A sketch and a Jeep

     Hey there my crafty friend, so happy you popped on by. I have a new card for the Wednesday Sketch challenge over at The Outlawz that started yesterday. Sure hope you can join us, would love to see what you come up with!

The Sketch

My take on it using a digi from Sandi Huggett - Sandi Samples:)

Challenges

Through the Craftroom Door

     I am entering this card into Challenge #26 Photo Inspiration over the Through the Craftroom Door. Which is where I got the inspiration for my colour choices from :) It is another awesome site where you can play in challenges for a chance to win something,  oh my how fun, I just love it :) Alot of my friends from The Outlawz play here too, so come check it out and play along there too, combine the two challenges to double your chances...cool huh? 

    If you have a minute please leave me a comment, I love to read them and it helps me find you so I can see what you've been up to. Also if you would like to play along with us in the challenges please visit us at 

The Outlawz :) Ty so much for stopping by, have a great day, big inky hugs!

Cindy  :)

Time to Party!!

     Hey there, it's Wednesday once again and time to enter my card into this weeks Peachy Keen Challenge which is colour inspiration :) I have always been fascinated with the patterns on peacock feathers, they are so beautiful!

 

     Immediately I figured I'd use an elephant taking care of the grey, and following suit with my card base in the same colour, although it is barely noticeable in the pic, on my screen anyway. Once again all papers are from my scrap stash, (I have so much of it) but I do know the solid papers except for the navy and grey card base were from  recollections 8.5X11 sheets. The designer papers are old pieces I've had for about three yrs.

     I originally made an elephant from the New Arrival cart and using the Pk stamp set to match, then at the last minute I decided to use my Happy Go Lucky Elephant from the Cottage Cutz spring collection, it's so adorable and I hadn't used it yet. The clock and sentiment are from the PKSC-04 April stamp kit of the month and the Happy Birthday strip was cut with a MS jumbo punch. The turquoise doily was made using a Fiskars round doily punch and I backed it with a 4" doily from the $ store.  My sentiment is stamped on a really pretty piece of purple paper but on my screen it looks kind of washed out, I sure hope it looks better on yours lol!

The elephant was cut out twice, popped up off the doilies and his ears and trunk are popped up off the first elephant so I could hang the clock from his trunk.

I even made him a hat using the same stamp set and glued on a piece of a cotton ball for the pom pom but I think he looks cuter without it, what do you think? It is green with navy spots, but they looks black! 

Challenges

Peachy Keen Challenge 19: Colour Inspiration

     I am so glad you dropped by to check out my post today and hope you like my card. It think it would make a cute invitation as well as a bday card, what do you think? Well I am just getting this posted with less than and hr to spare so I need to get it linked up. I love to read your comments and appreciate them so much, ty!  Big inky hugs and happy scrappin' 

Cindy    :)

Spreading my Wings

     Today I discovered that Market Street Stamps were illustrated by Angelica Suarez, how I missed that I have no clue. I couldn't figure out why they are sold on the Peachy Keen Site and now I know, LOL!! Angelica is a talented artist and I love that most of her stamps are accompanied by words of wisdom. Now I have something else on my wish list to collect,  ohh boyyyy!!! LOL
     Anyway, when I checked out the MSS blog I noticed there was a challenge and decided to make a card for it. Why not right :) Time to spread my wings, move on to new sites, maybe even get lucky and be chosen for another Design Team, or a guest designer spot, heck I might even win a prize, wouldn't that be cool!! :)
     In order to play along in this MSS challenge I had to own at least one of their stamps, lucky for me I do hehehehe, it's called Believing Butterfly and it's only 5.00 awesome stamp set (includes two) fantastic price, that's why I bought it, lol I love butterflies and it fit my budget. You get a beautiful butterfly (of course) and an encouraging sentiment.
      The challenge is called May "Paint the Town" colour challenge. We need pretty pink, rose bud, mellowed mellon and vintage glass green. Now you don't have to use the exact colours, just pick from your stash what you feel best represents them, perfect I have a ton of stash lol !

