthouse Challenge 2011 - Saturday (10/15)

I thought I'd post these today before we get so removed from October and I totally forget about it.  The Lighthouse Challenge was held the weekend of October 15-16 and it was a lovely two days.  I won't go on about the history - just caption them. 

Tinicum - on the Delaware - first stop of the day.

The moon rolling down the lighthouse.

Finn's Point

The shack on the way to East Point.

The roiling "chocolate" water of the Delaware Bay.

East Point Lighthouse

Sunken anchor outside the Cape May Museum

The rainbow-like prisms of the lens at the museum.

The units of the lens were numbered for shipping for easy reconstruction.

Each section was stamped with the manufacturer's information.

Cape May Lighthouse

Hereford Inlet Lighthouse

Birds congregating on the beach behind the lighthouse.

Butterflies in the garden.

And a napping squirrel - soon to be disturbed!

The murals outside the lifesaving station in Ocean City.

The lifesaving wagon outside the second lifesaving station.

Absecon Lighthouse through the gate.

Tuckerton Seaport Lighthouse (construction is on the road behind).

Sunset over the wildlife refuge - a great end to a beautiful day.

Saturday Morning Sights

Sunrise across the bay.

Take-off.

Duck hunters on the bay.

A closer, but not clearer view.  I think they were setting up the decoys in the water because those appear to be birds floating but I doubt that they would be there in the water with the men in the water also.  You could hear the pop, pop of guns starting with sunrise and though it's not loud, it's a little disturbing.  And now as I post, I can still hear the guns reminding me of fireworks during the summer.  Poor birds.

On a Whim - 11/11/11 at 11:11 a.m.

Let me know where you were and what you were doing at 11:11 a.m. 11/11/11. 

Nuts?

This pillow resides in our living room.  You know how they say "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree"?  Well, in our case that would the "the acorn." 

I have a dilemma to consider - our lovely pin oak is dying and has recently suffered storm damage breaking a lot of the limbs.  HWNSNBP would like to have it taken down.  I am torn about that as I realize that it has become dangerous and will continue to drop limbs.  But I love that tree - it's shape, the way it looks draped with snow, the way the chipmunk climbs up that trunk to gather acorns in the fall.  The shade it provides is a big plus also.  So what to do?  Think on it some more for now. 

Earlier this fall I picked up a new Memory Box die.  It's an acorn and it's cap.   I kind of went crazy with the scrap box and pulled out a lot of the fall colors to make lot's of acorns.  Then I stamped them with one of the stamps from Tiny Tags in VersaMark ink.  Gluing the caps on was tedious but I really like the way that they came out. 

I have wanted to do one of the "specimen" projects that have been seen around the internet but I didn't necessarily want to use butterflies, bats, or flowers so this acorn is a nice diversion from those things. 

The frame comes from Michael's and was a bargain at $1.00.  I took my Crumb Cake ink pad and did the direct to paper technique right onto the wood.  It's rustic looking for sure.  The leaves are from French Foliage - stamped on Very Vanilla cs using markers to match the colors of the acorns.  Each of the acorns is popped up on dimensionals on the Very Vanilla background. 

Jingle Belles 45

It Came Upon A Midnight CLEAR - our challenge for this week was to use something on our card that was clear.  It could be a button, a transparency, slides, etc.  I was in Michael's on Sunday looking for something else in the scrapbook paper section when I spotted this acetate paper doily by Anna Griffin - the vanilla doily is printed on the sheet of acetate.  And then I found these Dress It Up buttons also in vanilla.  The holiday ribbon was on sale for 50% off and this champagne ribbon went well with the vanilla items.  I thought that I had a sheet of copper colored glitter paper at home and thankfully I was right (it's actually called Chestnut by Recollectioins).  The copper looked good against a Chocolate Chip card base. 

I used some nesties for the oval and scalloped oval and stamped the ribbon banner from the set Pines and Poinsettias in Chocolate Chip on Very Vanilla cs and trimmed it up.  The photograph doesn't really do it justice.  Of course it will need special attention to be mailed so that angel doesn't get smushed - there's nothing worse than a smushed angel.

Let's head on over to the Jingle Belles blog to see all the other CLEAR lovelies. 

Teapot Tuesday 171, Try a New Technique (TLC 350)

Aren't these two kitties cute perched on the checkerboard shelf?  So, you can see we were to bring cats today.  Cats with bling or cats and bling, or just bling.  Well, you'll want to read the story here.

I have a few cat stamps, but none of them appealed to me today.  What I was thinking of was the Technique Lover's Challenge that I saw earlier today.   The challenge today was to create a card without any stamps.  I immediately thought that my teapot card from last week would have fit with this challenge, but you know you shouldn't post something that has already been posted.  So thinking back to the bowling balls that I had done several years ago in the form of cats, I decided to draw my card for the Teapot Challenge and also put it in the TLC gallery for challenge 350 today.

