New Start

 I just opened my blog for the first time in three years!  It's about time, you say, where have I been?

I was finding it too hard to maintain a blog as my job was taking a major amount of time and energy. Fortunately, except for the year of Covid from shut down until we all were vaccinated, the Cardologists have continued to stamp together.  That helped me keep my sanity.

At the beginning of this year, I finally found the idea of retirement less scary than continuing to work. So April 1 was my last day before starting this next chapter of life.   After two weeks of trying to adjust to the new lack of a schedule, my brothers and sister had a house fire that resulted in a total loss of their belongings.  Thankfully they are all safe and sound, and now, through the goodness of friends, they have found a house to rent until they can rebuild.

Tomorrow is my aunt's 90th birthday.  An occasion like that calls for a party and a special birthday card.  But I needed inspiration so I checked out some challenges I had bookmarked.  I found color inspiration at The Card Concept challenge 175.  A beautiful combination for roses, these looked like Flirty Flamingo, Daffodil Yellow, Mango Melody and Calypso Coral, and matched a picture my aunt recently finished in her coloring book. My style is clean and layered.

 The Retro Rubber Challenge 182 is Flower Power and I knew I had a very retro stamp featuring a vase of roses that my aunt had given me years ago.  Unfortunately that challenge ended this morning :-(

To celebrate that my aunt has made it to 90 years, I planned to add the number to the design and coincidentally, The Flower Challenge #68 just happens to be to use a number.

After blog surfing for the evening, I was ready to create.  I stamped the Stamp Rosa image by PSX on watercolor paper. 

  I scribbled the various marker colors on a block and used a waterbrush to color the image.  Unfortunately the coral looks brown in this picture. Now that I finished, the yellow didn't match the inspiration picture and should have all been mango.

I could have stopped with the 5 x 5 card, but bigger is better when you are celebrating.  I mounted the image to layers of Stamping Up paper, added a panel in Granny Apple Green (because green is her favorite color) that is embossed with vertical lines and features a gold '90'.  The final touches are miniature brass butterflies and a mango ribbon.

May 2019

This week I have a week off from work, whoo hoo, and today, I had one of those rare days that I haven't had in a long time - on vacation, home, with no where I have to be.

I dedicated part of my Memorial Day holiday to do something I had been putting off for ages and cleaned my stamp room table. Then today, with 
an uncluttered workspace, and a layout found here, I made, not one, but two cards!

The Twofer, a retirement card and a man's birthday card, both used the same circle dies from Sizzix. The goose is a Local King stamp. 

The striped paper on the first card was a scrap of unknown origin.  I used Stampin Up Pear Pizazz and Pool Party cardstock, The remainder of the paper and stamps are now sadly retired.

Thank you for stopping by my blog. I hope you found some inspiration.

Harvest Twofer

Greetings from Stamp Camp 2018.  All the Cardologists were here this weekend - lots of laughter, eating, and best of all, crafting.  More about that later.

Last night one of my dear friends asked if I was going to enter the Twofer Harvest challenge this month.  And when I gave the excuse that I didn’t bring any harvest stamps, all the Cardologists started digging.  Of all the stuff we brought, and I am talking about carloads, we had only one set with a basket of apples.  My friend had been joking, but I took it as a challenge.  Long after everyone else went to bed, I was stamping and coloring....even when I went to bed, I was dreaming about these cards.  I hope you enjoy the effects.

This first card was inspired by text messages one of the Cardologists was receiving from her husband.  He was signing off all his text messages with food endearments....my little artichoke, my asparagus sauce, my seven layer chocolate cake...it was so cute.

No beautiful sunsets this weekend; in fact, it has been cold with snow flurries. Although most of the leaves are down, there is still a grouping of beautiful trees with reddish orange leaves outside our window.  This second card is only partially inspired by our fall weather. At least we have three kinds of farm grown apples on our shelf (not that we eat a lot of healthy snacks here).

I used: Inky Antics Apple Pie (basket of apples, slice of pie, sentiments), Loralie Art Stamps Jake the Baker (Jake).

North Carolina 2018

We were getting really sick of winter and cold when my sister and I took a two week road trip to visit one of the Cardologists who had moved away to North Carolina.

The azaleas and mini rhododendron were blooming even in the mountains and they were already cutting grass in her development. Was it mean of us sending pictures of our picnic back to folks dealing with a late spring snow shower?

On the way home we spent most of one day traveling a leg of the Blue Ridge Highway.  

Yes, even with all there was to do in sunny Asheville, we two squeezed in some time to stamp together.

Just before I went on vacation, I learned how to make a butterfly push-through card at a Stampin' Up party.  I don't know if that is the official name of the card where the butterfly is mounted on the inside of a card and put up through a hole in the top.  We tried coming up with our own design.

Of course we didn't have a die to make the rectangular cut through the three layers of card and our Stampin' Up punch didn't reach.  So we punched one layer and used an X-acto knife for the other layers.  (Please don't look too closely at the rough edges of the opening.)

I hope you enjoy this interpretation. The flower frame is a Purple Daisy Design die, the butterfly is a set of two by Impression Obsession.  The sentiment and papers are from Stampin' Up.

Now as I post this, we are back home enjoying our own sunny day.  A bunny is standing motionless in my driveway, probably because he sees my cat.  Lucky for him the cat already has a mouse to play with.  Now I have a funny story about another mouse - but that is for the next post.

Have an enjoyable weekend.  But please keep in mind our servicemen this Memorial Day.
Thank you for visiting.

CC's 86th birthday

My auntie's favorite pastime is coloring in her coloring books so often when we visit her in the nursing home we are urged to take up the pencils and a book too.  All the staff have nicknamed her "CiCi" after her initials CCC.
 

Tomorrow is her 86th birthday so we took her out to dinner today and she had her favorite fried shrimp and a Switchback beer.   She gets a lot of good-natured teasing about the beer.

She loves pigs, so of course I had to make her birthday card with This Little Piggy from Stampin' Up. 


The windows were cut with a Paper Cut die set that cuts all three holes together.  One of the other Cardologists contributed the "happy birthday" diecut so I apologize for not knowing the company that makes the die.  

Silly me, I signed the inside before I remembered to take a picture.  I guess I should have said "hogs and kisses!"

Happy Birthday CC.