Sleepover...and a blog update

My husband has been in Hawaii for about a week and a half and won't be home for another week and a half! Sooooo, Tia and I are having a sleepover with a couple of girls from gym and one of the coaches :O) I know, it sounds funny, but being old school, I asked one of the gymnasts if she had ever seen the movie, "American Anthem". She never heard of it! OMG...I LOVE that movie! LOL. I explained to her that it was the original gymnastics movie (before "Stick It") with Mitch Gaylord. Needless to say, she never heard of Mitch Gaylord either! Of course she hasn't...that would make me feel YOUNG...not like an old hag :O)

So, we set a "date" for the sleepover to watch the VHS movie, American Anthem. I hope I can figure out how to hook up the VCR to the new TV :| LOL...my husband will kill me if I mess up his TV :O)

Oh, and a quick blog update if you didn't notice. I found that I have a lot of family and friends who swing by my blog but don't get into a habit of posting comments. Sooooo, I added a chatbox to my left side bar. Please feel free to leave me a message! I'll respond directly in the chatbox so that you can refer to it later.

Okay, I'm off to clean house, bathe the puppies, and wash my car. Hopefully before I pick up my daughter from practice :O) Now that's FUNNY! LOL Knowing me, I'll walk by the craft room and end up making a card instead!

Wish me luck!

Birthday Posies

I guess I'm on a birthday card kick this weekend :O) I fell in LOVE with the card that Debbie Olson had published in the recent Paper Crafts' Card Creations Vol 2 magazine (page 57). I love the background paper she created using Lisa Johnson's PTI Flower Garden stamp set. So, I CASEd the handmade DP and created a birthday card. I'm quickly finding that I can never have too many birthday cards on hand!

I stamped the flowers with Pink Pirouette, and stamped both the leaves and the swirl with Mellow Moss. The sentiment is stamped in Riding Hood Red. I added vellum over the DP to soften the look, scalloped and folded over the Mellow Moss CS, added some satin ribbon (from Michaels) and adhered to the base Pink Pirouette CS.

Supplies are listed in my SCS gallery. Hope you had a wonderful weekend :O)

Happy Birthday - OCCC

This morning I had a ton of creative ideas, but not a lot of time! Tia had her high school state gymnastics competition today so I only had a couple of hours to spare. We just got home an hour ago...Tia did a wonderful job at the meet! I'm so proud of her :O)

I decided to play along with Our Creative Corner Challenge (OCCC) for the first time. The challenge was to use a tag on our card. This is what I came up with. I needed a masculine birthday card so I finally cracked open the Lovely As A Tree set that I ordered over a month ago :O) I used the misting with markers technique and filled in the trunk of the tree with my Creamy Caramel marker. I cut the main image using my Nestabilities, covered the debossed edges with post its and sponged the background. For the tag, I used my large and small oval punches. I punched an additional large oval using Kraft cardstock to cover the reverse side of my DSP (that doesn't match :O).

This is a Stampin' Up! only card. Supplies are listed in my SCS gallery. Hope you have a great weekend!

Best Wishes...MOJO74

I created this card for a close friend who is moving up in her career to bigger and better things :O) The layout is from the MOJO74 sketch.

I used the Wet Watercolor Crayon technique for the main image. Basically, I colored the stamp with Stampin' Up watercolor crayons and added shading on the right edges using a darker hue. I spritzed the stamp with my stamp cleaner and pressed it to the paper. Pretty easy when all was said and done...it was really a matter of putting the shading in the right place. I probably could have added a little more shading in a few spots, but overall I like the end result :O) Supplies are listed in my SCS gallery. Everything is from Stampin' Up! except the butterfly with pearl rhinestones, the ribbon and the lace border punch.

Hope you had a great week! All the best for an even better weekend!!

Cherry Blossoms

I made this card for my co-worker who had a birthday this week. I sort of used the colors from the Color Throwdown challenge last week (CTD28), but added Kraft (and used variations in the shades of color they chose). It wasn't until I uploaded it in my gallery that I realized it's basically the same color palette as the card a made a couple of weeks ago (four posts ago on my blog :O). Oops! Well, we're off to Florida for a week on Friday so I don't know when I will post again (not that I have been posting frequently or anything :O). I hope you're having a great week and finding lots of time to express your creativity!

Supplies are listed in my SCS Gallery.

Blog Update

I wanted to post a quick message about the changes on my blog. For those of you who follow my blog - THANK YOU :O) I'm humbled that you think my posts and/or creations are interesting.

You may have noticed some obvious...and some less obvious changes on my blog recently. The more obvious changes included removing a lot of sidebar information from the main page of my blog. Some of this information was simply relocated, and some was removed altogether. My blogroll for instance. It used to be on my right sidebar. The list was pretty long and I kept wanting to add blogs, but I was hesitant because I wanted to keep my blog semi-clean and uncluttered. So, I moved it to the navigation tab labeled "Inspiration" under my blog header. This seemed like the perfect option to retain all of my favorite blogs without continuously expanding one of the sidebars.

My labels are now in a dropdown box to keep that list clean. This is actually what I wanted to do with my blogroll, but I haven't taken the time to figure that out yet. It took a while to move all of the links to the navigation tab, believe it or not! LOL

I also moved my About section, my blog Awards, favorite Challenges and Shopping links to the navigation tabs under the header. This REALLY helped to de-clutter my sidebars! The Stampin' Up! link simply takes you to the Stampin' Up! site right now, but this too will be changing. My plan is to make it a useful "business" page with current information about incentives, hostess clubs, and workshops.

I'm gettting there...slowly but surely...thanks to the amazingly talented Amanda at Blogger Buster. She's very good at simplifying her instructions for the basic user.

I really like how my blog looks now...and expect I will continue changing it to better suit my personal style :O) Hope you like the updates!

Birthday Anchor

So, I needed another birthday card for a friend at work. It took me over a week to make it, but I finally finished it up last night :O) I kept messing up the main image, and thinking about how gorgeous Donna Baker's design was. The template is one of Taylor Van Bruggen's sketches (TECC52DB) from her anniversary challenge last week. I didn't even come close to meeting the Thursday deadline, but at least I finished! LOL

I have details about how I masked the boat, cloud and water on the post in my SCS gallery. Supplies are also listed there.

Hope your Monday went well! I still felt icky most of the day, but...I hesitantly say...I've felt a little better over the past two hours (other than this increasing pressure in my ear). So, hopefully that's a good sign and I'll be back to normal in no time. Thanks for your well-wishes!

Oh, and I promise to edit my previous post or create a new tutorial soon with instructions on how I made the woven heart :O) I'm so glad you are actually interested! LOL

Have a great week!