I first sketched the cat on some copy paper and then, since I couldn't find any carbon paper, I quickly scribbled all over the back with a pencil enabling me to transfer the drawing to some watercolor paper with a stylus.  I decided to go with both of the colors you see in the cats in the teapot - blue and yellow.  I added the color by using my ink pads and aquapainter.  The detail lines were added with markers.  The flowers were punched, sponged on the edges, and then added to the cat's neckline.  Last touch was to add the sticky pearls to the flowers - thus the bling.

The image was cut out and then mounted on a simple card base with the fold at the top.  Looking at the picture now I'm torn with whether I should blacken the eyes instead of leaving them white.  What do you think? 

Well, there are two galleries to visit today - the Teapot Gallery here, and the TLC gallery here. 

Saturday Along the Canal

HWNSNBP and I decided, despite the 40º temperature to go for a bike ride.  We layered up, got the bikes ready on the car and set out for a local park only to find out that there was an event going on there that would keep us from the bike trail for a couple of hours.  So his idea, which turned out to be a good one, was to head down to the canal and check out the path there.  After last week's snow storm and all the tree damage that was done in the area I was concerned that the path would be a little impassable, however, with the exception of one downed tree trunk we were pretty much homefree.  It was an invigorating, brisk ride.

Clean Up in Aisle..........

I set out just to do some straightening up of the workspace and decided that it was more than necessary to actually put some of the scraps and bits that were lying around to use rather than just file them away because it was a crazy day at work and I also needed to put my anxiety to rest and create something.   I have a problem with throwing scraps away. It could be punched pieces that I didn't use on a particular project or images that didn't work out, but just about anything becomes fair game and I'm at a stand off with myself about getting rid of it or putting it away.  There is a voice inside of me that says - hey, you have plenty of paper and can duplicate that without a problem, but this voice has a somewhat split-personality and also says - hey, don't throw that away, it still could be useful.  Right now that second voice is having it's way!   

With that in mind, here are a couple of cards that I scrapped together............

I tried something with the background on this and used the striped embossing folder both horizontally and vertically and it came out pretty cool.  Those leaves were for a project I had in mind, but you know what, that's kind of where the project got lost.  I remember sitting down one evening and stamping the leaves and cutting them out, but for one reason or another I never got around to that project and honestly, I can't remember what it was anyway.  I'm sure it'll come to me sometime in the future but I have made a real mental note to write down my idea in a journal or even a post-it note and then I can include that in a clear envelope with the pieces for that project.  That was an organizational technique that I had started using when I was painting and creating ornaments years ago.  The problem that I ran into with that was not using clear bags and one of these days I'll have to get around to rebagging that stuff.  (Oh, and those roses I believe were made from the brown packing paper that comes in my SU orders.)

This next one uses a number of pieces including some more of those leaves along with a stamped image.

I added the VersaMarked leaves to the card base and stamped the Riding Hood Red piece with a stamp from Elements of Style.  The name of the set with the bird image has escaped me for now as I think it was a hostess set.  The peach piece is a leftover from the petal cone box die. 

And I thought I'd add in this last Halloween tag that I created while I was enjoying my day off on Monday.  I had found this cute little witch stamp in the dollar bin at Mike's and the Web and Willows is a Memory Box stamp I picked up this summer which reminded me of our garden and not particularly just Halloween.  I'm not sure you can see the sparkle I added to the web with a glitter pen.  The little spider sticky that I had was a perfect fit for that web.

Something that has been debated for as long as I've been stamping - how small a scrap is too small to keep?  Have you used the layering punches?  Do you save the little tear drop pieces?  Or what about the pinking hearts punches?  You get all those lovely little hearts.  Trash or treasure?

The Paper Players #70 Challenge is Anything Goes (fall theme), so I think I will join in the fun over there. 

Jingle Belles 44

Not a Creature Was Stirring...................... not even a, a, a, snowdog, snowcat, or snowbunny.

It's Halloween week and I thought for sure that we would be challenged to use orange in our card - nope, not part of the challenge.  But........... I did it anyway.  Ha! 

These are definitely not your typical Christmas colors, but I thought that the red, pink and green would be pretty cool and the fact that the two shades of orange were in there just added to the fun.

The stamps are from an All Night Media set called Snowglobe that I picked up several years ago and it has finally been inked up, or should I say that the creatures were inked up because this week we were to put creatures on our cards. 

I've got a slew of Christmas stamps with birds and some other animals too, but I decided that in honor of Halloween I would go with something else and these actually made me think that the dog, cat and bunny were dressed up in their Halloween costumes which would have worked here in New Jersey because we actually had snow on the ground on Halloween!

The sentiment is an A Muse stamp that I picked up at One Little Spark in Tuckerton.  I thought that it was kind of playful and matched the playfulness of this card.

So, who will get this out of the ordinary holiday creature creation?   I'm beginning to think that I might just have to let HWNSNBP randomly pick the cards out of the box as he addresses them because that is his part of the Christmas card mailing.  But before he does that I think that I am going to do a little write-up to insert with these cards to explain what I've been doing all year with the Jingle Belles and indicate what week and what the challenge theme was.  That, and I will make sure that each card has an envelope with it because some of them are not standard size.  Yep, I'd better get to doing that soon, huh!

So let's go check out the creature creations in the gallery this week.  Click here to join me.