Challenges

Market Street Stamps ~ May "Paint the Town" Challenge

Little Miss Muffet Challenges ~ Anything Goes

     My flowers are light pink prima's bunched together and hot glued to resemble carnations. I brushed the tips of the petals with a MS rose ink pad. I stamped the butterflies 6X and layered to sort of give the illusion of flight. Two sets were stamped with two shades of pink which really isn't evident now that I tried to add some definition to the pattern with a gel pen. :) The third set was done is a pale orange melon colour paired with yellow, then tried to define with a yellow gel pen as well. :)  The bodies and antennae have Eucaluyptus stickles and the wings on the top two have fruit punch stickles and the one on the bottom has some yellow and some spiced marmalade brushed on them with a paint brush, while wet I shaped the wings a bit.  

     The lighter green flourish is a Die-namics die, the larger is a Cherry Lynn die that I cut apart and randomly placed. My fleur de lis die cut is a light melon although on my screen has a deeper orange tone. I placed a 4" doily behind it to give it a bit more shape and soften the melon against the green check. I added a really pretty green almost aqua or turquoise looking but it was sheer so I added the rose paper ribbon stuff and tied a bow with the piece I cut off. I love to add pearls or gems to my cards and pearls look great as butterfly trails. All the papers used are bits and bobs from my scraps drawers which I store by colour, I have a lot of scraps :) I rarely cut a fresh piece of paper. 

     So that's my card for this challenge, if your interested in playing along please join us as I'm sure the DT would love to have you. Also one randomly chosen lucky participant will win a stamp set of their chose with a 15.00 value...SWEET, I could use more MS stamps so of course I wanted to play along!!  LOL  Have a great day, hope to see you in the challenge. good luck and go get inky :) Bye for now, till we meet again my sweet crafty friend!

   P.S.  I just found another fun blog and decided to enter my card in their challenge too. I checked out their site and it sounds like great fun with lots of opportunities to win great prizes woohoo come check them out over at the  Little Miss Muffet Challenges blog! There's still five days to enter and I am entry #104, wow, I hope Mr. Linky likes me LOL 

Cindy        :)  big inky hugs 

When your under the weather

....take time to get better!

Challenges

Peachy Keen Challenge 18 ~ Anything Goes

The Outlawz ~ Twisted Thursday ~ Anything Goes with a rainy day twist

     I really wanted to make a project using the May stamp club set but nothing I came up with was feeling quite right. When I was looking around the Challenges at The Outlawz I seen this one and thought hey I could use my Shower Peepers for this one cause it has an umbrella, then thought, oh hey I could enter it in both challenges, woohoo :) LOL  This is what I came up with, hope you like it, hope PK likes it more :) I almost gave up and wasn't going to do this weeks challenge but I don't want to miss a week, you never know I might get lucky and win the monthy prize, well, I don't have much luck so maybe not but if I don't try I won't for sure right :)

6X6 base-baby blue recollections cs

I used the rainbow stamp from PKSC-02 February kit to make my background paper

the rain boot paper is by American Crafts

I made vellum overlays for the rainbow and rain boot paper because the bright patterns were over powering my focal image

Traced my focal image diecut and hand cut to make a mat for it, the diecut is from the Fleur De Lis Motifs Spellbinders Shapeabilities set.

I used my Shower peeper for my focal image, and just hand made the little flower pot, I wanted to use the stamp of the cup of hot coffee from the April stamp set but the image was to big for my little peeper to hold :)

Covered the umbrella with a piece of acetate to make it look shiny

The doily strip was made with a Nellie Snellen border die and cutting both edges, then I used a fiskars ribbon hole punch to thread the light green ribbon. My sentiment is from the PKSC-04 stamp set.

