HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I hope everyone is having a very Happy Halloween! We had a wonderful time here in MD going down into the District of Columbia to the Kennedy Center for a free , love that word, showing of the 1925 Silent Movie production of Phantom of the Opera staring Lon Chaney. It was shown accompanied by a gentleman playing a theater organ. It was great fun!

Now I am getting ready to hang out with Gina K. on Splitcoast and hopefully some of you as well. We're having a party to celebrate the opening of her new online store and some wonderful new stamp sets as well! Come on and join in!

FROSTED FILTER PROJECTS

Here are my two cards made with my frosted filters. One of the things I really like about the frosted filters is that they look so much like handmade papers. And I love handmade papers. The Christmas card is my favorite. I love the Silent Night SU stamp set and was very sorry that they retired it, but I am glad that I can still use it for my personal projects. I just can't demo it. I also love the liquid applique that they had two Christmases ago. It makes such fun snow. On this card for added sparkle I also used yellow stickles for the windows, dazzling diamonds for snow falling in the church and embossed iridescent ice snow flakes on the blue background piece. The groovy guava card uses the stem silhouettes stamp set from this years Holiday Mini catalog. I used my marvelous markers on the stems stamp and spritzed it then stamped onto watercolor paper.

So this is what learning a new technique turned into. Once again thank-you Thinker for suggesting this technique. It is one I hope to remember and use often. WHy don't you give it a try also. It's easy and fun though a bit messy. If you don't like colored finger tips use plastic gloves!

FROSTED FILTERS

Here are four samples of the frosted filters I did in playing with this fun new technique. I did six different samples. These are the four that I haven't turned into cards yet. I'm not sure what my favorite one is but I lean toward the blues. These are my favorite colors as they are so peaceful. I still need for work on this technique. I would like to get some really soft colors that are very very subtle. So far mine are quite bold. Some are more muted than others but they are still fairly dark. The trick is that the more water added to thin out the color the more the colors blend together and I end up with muddy colors. The next post will have the two frosted filters I used and the cards I made with them.

AND THE WINNER IS.........

THINKER! I already have your address Thinker so I will be sending out you BLOG CANDY tomorrow or Tuesday. (Probably Tuesday as that is my morning off work!)
Thinkers technique suggestion was Frosted Filter. Thank you so much for the link to SCS tutorial as this was a technique I had never heard of. For those of you who have not heard of this technique either HERE is where you can find out about it.

I don't have a card to post yet because I had so much fun playing with the technique I now have 5 or 6 different frosted filters that I can work with. I'm still trying to perfect the technique so I can get a nice soft background. So far the ones I have done are pretty, but they are bold. Hopefully by tomorrow or Tuesday I will have a card or two put together.

I have learned that there are different type and weight filters and they give very different results. I happened to have two different types in my pantry. The first I tried was a cone type filter. I had to cut it apart and ended up with two triangular shaped pieces. These filters were fairly heavy and gave me a much brighter coloring. The other filters were Mr. Coffee filters which are circular and flat bottomed. They are much lighter weight and gave me much more muted coloring. I will try and scan the colored filters tomorrow and maybe you will be able to see this difference.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I am going to keep them all on file and try them all. I especially want to try the Cracked Glass. I've heard about this technique before and it intrigues me but I'm a little scared of it. Sounds complicated, but also sounds very pretty.

Picking Technique to Try Tomorrow!

I'm getting some good ideas on a technique to try. I've had some unexpected activities pop up today so I will be picking the technique tomorrow. One more day to give me ideas. I'm thinking up BLOG candy to send on even as I type this.......What will it be????????

NEW TECHNIQUES TO TRY????

So many new techniques and idea to try. I keep skipping from one to another. I will have to settle down and figure out which one to try by tomorrow so I can play with it this week-end. I'm not sure how to settle on which one though as so many I have found sound very interesting. I may have to just put some of them on a slip of paper through them into a paper bag and draw one out. OR I could focus on ones that can be used for festive holiday items. Those techniques that add glitter and glitz to holiday projects.....decisions decisions.....so many ideas and so little time! Stay tuned for what I choose tomorrow! IF you have any suggestions to offer just post a comment with it. I will throw your idea into the hat (if it is a new technique for me and I can find directions on how to do it). If your idea is drawn I will send you some BLOG CANDY for your stampin' fun!

WHEW!

Well I am happy to say that the hard work of the past few weeks have paid off. I had the best show as far as sales ever! I also had a lot of fun talking with people and I met quite a few new folks. I think that we are thinking of making this craft fair an annual event. Now I do have moe work a head of me as almost all my cards sold! I was amazed. But I am giving myself a break for a while to catch my breath and do some thinking on some new designs. I also want to try some new techniques to use. So I will be on the look out for some to try. I did just purchase a mew book tonight using some free credits I had. It is a paper crafting book and looked like it had some very interesting new ideas including paper weaving. That looked like fun so hopefully some new projects will be forth coming.

OOPS!

Well I thought I wold be combining stampin' and kwiltin' in my last post but for some reason the kwiltin' photo didn't upload and when I tried to edit it and add it in thinks really went wonky with the layout of the post. So being totally HTML illiterate I'm taking the easy way out and just creating a new post!

