Whirlpool of Imagination

A Variety of Happy Mail

As we round off the month of September, I thought I'd show a few pieces of happy mail I have received.

This one is from Debbie. I really like this stamp - it's on my wish list. And I like the colors and overall feel of the card.

This one is from Tara. I like the brightness of the card and I've always liked sun stamps, even though I don't have a tendency to use them.

This one is from Jenny. I really like the colors and the overall layout. I also like the jewels and the element of the small circles under the jewels - gives them an extra layer of dimension which I really like.

And that's a peek into my mailbox. Thanks to all my wonderful pen pals who brighten up my mailbox on a daily basis.

Gentle Thoughts

This week I spent some time going through my card inventories. I was running low of some designs so I did a bit of repeat work. Some themes also needed some more designs so that is what today's card is all about. One category that I don't have a lot of designs for is sympathy cards. I have enough stamps that say "with sympathy" but I don't have many more that contain alternate wording for sympathy cards. When I saw the sympathy set from There She Goes, I decided that I must buy it.

The bird silhouette is stamped with a palette noir ink pad first and second generation, although the picture is not showing the lighter grey layer well. Besides the simple stamping, I used one of my newer cuttlebug folders and just layered.

Today we are staying pretty close to home. Mo's knee went out on him this morning she's taking it easy for himself today. Meg has to cheer so I'm off for that but hopefully later I can come home and create. Have a great day!

Anniversary Mice

Yesterday was my anniversary - 9 wonderful years with Mo.

There we are on the steps of the church. I can't believe how young we look. There is a lot more grey and a few more "character" lines but I love him as much now as I did then. And I'm super excited to see what the future brings for us.

I find making cards for Mo pretty difficult, especially for something like this. I don't want it to be too mushy (he is SO not a mushy guy) but I still want it to be romantic, at least in my eyes. Since I am a big fan of cute, you'll probably notice I lean that way a lot and for themes such as this, I really lean towards cute.

In addition, I decided to use this card as a way to fulfill Bonnie's pen pal challenge. We were to use critters in some way. Stamp critters are generally cute even if the real things are not (I shudder here as I saw a mouse in my garage yesterday - I shooed that thing out REALLY fast). Bonnie is a big fan of House Mouse designs so that was her first choice of critter. I don't have a lot of HM stamps but I pulled out the few that I had and found the perfect one for Mo's card.

                                           

Here we go. The mice are colored with prismacolor pencils and blended with baby oil. I used a sakura sparkle gelly roll pen for the flowers and the sentiment is from Spunky Stamps. And to give it an added something, I pulled out my velvet brads from Doodlebug. Since the HM design is so large, I made this a bigger card than I usually do, going with the 5x7 rather than normal A2. I love this paper and wanted to be able to showcase it a little bit in the background.

I hope you have a fantastic day. It's pouring rain here so I'm staying inside and creating!

Going Bananas

The other day, this was the sight that greeted me from the banana bowl.....

Brown bananas like this mean only one thing...banana bread! This is a favorite of Mo and Conor so brown bananas are always greeted with excitement in my household.

The recipe I'm sharing with you originally came from a Mr. Food cookbook. I don't know if Mr. Food is still around. I originally saw these cookbooks on QVC years ago and have been making this bread every since.

Most of my recipes are a mess. I have cut out papers and notes in books everywhere. Depending on how organized I was last time I made the recipe dictates how easily I find the recipe the next time.

I recently had to shop for my monthly calendar from Lang and as I was browsing the catalog, I found some cute recipe notebooks that hold 4x6 recipe cards. I've decided to start making my own cute recipe cards for the new cute notebook.

If you'd like the recipe, here it is:

 

Banana Bread

 

     ½ cup vegetable oil                           1 tsp baking soda

     1 cup sugar                                      ½ tsp baking powder     

     2 eggs, lightly beaten                        ½ tsp salt

     3 ripe bananas, mashed                    3 tbsp milk

     2 cups flour                                      ½ tsp vanilla extract

 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the oil in a large bowl. Add sugar while beating lightly. Add the eggs and continue beating. Add the mashed bananas and beat just until moistened. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Add the dry mixture to the banana mixture and beat until just moistened. Add the milk and vanilla extract and continue beating just until mixed. Pour the mixture into a greased and floured loaf pan and bake for 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for about 10 minutes. Turn out onto the rack and cool completely.

Have a great night!

Leaves Notecards

Is it really only Tuesday? The week is feeling long to me, how about you? I have a quick post tonight. After the set of pumpkin notecards, I did up a second September set. (Always sending in notes it seems). This set had more stamping, rather than paper and coloring as accents.

This time around, I pulled out a bunch of stamps and ink pads and just had some fun layering the images.

All the stamps came from an Inque Boutique set. It's one of those build a scene sets. It comes with a lot more stamps than I used but I just picked 5 or 6 that I thought I could layer. The inks are various Stampin' Up and CTMH inks and the orange/red leaf is a kaleidacolor pad.