Added some orange gems to the focal die cut, gave the flowers some shape and added stickles to the centres, plus added those cute gems for raindrops :) 

Hope you like my card this week, here's the bg  paper I made for it :) 

 After colouring them in with my Prismacolour pencil crayons I smoothed out the colours using a fantastix colouring tool and some Goo Gone, a lot cheaper than Gamsol and works pretty good softening the strokes, I just started in this picture :)

 All finished here, looks smoother don't you think :)

     Well ty so much for coming by to see what I have been up to, I hope you  leave me a comment, I would love to see what your working on and what challenges you've entered lately :) Have a great rest of your week, big inky hugs my crafty peeps :)

Cindy 

Outlawz DT sketch challenge

     Hey there, so glad you dropped in. As you may know I am on the Wednesday Sketch Challenge design team over at the Outlawz and it's that time again for a fresh challenge, I was also responsible for posting this weeks challenge and wanted to share it with you here in blog land as well :)
     If you have never been to "The Outlawz" I suggest you come on over and check us out. We have a wonderful site with so many awesomely talented design team members as well as followers who enjoy joining in our challenges just as much as we enjoy posting them, and boy do they ever rise to the occasion. We love it!!
     We have a different challenge starting everyday of the week and one that runs every 2 - 3 weeks. We also have some awesome sponsors, so if you love to create/share and be in the running to win something awesome then The Outlawz is the place for you.
     Our challenges are
Sundays -  CAS- in other words "clean and simple"  
Mondays - Greetings - greeting cards, LO's etc that follow the weeks theme and have a greeting on it
Tuesday - Colour- just what it says....use the colours for that week, and include the twist ;)
Wednesday - Sketch - each week a different sketch to follow 
Thursdays - Twisted Thursday - Anything goes with a different twist each week 
Friday - Copic/Promaker - use alcohol inks and follow the theme
Saturday - Paper Ala Mode - create something from the theme provided
CFC - means creative freebie challenge, two very talented ladies who are also super sweet and kind provide the digi's for you to use to create anything you like. You have your choice of the digi's provided for that challenge, and two or three weeks to enter something, if you want to get more free digi's enter each challenge.
     Now doesn't this all sound like fun...you betchya....now I know not everyone has or uses alchohol inks, or maybe their style isn't CAS, but that's the beauty of it, there's lots of choices and awesome inspiration to keep you coming back for more. Hope to see you joining in all the fun soon!
Now for this week's sketch and my entry:  

     Well, what do you think? Please leave me a comment if you like my card, and/or if your going to check out "The Outlawz"! The butterfly is one of Sandi's free digi images, isn't is gorgeous, I love it! It is from a few challenges ago and I paired it with the MS jumbo butterfly punch to set the tone for my card. I wanted to try using different colours than usual, I'm more of a pink, purple or blue girl :) orange just isn't a colour I use very often. I used gel pens for the glittery look to my image and some stickles on the body and dots on the wing tips. The background paper is so pretty in real life, it is already textured and shimmery in a very pale yellow colour although on my screen it looks cream!

  Big inky hugs to all my crafty peeps 

    Cindy   :) 

It's Time....

Challenge

Peachy Keen Challenge 17 :: Sketch

     It's that time again for another Peachy Keen Challenge! This week it is a sketch challenge. I decided to make a retirement card using two of my aunt's 3 newest stamp sets that will be living at my house YAY!!!! Ty so much Aunt Kathy. And she entered her first PK challenge this week too, it's very cute, but she doesn't have a blog yet so she emailed it in!

    I have been busy busy all week and only had the last two hrs of the challenge left to come up with a card. I have been thinking about it off and on but just couldn't come up with anything. This isn't my best creation to date but it's still kinda cute, after all it's got a Peachy face on it which makes everything cute, thank goodness :) 

   I used PKSC-04 April 2012 for the stop watch, hat and sentiment along the bottom, and the clock faces for the red strip. For the face, arm with beer, and arm that I added another beer to after cutting it out of the hand  is from PKSC-02 February 2012.

