A birthday card for a welcome change!

Finally, a card other than a sympathy card! Made this for and mailed to my brother for his birthday. I find myself using the SU watercolor paper a lot! I love it and with the stamped images and either watercolor crayons or pencils it almost looks as it I can really draw and paint. Ha! Fooled you! Now artistic talent of that sort here.

More sympathy cards

Yet again more sympathy cards. It seems that these are the only type of card that I have made this year. These were made for the family of my husband's Aunt. That's three family members to die this year and one family friend. I think it is now time to move on to joyful family events, right? I guess all these funerals also are hard because they are a sign of my aging. Not many like to face that prospect even though we all know intellectually that it is inevitable unless you are the one sympathy cards are being made for. When you look at it that way I guess getting older is not so bad after all.

On a Happier Note

This is a very special Christmas present made for me by my son. It is a bookcase being used by me to hold DVD's in our family room. He made it extra special by wood burning quilt blocks along each side. And I didn't even know he knew how to do wood burning. Such talent! Do I sound like a bragging mom? Oh well to bad cause that's exactly what I am! Thanks Nate! Now the whole world can see your talent if they want too! Love ya!

By the way the blocks he chose were designed by Carol Doak and are from her book 40 Bights & Bold Paper Pieced blocks. A favorite book of mine. Now maybe I should make a quilt to go with the bookshelf.

Sympathy Cards

Well I did finally get back to making some cards. Unfortunately they are all sympathy cards for family members. I just sat down with my sympathy stamps and a couple of my favorite stamp sets and began working. I wanted them each to be different in case the various family members should happen to see each others. Once again though it was a sad process it gave me time to reflect over the time I spent with my Aunt (she is the one who died) so that was a good thing.

Yeah I finally actually got something finished. I made these Christmas ornaments for each family member that we will be spending Christmas with this year. I had fun once again combining my two loves; quilting and stamping!
The tree pattern is a design by Carol Doak. It is paper piecing which is a block piecing technique which I really enjoy for its ease and precision. Rather than stuffing the ornament I choose to do it like I do my fabric postcards using a stiff fusible interfacing. I stamped the back with year and a sentiment and decorated the front with Swarovski crystals and metallic thread. The edges are overcast with a heavy thread and then I hot glued the star on top with a gold cord hanger. The only problem is I forgot to make myself one!

Nothing to upload!

It's been awhile since I have been here. My lap top was not a happy camper and so it was hard to do anything on it for some time. Now I am happy to say I have a new lap top and am back in business. However as it is now the Christmas season I have no time to do much of anything. Plus I have been busy helping a friend whose first floor condo was water soaked when sprinklers went off in the condo above her. It's a real mess, but given time and elbow grease we will get it all fixed up and put back together. Hopefully in the next week I will get some time to be creative. Actually I have some quilting I need to do so that might take precedence. Then there are Christmas present to wrap and cards to send out so it might be a while till I get to be creative in any way! I'll really try though.

Get Well Cards

Well I finally was able to get Blogspot to upload my photos. Seems every time I have tried lately it just keeps loading and never finished so I would just quit.

Now I hope that the up coming cold and flu season isn't bad, but if it is I'm ready. I sat down the other day and made a batch of Get Well cards.

It took a while to get into a creative mind set but when I did I was able to come up with a variety of designs. I also had the help of being in a card making challenge on SplitCoast Stampers. They gave the basics and I came up with my design. It was a great deal of fun and a very productive weekend for card making.