Here's the set - nice contrast to the rug in the office, huh?

And really, that's all I've got today. The morning went well but the afternoon and evening were crazy. My energy levels are fading fast so I'm thinking early bed tonight. Have a good one!

The White Out Challenge

This weeks Limited Supply Challenge over at Splitcoast was fun! I sort of bent the rules with the (tiny) addition of patterned paper but hopefully they don't kick me out of the challenge for that!

Here is my Birthday Pieced Dress. The idea was to use white as the main color. We could then use black, brown OR grey and one accent color.

We were not supposed to use patterned paper or background stamps and we couldn't use anything but the accent color for any extra color. We could use the cuttlebug and ribbon and other embellishments. Here is my best try.

Both the dress and sentiment come from Gina K stamp sets. I used patterned Christmas paper from last year to piece the dress. I liked the shade of red on the polka dots so I ran with it.

I used the swiss dots folder from the cuttlebug and the jewels are from Doodlebug. I'm not the best at paper piecing but I like the end result here, looks pretty good to me.

No stamping for me today unfortunately. This afternoon Meg had to cheer at a football game so I was there cheering for her instead. Their uniforms came in - she looked sooooo cute!

I hope your weekend was as fun and fruitful as mine - I'm looking forward to getting back to some serious stamping this week. Until next time......

Drowning in Clutter

I spent the day trying to declutter the house, including my stamp studio. I did a pretty good job on parts of the house, just hit the tip of the iceberg in my studio. But I'm feeling good about the progress I made so far - hope your weekend is going well too.

A Silhouette for a Challenge

How could I not do a Splitcoast challenge that told you to use silhouettes???? Is that not perfect for me of what? The Ways to Use it Challenge for this week - WT184 - was to use silhouettes.

  I recently got these Inkadinkado stamps from AC Moore. I was immediately drawn to the flourishy nature of the stamps along with the Halloween theme. I've had them a couple of weeks but today's challenge was the jump start I needed to use them.

Everything is stamped with palette noir ink and pretty simple beyond that. I used a Sakura jelly roll pen to add a bit of sparkle in the wake of the witch. I tried a lot of things to "dirty" up the picture, but in the end, my natural simple tendencies won out and I kept it clean.

I had a tough time creating today. I'm fighting a little infection and am not quite myself. I kept starting and stopping the whole creative process and finally was able to follow through. I'm looking forward to the weekend and a chance to rest a bit more - I think lack of sleep has chased away some creative mojo. If you have extra, please send some my way! Have a splendid evening!

Pumpkin Notecards

With the start of the school year, my day to day correspondence has increased. There always seems to be some reason to be writing quick notes to the teachers. Every year I've said I would make pretty notecards to write on and has it happened before this? Nope. I've been inspired by some great examples over at Splitcoast to follow through with this goal this year.

I've also decided that not only will I make cute little notecards, I will make them completely seasonal and each month I will make different designs. Here is the first design.

The pumpkin I used here is from TAC and I colored it with prismacolor markers. This is also a great way to use up scraps. I am forever keeping thin strips of patterned paper, saying I just might use it. Such was the case with the paper I used for these notecards. The strips were just the perfect width for my needs.

These are quick and easy so that several of the same design can be made at the same time, giving me enough notecards to get through any given month.

Here is the first set of notecards made up. Which is completely timely because I need to send in a note to Conor's teacher tomorrow! Are you making up notecard sets? If so, I would love to see what you come up with. Drop me a link so I can see what you're doing with these too.

Silhouette Sympathy

Are you surprised to see that I'm using silhouette stamps again? I'm telling you ~ I don't think I can use anything else at the moment. That's all my brain wants to create with!

What's fun today is that this is a new stamp company that I'm trying out because you know my motto.....you can never have enough stamps!  (most especially if they are silhouettes or flowers and extra points if they are both).

On a round of blog hopping one day, I discovered There She Goes stamps. I had missed the initial preorder period and had to wait for the stamps to get onto the website before I could try these little guys out. These are good quality acrylic stamps. They were not flimsy as some acrylics are and stamped well pretty much right from the start.

Both the floral silhouette and sentiment are from the same set. I stamped the flowers with starry night palette ink (same with the sentiment), both first and second generation. Sometimes acrylic stamps stamp out almost completely on the first generation so that you can't do a second generation with them. I found no problem doing that with these. The trick I have found with pretty much all acrylics (well, the high quality) is when you are stamping the image for the first time, always stamp it on a piece of scrap paper, some of which I keep right at my stamping table. This is almost like a warm up for the stamp. It seems to need to have ink on it and then after that, all subsequent images stamp just fine.

The rest of the card is pretty obvious. It is done in my usual clean and simple style.

I am really pleased with these stamps. I would recommend them without any hesitation. And if you check out the website, you'll notice there are ways to acrue "points" for free items - something I am all for. I am looking forward to see what other fun sets Jessica comes up with - I am pretty positive that I will be a repeat customer!