This is a small Christmas wall hanging that I made for the fair. If it doesn't sell there it will head out to the Sandy Spring Museum gift shop. This little guy has an interesting history. Every once in a while I decide to clean my sewing room. (Okay everyone pick yourselves up off the floor! I do clean once in a while. FLY Baby friends pretend you didn't hear me say that! I clean and declutter everywhere BUT my sewing room. Really I do!)

Anyway back to the story. I decided several weeks ago that the sewing room (aka: basement) needed a little help before I dove in to making things for the craft fair. In giving it the help it needed I found this Bowl full of little, and I mean little, log cabin and court house square blocks. Obviously they had been destined for some Christmas project as they were mainly red and green with Christmas prints (well most of them were; there were a few pinky ones?????) I have no clue when I made them or what the project was, but there where lots of them. I can't bear to throw things like this away! So I tried to think what to turn them into. Well this is one of the things. A cute little Christmas Wreath complete with bow and bell. It's total size is about 12 inches square. I also made another wreath that is a different design. It's rectangular about 12x16 inches. I tried to photograph it as well, but there is a lot more red Christmas fabric in it. It's a green wreath on a red background. For some reason the red almost looks fluorescent in the picture (it's not I promise you!) and so it looks pretty funky! But only in the photo. It's real pretty in real life. Also I had enough blocks to use them as a row of blocks down the left side of a set of 4 placemats.

Oh the pinky ones. I closed my eyes, grit my teeth and did throw them away!

CHRISTMAS MAKES AN APPEARANCE!

It may still be October and not even Halloween yet, but for crafters it is time to begin thinking Christmas. And I have been! In this post I am combining projects from my love of both stamping and quilting. And yes they are both projects that I made for the craft fair. (Part of me will be happy when it is over. Another part will be sad though because I will no longer have an excuse for spend so much of my time making pretty things and I will have to get back to more mundane activities like housework.)

First here is a Christmas card. Like my Thanksgiving cards I have "mass produced these. (Actually 16 this time!) They are packaged in cute little plastic boxes with elastic silver cord Once again I water colored the tree with my WC crayons and aqua painter. Iadded yellow stickles to the star and placed two small colored brads for ornaments on the tree. I also FINALLY broke down and used some of my hodge podge hardware paces! I've only had them for two years! The doubles sided paper is some hat was leftover from the World Card making Day project which used the Winter Bright Simply Scrappin' Kit. Now I not only hoard small leftover fabric pieces but also paper pieces. MY life is being taken over by scraps! Good thing the ARE useful,

By the way has anyone noticed I kinda figured out how to do a watermark? I still need to work on it. I think it ended up too small to be really of use. But thanks to Kurtis's tutorial I did it! (Sorry Kurtis I didn't foloow the direction totally which is why it's too small. I though it would be to large. I should know better and should have listened to the pro! I'll do better next time I promise!)

I HAVE PICTURES!

Here are two of the Thanksgiving cards that I designed and have made for this weekends craft fair at my church. I actually mass produced (well for me 12 cards of one design IS mass production!). I will be selling them in a package of 8 with 4 cards of each design.

The Thanks card was fun to make. I love using clear embossing powder over craft inks. It's like having 48 colors of embossing powders! The leave was fun to do. Since I use the craft ink stamping spots I was able to dab on different fall colors and get what I though was a fairly accurate look of a fall leaf. It's hard to tell from the scanned image but the squares above the work Thanks each have a gold embossed letter spelling out G I V E. I also finally got to use my jumbo eyelets. They are a challenge to set but my crop-a-dile handled the job!

I've been doing a lot of water coloring lately. It's something I can do while sitting in living room with my husband. There are many methods of watercoloring. I have tried many of them including water color pencils, aqua painters and the classic inks that have been pressed to the ink pad lids and watercolor crayons used with the aqua painter or small paint brush. I prefer using the watercolor crayons that Stampin' Up sells and an aqua painter. I find this the most compact and less messy system to use. Plus there are so many wonderful colors to play with. For paper I prefer the SU watercolor paper but as wonderful as it is it is fairly pricey. I'm experimenting with other brands but so far haven't found one that colors as nicely. So I guess it is true that you do pay for what you get!

Now that Thanksgiving is taken care of it is on to Christmas!

TODAY I STAMPED!

I don't have any pictures yet. Camera is not working (I think it needs new stronger batteries) and I'm just too plain lazy to hook the laptop up to the scanner. But I have completed several stamping projects this week. I've been altering composition books and making them into various types of journals. And I've designed a few cards which I plan to mass produce (if you call 10 cards of one design mass production) ; then package in sets for next Saturday's craft fair. Then ones I have designed so far are Thanksgiving Cards. I also hope to do sets of Christmas cards and hope to find time to design them tomorrow. The designing process I think is the most time consuming, but it is the part I enjoy the most which I guess is why I don't usually mass produce things. Make it ince and move on is my motto be it stampin' or kwiltin'

I AM STILL KWILTIN'

I have not been getting much if any stamping done lately. Right now I am focusing on my quilting. It's really been quite a long time since I have done that and I am having fun. This flurry of quilting is partially precipitated by a request for some new items by the manager of a gift shop that I have items for sale on a consignment basis. I can't do stamped items there because of SU's angel policy stating you can not sell items using any of their product or images in permanent retail outlets or the internet. Soon I will have to get back to some stamping though because I am a vendor on our church craft fair on October 20 and since it is a temporary venue I can sell SU items there. When I get something finished I will post somemore pictures here but for now I just have words.