Time Certainly Flies

Well, It's really hard to believe that it has been a month since I have posted anything here! I have been doing things including making cards, postcards and piecing a small wallhanging, plus a vacation thrown in for fun. The main problem with posting is that my computer is not feeliing well. The fan does not work any longer so the CPU over heats and the whole thing crashes...so I have it sitting in front of a portable fan which blows on the vent hole when I am using it. This is noisy and rather cold easpecially now that fall weather has come on with a vengence. AND though I can now use it this way it is functioning much slower than it ever used to...I think it's days are numbered. Then I don't have a clue what I will do. I hate to admit it but I don't think I can function without a computer anymore! Isn't that sad. Not only do I communicate with people from all over the world on it, but I keep my financial records on it, I design on it, it's my personal recipe book and the list just goes on and on.....anyway. I tried to upload some photos a moment ago and either my computer or Blogspot was not cooperating. I will try again later. Gotta get some pictures here. Words are fun, but they work so much better with pics.

Fixed Page!

Here is the fixed page I talked about in previous post. Empty space is really nasty in my humble opinion. It needs to be filled in with something even something simple. I almost always use background stamps or watermark images for this reason. And in my quilting I will rarely use solid fabrics. They read empty and on close inspection are empty. I will use tone on tone fabrics which are similar to watermarks or using a background stamp in the same color as the card stock. At first glance you don't notice the design, but on closer inspection it's there and you can see it.

Evolution of a Scrapbook Page

I am in a 6x6 Christmas scrapbook page swap. I've not really done 6x6 pages before so this is a new endevor for me. I was worried about how to get a design on the page and still have enough room for a photo. I've done scrapbooking before with Creative Memories products, but never worked on a page smaller tham 8x11. I new I wanted to yous the Cool Play set and have a snowman on the page. My first attempt I was not happy with at all. The snowman was too small I though and there was too much open space. Also though I liked the effect of using Dazzeling Diamonds glitter on the snow flakes in the background it was way to labor intensive to do the 20 pages I need for the swap. What to do?

I still liked the basic design elements so I tried enlarging the snow man and instead of a single stamp snow flake with the glitter I used a snowflake jumbo wheel and whisper white craft inl for the back ground snow. Of course that meant I couldn't use the white for the "let it snow" stamp so I switched it to black. I liked the fact that I now had room for some extra color in the form of the cap and scarf. It's still pretty labor intensive as I have to cut out the snowman, scarf and hat, but I had to do that on the other page as well anyway. So here is my swap page!

Now I am not one to just throw away work I don't like so after staring at it for a few more minutes I decided to try adding a second "let it snow" in white above the little snow man on my reject page. And voila: IT WORKED! I like it now. Just filling in the empty space really helped I think. You can see this card in my next post. I still won't do it for the swap just because using the glitter is more involved and messy than I want to deal with right now.

The lessen here is work with ideas you try that you don't at first like. Chances are there is a fix that will make it work!

Still Crazy, But Taking Time

I think I have given up on life slowing down any and I'm just going to make sure that each day I take time for either sewing or stamping. Yesterday I made time for a card and several 6x6 scrapbook pages, which I will deal with in a later post. The card I made is one that I would have preferred not to have to do as it is the above sympathy card. It was for a very special quilting friend whose husband unexpectedly died of a heart attack on Sunday. As much as I don't really like having to make sympathy cards I do find that they provide their own special blessing in that I seem to always spend time praying for he grieving person the card is being made for. I think for this reason I may never make sympathy cards in advance, except to sell to others. I will make mine as needed so as not to miss the time of prayer.
The birthday card I made last week, I actually made two of these cards just in different color-ways so that I could keep as sample. The other one I made for a very special person who shall remain nameless at this point in case she happens to log on to this sight and read it. She won't get her card for a week yet. Now I've probably given it away. I love the stamp set I used for this. Favorite Teddy Bear by Stampin Up. It has so many accessory items to go with the teddy bear that I think it will be used a lot!

A Break from the Craziness!

I really needed to take a break from all the business of the week. So I stamped. This is my latest card. It is in celebration of fall. These are colors I love. I designed it for my SU Sisters September SYI Swap and made a few extras for myself. Other than this card I haven't been doing much "crafting" this week. Too busy getting ready for the big church picnic tomorrow. Though I guess the 4 display boards I put together might count as crafting???

