Whirlpool of Imagination

Happy Halloween!

Good gravy, it's been a long day! We've had two halloween parades, two halloween parties, a birthday party and trick or treating. The kiddos are flying high on sugar from all their activities. I don't know if they're tired but I can certainly say I'm exhausted!

I got all the candy treats done last night with time to spare. I ended up with 23 lollipop covers and 18 candy corn bags. The kids were excited to have treats for their friends and my kids have discovered that they are huge fans of candy corn.

I already showed the lollipop covers but here are the candy corn bags. Just like the lollipop covers, I used the images from TAC's October stamp set. Their size is just perfect for projects like this.

I'm still not feeling 100% so I think its off to bed early for me. Hope everyone had a happy halloween.

More Iris Folding

Yep, here's another one. This dreidel pattern is also from Circle of Crafters. I kept it pretty simple and just used layers of cardstock to tie in color from the patterned paper.

I'm in the midst of Halloween treats for the kids' classes. I'm doing a last minute change of plan for Conor's class so I need to run out for candy corns. (let's hope there's some left!).I have all the pieces done so I'm hoping the actual construction will go quickly.

Iris Folding

I have several projects in the works and many are half finished. So hopefully, I'll have lots to show you this week. I am still working on my iris card spinner so you may see lots of these in the coming days. The last time I made this design, I stuck exclusively with the blue and silver. This time I wanted something just a little different so I added the rose/mauve color as well. This pattern can be found on the main iris site at Circle of Crafters.

I'm still fighting this cough and if I can figure out if I'm supposed to be taking an expectorant or a suppressant, I'd probably be a happier camper. I do plan on some studio time today which will hopefully take my mind off the cough.

Hack, Hack, Hack

This coughing thing has gotten ahold of me. I can't decide if I'm better tonight or not but all the creative life has been sucked out of me. I'm going to crash on the couch with a blanket and a good book. I'm hoping for a good nights sleep and a new outlook tomorrow.

Iris Holiday Lights

I am about 2 1/2 weeks out from my craft fairs so now I'm filling in gaps in inventory. I have a separate spinner for iris folded cards and definitely need to do some work on those. This is a quick holiday lights card. I used poly satin ribbon for the lights. If I had had metallic red, I would have thrown that in to add a bit of extra dimension. The sentiment is from Purple Onion stamps and the string is stickles (holly).

Tonight I'm working on popcorn covers. They were a best seller last year so that is my task for tonight.

Celtic Candle Christmas

I've wanted to use this celtic candle but haven't really been sure what to do. Somewhere (and I go to so many gallerys I am sorry to say I don't remember who I got the idea from) I saw a great holiday card using a paisley background. I stamped the paisley in red on red cardstock and stamped "celebrate" along the side. The candle is stamped in dark green chalk ink and the flame and berries are colored with stickles. In person, I like the subtle paisley as a holiday background, but then I like this paisley with pretty much everything!!

Stamps: paisley (Cornish Heritage), candle (Scottish Borders), sentiment (Stampin' Up)

Party Girl

This week at The Stamp Shack, we were challenged to stamp something and use paper piecing. Right away I thought about this fun stamp from Beeswax Rubber Stamps. I took the stamp and stamped it on my white cardstock and then stamped it again on my red cardstock. I cut out the dress portion from the red cardstock and adhered it to the white cardstock. Easy, but fun! It gives the card a little bit of dimension. The sentiment is from Spunky Stamps and the background is from TAC. I used palette noir and CTMH grey flannel for inks. I will probably add some sparkle to her bracelets with some stickles but I wanted to scan this and was too impatient to wait for anything to dry!

If Today is Your Birthday......

then you share a birthday with me!!!!!!!! That's my big news for today.

I did get some studio time this morning. My father in law came over to play with Conor and I did a massive inventory on my craft fairs stock. I am down to three weeks and counting and still have a lot of work to do. I have some standby's but I like to offer a good variety and new items. I don't want people that come visit my booth every year to feel like I just put out the same old items year after year.

While I should be playing around with holiday designs, I took out those Stampin' Up tulips again. I was still in a blue mood so I went with it. The blue base card I stamped with the Cornish Heritage paisley background. For the tulip, I used Blue Iris chalk ink. Sometimes simple ideas take me a big longer.....with these two step stamps, I kept trying to find two colors that worked well together. When it wasn't working, it hit me that I could just do a second generation stamping of the tulip and then use the same color for the details, just first generation. Thereby, a perfect match. I'm sure everyone else in the stamping world had already figured this out but that was my big idea of the day.

I'm hoping to get some more creating time tonight. I do have a couple of holiday ideas brewing.

The Redone Card

This morning my brother comes over to check the scanner - he turns in on and it WORKS PERFECTLY. It's kind of like when the kids are terrors all day, you're worn out, Dad comes home and they're perfect angels!

Most of the card is the same as the one posted a couple of days ago. I cut down the sage block a bit and matted it with pumpkin cardstock. I changed the ribbon from the really harsh orange to a softer tangerine like color. In real life, it matches the pumpkin really well. I like the softer orange better and I like the extra layer of matting. The two blocks before just seemed too harsh a contrast.

When I went to Michael's the other day, I did a quick check of their $1 bin stamps. They have had some really cute designs lately. This is a mini card design for a set I made today. The words say thanks so much. I watercolored the two larger flowers and on the small ones, I just colored them in with regular colored pencils. My grand plan of watercoloring everything went out the window when I realized that I sell these in sets of 10 and the watercoloring would have been lost in the tiny flowers anyway.

Mini Birthday Girl

So my scanner is getting its official diagnosis tomorrow and we'll see if its fixable.Today I took pictures of a couple of cards instead of scanning. I new at taking pics of cards and the reworked design from a couple of days ago was placed against a darker background and the card has a dark background which I only just realized when I went to resize it for the blog. So that card will have to wait. Instead, you get a mini card design.

Conor went to a birthday party today and I put this together for the little girl. The girl stamp is from Close to my Heart and the happy b-d background is from Cornish Heritage. It's just simply colored with colored pencils. I wanted simple but cute since we're talking three year olds here.