     All paper is from my stash. I used my MS Arch Lattice border punch to make my strip down the right side and hand wrote Retired!! I used Spellbinders curved rectangles to cut the red mat, then traced the inside of the same size die on the blue and hand cut so I could have the slight edge effect.
     I used gold and silver gel pens to colour the stop watch, red gel pen for the tongue, my pearl pen to cover the centre area of the watch so it kind of looks like the background is made from a shell, some very expensive watches have that type of background for their faces and I love how they look :) I then used my snow writer for the foam on the beers :) Cheers

     I hope you like my card this week, it's not about to win any challenges I know but I had to play to get my name in for the draw at the end of the month for the $30.00 gift certificate from PK. Did you know that if you play every week, and I do :) you get a chance at winning one? You should join in the fun, there's a lot of awesome talent over there!
    Ty so much for dropping by, I hope you have a minute to leave me some love and I can visit you to see what you've been up to lately and leave you some love back:)  Have a great week and if this coming wkend is a long one for you, like it is for me have a great time and stay safe. May god bless you and yours, until next time happy scrappin' !

Big inky hugs
Cindy    :) 

Souper Fun PK Challenge 16

     Hey there my crafty friend, ty for stopping by to see what I have for you today. The new Peachy Keen Challenge this week is to make a 3D project using a soup can! As soon as I saw that I knew I just had to make a luminiere. (At least I think that's what it's called, lol)

Here's my can before...

after

    A couple of  holes on the eyes got away from me, it was really hard to hammer a pin on the line when you can't see if your on it when your hand is in the way holding the pin. LOL But I didn't do to badly :) I used my copics for the nose and the cheeks, but the cheeks weren't showing up like the nose was so I used a pink sharpie.

    At first I was making it so it would hang from a branch or something and I'd put a candle in it for the light to shine through, then I thought ohhhhhh all the rain is going to get in and it will get all rusty. Plus I didn't want to use real candles because I painted the inside of the can white. Flames would wreck it and the can would get hot and black inside. I wanted to paint the outside to but it isn't easy stamping the face on a soup can,  it can slip giving you shadow lines, which happened to me on my first attempt. I am using Staz On black ink, luckily I can fix mishaps with a q-tip and some goo-gone but if I had painted it white, I wouldn't be able to do that. I had to erase the image a few times and start over trying to get a good impression. 

     You have to carefully ink up your stamp really well, position your can so it can't roll and lay your stamp over the area you want the image. Carefully press all the inky areas and try to push some of the ink pad into the ridges. I got really good coverage and only had to fix a few spots with my black sharpie. The first one I made with the opening at the top, and I used a small finishing nail to make all the holes but I could only manage to get the holes in the valley's of the ridges instead of the hills. The holes were all different sizes and although it was really cute and completely usable I started over.

    This time I turned the can upside down and made it into a table top ornament, I used a pin to make all the holes, they are more uniform, smaller and I could put holes in the hills and the valleys, it was much easier.

     To punch the holes I had an old Ferero Rocher container, I set the can in there with a plastic lid from the nails so it wouldn't move as I was hammering the pin, this worked out awesome.

     After I got him all full of holes I thought he needed something so I gave him a hat from half of a plastic bubble container I picked up at M's a while ago with lace in it. I just painted the inside of it with blue acrylic paint, and wrote my sentiment on the outside with a black sharpie.

         After all this I can't find my little battery operated candles, they must be packed away with my Christmas stuff, but I always have a few in here for different projects I make, no idea what I did them after change my rm around a few weeks ago, hmmmm. Oh well, no biggie, my MIL bought these light up footballs to put in some candle holders I altered a couple yrs ago for a wedding shower I put on, they glow blue and have 3 settings, I left it on the constant glow setting so it wouldn't be flashing, to hard to take a pic that way, LOL! 