I also did get to bake a cake today for the cake walk at the picnic. Don't get to bake much anymore with only two of us in the house. And I still have two pans of apple crisp to make. While they are baking maybe I can squeeze in another card for a special birthday girl this month. Not saying who in case she reads this.

CRAZY!!!

Life has been absolutely crazy around here for the past week. Don't anyone even ask me what I've been doing cause I don't think I could answer, but I know I've gotten alot accomplished. Just nothing in the world of Stampn or Kwiltin. But I did want to check in here and say that I hope tomorrow is a different story. For today, though it is 6:22 pm I am off and back to work. Ain't life grand!!!!

Just a few more pictures

I couldn't figure out how to get these final pictures of quilts at the end of my last post so I had to make one more. The Walrus quilt is just another marvelous example of a pictorial quilt. It is done completely in fabric. The quilt with the circles was another surprising technique. Other than the background white fabric there is no other fabric in this quilt. Everything is painted! Unbelievable! It was also very heavily quilted around each of the motifs. Finally here I have a picture of a very traditional "Dear Jane" quilt. Just to show that yes there were traditional ones at the show. This one caught my attention because I have a "Dear Jane" quilt started. Will I ever finish it? I certainly hope so, those are all 4 inch square blocks and note there are lots of them! Color, fabrics, Creativity! Everything was found at this show and I loved it. Some day I hope to be able to attend another show of this magnitude.

Nashville Trip Wrapped Up

This is the final installment on my trip to Nashville. The picture here is actually a quilt, but I can see a card image here as well. I really loved this. It's not necessarily something I would quilt, but it was so beautifully done that I spent a lot of time just looking at it and imagining how it what done. I will never quilt something like this, but I think I will play around with stamping techniques and come up with a card design.

Many of the quilts at this show were pictorial rather than what most people would consider "a quilt". The techniques used were amazing. I wish I had such creativity and talent. I did pick up a lot of ideas however and was greatly inspired to stretch what I do. This insiration was aided by several of the "make and take" workshops that Mary Moore and I took which taught us how to create appliques with man made fabrics and a heated stencil wand, how to paint on fabric and even how to create our own fabric using yarns and threads. Then also several vendors showed us how to color fabrics with crayons and embelish using crystals, which was something I learned about on one of the quilting cruises mom and I took. I wish I could spend most of my days just creating beautiful items like I saw on the trip.

Nashville 2

Here are some views from the Gaylord Resort. It is definitely a beautiful place to stay and it is very relaxing. Not only are the gardens wonderful and the sound of the water calming, but there is very nice unimposing music in the background. I had to continually remind myself that I was indoors.

Now I must be truthful; the picture of the balconies are guest rooms, but they weren't where we stayed. Those are what I called the high rent district rooms. I will only ever stay in rooms with that type of a view in my dreams. Our room, though in the "low rent" district was very nice. Very spacious for the two of us and we did have a pleasant view out over an outdoor court yard. At least we weren't overlooking a parking lot. But we were in our room so little it really didn't matter.

Mary Moore and I did eat at the Cascades Restaurant which is shown here in a picture. We had a very tasty sushi appetizer. The restaurants are very good and they really cover the complete range from Chic-Fillet to the very formal Old Hickory Steakhouse. We ate at neither of these; one too casual the other way to expensive. We did have a very good meal at Finnigan's which is an Irish Pub. I wanted to go to Jack Daniel's on Friday before our flight out but it didn't open in time.

Well so much for the hotel. If you want to know more about it click on Nashville 2 title. Next posting will be more about the show including some stamping ideas I came away with.

Nashville Trip

Well I am back from my trip to Nashville to see my quilt. For the next few posts this blog will deal more with my kwiltin than my stampin. Though I did pick up some stampin of fabric tips on this trip, but more on that later.

This was a wonderful trip in many aspects. Of course it goes without saying that it was a thrill to see my quilt hanging in a National Quilt Show. It was also very humbling as the quilting skill level and creativity represented by the quilts at this show was phenomenal! It was also wonderful to spend a few days with quilting friends and sharing this experience with them. Once again I was very impressed with the friendliness and helpfulness of quilters. Though most people I encountered on this trip were strangers to me they were all so friendly and willing to help with advice for seeing the show or hints on how to reproduce something we were looking at together.

Mary Moore, my travel companion for this trip, and I headed off on out adventure at 5:30am on Wednesday morning. We flew into Nashville via Southwest Airlines and were checked into our room at the Gaylord Opryland Resort by 10am. It was then off to explore the show for a few hours before the awards program. I must report that our guild did not receive an official placing award, but being there was reward enough for me. There were only 19 guilds from around the country that had quilts accepted for the Guild competion so I think we did very well.
The pictures at the beginning of this posting show our entry into the show, our group of four who attended the show and me with my quilt.

Its time for me to head off to work so more on the show and my experiences later. If you would like to view the winners of the competions at this show click onto the title if this blog posting. It will link you to the AQS web site where theyare posted. See ya later!

It's County Fair Time!

No time for stampin or kwiltin this week it's the week of the Montgomery County Fair. That means I'm real busy between volunteering with 4-H and helping out in the fair office. I did get a few things entered into the fair last week and did pretty well in the ribbon department. I entered 8 things between Home Arts and Arts & Crafts and all 8 received ribbons. My card that I entered in Arts & Crafts took 3rd place. It was the first card I posted here on my blog. If anyone reads this and is interested you can see it by going to my June archives. It is the Faith Card. I also received a 2nd place ribbon for a framed picture I stamped. Pretty much everything else was a sewn item. It's nice to know that ones work merits someone elses praise and recognition.

Back to Stampin'

Two more projects using the Nature Prints stamp set. The "Memories" book I can take full credit for. I've been wanting to alter a school composition book for some time now and finally got around to doing it. It was really fun to do, but there is one caution. After I had the whole thing finished I openned the book and discovered that I had put the cover design on the book upside down. Since I used sticky tape (which is very well named!) I couldn't just remove the cover paper and turn it around. I was able to remove all the taped on cover articles. Since I had stamped directly on the cover I had to sticky tape a new cover sheet on. This then became to back of the book. I then Carefully retaped and stamped the front right side up this time!

The Happy Birthday card I cannot take credit for. I CASED it from the Stampers Showcase on the SU demonstrator web site. It was designed by Adele Heffern. I was intrigued by her method of making the wooden wall behind the trophy fish and wanted to see how it would really turn out. I LOVE IT! The wood grain backgroound was created by taking a piece of Creamy Carmel card stock and swiping the edge of the Whisper White craft ink pad over from top to bottom. After it has dried you then go over it again in the same manner but with a Creamy Carmel craft pad. when that has dried you mark the lines for the boards and dots for the nails. It turned out better that I had even imagined and it is so perfect for this card. Thank you Adele.

Kwiltin' this time round

Well I have been productive today and it felt so good. I did get some stamping done, but it was related to a swap I was in and was only stamping 28 images of the letter X. So not too creative, but my three letters (I also did O & Q) are done and they are in the mail. I also spent some time packaging up card kits for the StampFest I am involved in on Saturday. I think this may be the last one I do as I just don't have any customers or friends to get there and it's alot of work and expense to be providing projects for other peoples customers. Unfortunately I do enjoy doing them because I like teaching, but I keep loosing money on them so they don't make sence for right now.

My real work today came in the sewing room and here are two of the projects I did. They are both paper pieced and a lot of fun. The flower block is only two inches square and I did two others like it. They are for a challenge sent out by Carol Doak for her Yahoo group on Paper Piecing. I also made five little basket blocks for our 2008 guild raffle quilt. I LOVE DAYS OFF FROM WORK! Unfortunatly today I need to go back to work so won't get much done. Though at least there today I have the Secret Shop Craft workshop so I will get some crafting in today!