I tried but can't get a good shot in the dark, I wish I had a tri-pod

     It's my youngest sons girlfriends B-day in 2 weeks, and he wants to give this to her, she will love it, she saw me making it and kept saying how cute it is, and that she wants to make one :) Her fave colours are blue and green, that's why I made a blue hat with green trim for it :) She doesn't know she's getting it, the hat fits perfectly, like it was made for this project and look what will be going inside!  :) She's gonna freak LOL How exciting!

     I hope you enjoyed my project today, and maybe you got some cool ideas floating around in your head now to make something like this. I actually want to make a bunch of these but with different faces, now I need the whole set LOL and I want them in my Gazebo hooked to the mini lights, that would be soooo cool :) I guess we better eat more soup, we rarely eat soup, usually only use it to make my noodles and sauce, mushroom pork chops or scalloped potatoes. But I need a bunch of these! LOL Thank you for dropping by, please leave me a comment so I can visit you too, I love to see what your up to and leave some love! Happy Scrappin!

Cindy   :)

    

Made my own background paper!!!

     First of all, I'd like to thank the PK DT for choosing my garden markers for top 3 last week, I am so happy to have won this badge which I am trying to get on my blog to proudly display. Since they changed blogger on me I have been having a time figuring out how to edit stuff and add things other then blog posts. I think I have it fixed now but wanted to get this posted, the challenge ends in less than a half hr. Just wanted to say that, ty sooooooooooo much ladies, it means the world to me!  Big Inky hugs ladies. :)
On to my card........

Challenges

PK Challenge 15 - Just Cards 

Just what the title says,  this weeks challenge over at Peachy Keen was to make our own. I've done that before, but I usually make scene's with clouds and stuff, on occasion I do the random stamping thing with versamark or coloured inks etc, but I wanted this paper to be special and I took extra care.

     I tried several different techniques until I made the one I really liked. In fact, I had one finished before this one and was going to post about it after dinner, but while preparing our evening meal an idea came to me. So, after American Idol was over (LOL) I quickly whipped up the card I am entering into the challenge. I used PK-268 Happy Mother's Day. I cut and folded a mauve card for my background. Cut a slightly smaller white mat for it and set to work. I wanted to use the butterfly from this set so I stamped it once in black on a scrap piece of white card stock, then carefully cut it out with my exacto knife.  

     On my white mat I randomly stamped it several times with a  purple Ink it up! stamp pad. Then I used the negative from cutting out the butterfly image and used it to mask off the surroundings of the image. I then randomly sponged pink and yellow MS chalk ink to the wings and used a q-tip to add green to the body. 

     After I got them all done I thought it looked really pretty but kind of bare. I got out a small background stamp from a See D's stamp set that came in a huge collection of 262 stamps, which consisted of several different sets but I don't know the name of the set, there wasn't any labels for them. I randomly stamped a light purple and some green in the white areas. 

     Added a ribbon and the layered pendant I made after playing around with my MS and Fiskars punches the other night. Made a bow for it added a few purple gems and called it done. The sentiment is from the PK Mother's Day set as well.

 I layered the two with pop dots and mounted it with pop dots as well.

The other night I was going through all my punches and trying to find their proper names so I can write them in my posts when I use them. On I believe it was the ED Success site they had a video about different ways to use your corner and border punches, I knew about doing the straight ribbons and cutting both sides but learned a trick to line it up correctly and learnt about making these pendant type shapes like you get in spellbinders sets with corner punches. I went crazy and have made them with every punch I own, now I am going to finish laminating them all, and use them as templates for my cards to see what I want to use on certain cards. My options have just expanded like crazy woohooo  :)

     If you like the paper I made, or think the techniques I used were inspirational please leave me a comment. I love to hear what you think.  Try the reverse masking idea, I don't know if it's been done before, I've seen people use the image to mask it from other images, but never seen anyone use the negative as a mask to colour the image, I like how soft my paper looks, and I am really happy with my card. :) Ty so much for coming by and checking out what I made for this weeks challenge. :) Have a great day and happy scrappin'

Cindy  :)