Lack of Creativity is a Sad State

Boy after a flurry of activity on Sunday I have been a real slug! With a friends help I did get 100 small party type favors done for the Chrysalis weekend, but I can't say that they used any amount of creativity I simply used my tag punch and the Yum Yum tag stamp and a verse stamp both of which are retired SU stamps and adhered them to a Hersheys nugget. They did look cute. But I was glad when they were done. Hopefully tonight it will be cool enough to work up in my stamp room. It's been way too hot this week. Close to or over 100 almost every day. I need to get some projects designed for next Saturdays Stampfest and whould like to get some entries for our county fair done as well. It sure would be nice if I could make this weekeknd a 4 day weekend, but since I can't I'll just have to get off my butt and move twice as fast.

Here are four of my favarite cards that I made yesterday. I'm still amazed at the number of cards I got done. Of course nothing was done today. I had to reenter the real world of normal work.
Tomorrow I have a day off and after housework I hope to do either more stamping or maybe some quilting. I have a feeling quiltging may win out as I do it in the basement and these days out second story is pretty HOT! Just like outside.
I really am looking forward to making more of the fabric postcards. I toook one into the post office to mail today. I wanted to have it hand cancelled. The postal worker that took it was really wow'd by it which was really neat. Now I just hope it makes it through the mail without too much dirt or grime added to it. Maybe I need to make one and mail it to myself to see how they are when they arrive.

They are done!

It took almost 6 hours but the cards are done. Laura and I had a great time together and came up with what I think are some great designs. Part of the reason it took so long is no two of the twenty cards we made are alike. They are all different! I've never really spent this much time at once stamping. There was a basic theme we were following so I had picked out a selection of stamps that went with it. This helped some, but what we found is that we began experimenting with different techniques. So not only did we create the cards needed, but we learned alot as well. Best of all however was the fun we had together. Even my DH got involved in that he fixed dinner for us.
Tonight it is to late to scan the cards, but tomorrow I will try to find time to hook up to the scanner and scan a few of the ones I made. Now it is time to rest and gear down for sleep.

No creativity today!

Though it is a Saturday and a day at home there was no creativity today! Just a lot of housework and laundry. However I did get plenty of files that have been sitting around way to long in my stamping room put a way! Yea!!!
Last April I co-chaired a quilt show for our local quilt guild and I had show records scattered all over the place. I was so glad when the show was over that I just dumped everything and forgot about doiing anything to organize it for the next sucker, I mean quilt show chair. Now after an afternoon of sorting, everything is nicely organized into a notebook and ready to pass on. All we need now is a person to volunteer for the job.
Tomorrow I will be ready to have fun stamping with a friend after church. We will make "palanca" cards for youth from our church who are going on a spiritual retreat next weekend and also some young adults, including her and my sons, who will be helping lead the weekend. We each will have 10 cards to make so it will be a marathon session.

Here are two of my first attempts at truly mixing my Stamping and my Quilting. They are fabric postcards which are currently the rage in the quilting world. Actually they have been quite popular for some time, but I'm a little slow on getting on the bad wagon. But now that I have jumped on it I am hooked. They are so quick and easy to make and yes they can be mailed using first class postage (39 cents) rather than postcard rates. I should have also scanned the back of the card but didn't. Maybe tomorrow. On the back I stamped POSTCARD across the top and drew a vertical line down the center. But back to the front. The stamps I used are Stampin' Up (of course) and I used craft inks. The design is done in what is called Paper piecing in the quilting world and the are patterns designed by Carol Doak. My favorite paper piecer in the whole world!

I made these cards for a workshop I had at my house. They showed how using the exact same elements you can create two different cards. The card on the bottom is actually one I found on the SU Demo site for use in a beginners workshop. The card on the top is the one that has been modified.

Now for the truth. The reason the card on the right is modified is while making the card one of the participants accidentally tore the wrong side of the Whisper White card stock so she had to improvise. Everyone really seemed to like the idea that even when you think you've made a mistake you really haven't you just need to adjust and actually they liked the boo-boo card better. It's the one they all made! Now that made me feel really GOOD! I really like it when people don't get stressed over mistakes but make lemonade out of them.

Summer Mini Set

I just love this stamp set! It's from the summer mini catalog and it's called Nature Prints.

The first card shows all 4 stamps in the set and uses the new "In Colors" that are only available from Stampin' Up in the 2006-07 Catalog. I just love the colors and they go very well with this stamp set. With this card I also used my Stamp-a-Ma-Jig to get the images placed where I wanted them. Boy I don't know how I lived with out this tool! It's absolutely WONDERFUL! I also used my new "cutter kit " to distress the edges of the layers. Love it as well, it will certainly give my finger nails a rest when it comes to distressing!

For the second card I used Pearl Ex on the fish stamp image. I chose to use Duo Red/Blue for this as it gives a nice Iridescence like fish scales do. I used Canvas background stamp behind the fish, but some friends suggested Cheesecloth background stamp would be nice as it would look like a fishing net. I'll try that when I get that stamp.

Both of these cards where designed for possible Stampfest Projects. The card with the fish was chosen, but we will use the Cheesecloth stamp and a "Happy Birthday" stamp rather than "Celebrate" which some felt was an over used stamp. I used it because I had it. I wanted to try and do some cards that could be used for men. It seems like most everything we do with stamping is female oriented.

Anniversary Card

Well it has been a while. I have just returned from a delightful vacation and now feel that I can post this card. I had made it for my in-laws anniversary but didn't want to post it before I gave it to them. I didn't think they would check out my blog but just want to be sure that they received the card before they saw it.
I had fun making this card as I played with Pearl X . It added an iridescence in the dragon fly which really added interest. Unfortunately it doesn't show up in the scan of the card. I got the idea for the card layout from SplitCoast Stampers but I don't remember form whose gallery it came. I need to do a better idea of keeping track of those inspiration sites so I can give them proper credit.

Okay, okay I know this is not a card. It's a quilt, but I haven't started a quilting blog yet and the title of this one is Stampin & KWILTIN' so here it is. Now as to why it is here. I just was informed that it will be hanging in a national quilt show at the end of August. All I can say is BOY AM I EXCITED OR WHAT!

I've never had anything selected for a juried show before let alone a big show. I'm a local guild and county fair type gal.

This was submitted by our local guild as part of a group of 8 that were chosen from 19 entries in our guild challenge on TIME. We were to make a wall hanging size quilt which interpreted Time and there had to be at least one clock face on the quilt.

My interpretation was called It's About Time and I interpreted different phrases and images of time such as: Time is Money, Tea Time, Tee Time, Time in a Bottle etc. I also put images of Father Time, Big Ben and the Croc from Peter Pan complete with a clock charm in his belly. It was fun. Oh, I did do some stamping on iot. The ribbons at the top and bottom are stamped with the words "It's About Time!", "Thyme?" and "No Time!".

First on Split Coast Stampers Site

Yea! I've got my first card up on Split Coast Stampers! For me that is very exciting. I have my own gallery of one card! There will be more in the future, but one step at a time. Click on the title and you will be taken there. How cool is that! Now I just have to put it on my Links list. Guess I will go try that now.

It's done!

Here is the finished product of my Heartfelt Thanks Series. I put the card fronts onto a display board along with the prices of the items needed to make the cards. Though the price list looks expensive I also mention that with these supplies alone you can make over 75 cards! It works out to less than a $1.00 per card. Hopefully this display board will come in handy when I have my next workshop, which as usual will be at my home after our vacation this month. I am also hopeful that maybe out of that workshop I can finally get someone else to host a workshop. That would be very nice!