(gah!) PINK!!!

we've got a very special challenge this time at shopping our stash: first, it'll run for two weeks instead of just one; but also, it's a tribute to our late, great, friend and former SOS leader, leslie hanna, whom we still miss very much. so of course we thought it only fitting to make cards featuring the color leslie absolutely loved... or rather, loved to hate: (gah!) PINK!!! ♥

loose floral watercolor painted with peony, fuchsia, wisteria and lime green colorbursts on strathmore watercolor paper, then cut into small hearts using a set of (absolutely ancient!) provocraft/cuttlebug nested heart dies as templates; love stamp: mft; typewriter alphabet stamps: graphic 45; elderly scraps of cardstock that were just the right size (dontcha love that?!): core'dinations (shimmery charcoal) and bazzill (gah! pink!); glossy white cardstock: paper accents; permanent black pen for outlining: pitt artist pen in S nib by faber castell; inks: ranger archival and distress; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

it's no secret that i love pink as much as leslie disliked it. we often laughed at how complementary our tastes were; as well as the fact that we envied each other's opposite skill sets: leslie wished she had what she called my "collage gene" whereas i always drooled over the fact that she could do CAS design with amazing ease. this card isn't quiiiiiiite "clean and simple" it's more like "grungy and simple" i suppose; mostly bc to this day i cannot use black ink on white cardstock without getting a big smudge. so i deliberately incorporated a bit of mess right from the start, so that my later unintentional booboos would look like "i meant to do that" lol!

i started out with a very loose floral that i painted with my favorite pink shades of colorburst (fuchsia and peony) as well as a tiny bit of wisteria for the flower centers and some lime green leaves. i cut my handmade patterned paper into small heart shapes, outlined and inked the edges and set them aside while i built my grungy but white-space embracing (well, sorta) background. the set of graphic 45 alphabet stamps are one of my all-time faves, but, being wood mounted, they are difficult to line up precisely. on the other hand, once you know that, you can design around their beautiful imperfection. which i did by making a bit of a background for where i thought the hearts would go, using one small "love" stamp from an MFT sentiment set that stephanie gave me, and two shades of pink distress ink (spun sugar and picked raspberry) plus a little bit of off-stamped black ink. then i tacked the hearts on with just a teeny bit of adhesive and machine stitched through the not-quite-center of each one. 

i'm playing along with sketch saturday, who've provided this beautiful sketch to inspire us this week (i have flipped it horizontally):

i hope you'll check out all the gorgeous (gah!) pink creations from my design team darlings at SOS, then start planning one of your own!  ♥♥♥

a wonderful christmas, followed by terrible news

good morning, everyone, i hope you've had a lovely holiday, if you celebrate xmas; or, alternately, just a particularly nice weekend! apologies for the radio silence over here, the run-up to the big day became incredibly busy with the finishing of some last minute gifts and projects, including a forest of fun vintage paper trees i made for my mother and aunt, of which i'm showing a few pics in this post. the pretty pinecone and glitter houses displayed with them were a serendipitous *steal* i lucked into (on sale less than half-price!) at michaels before the holiday, but after the trees were in the works... score! 

we had a fantastic if super-busy holiday with my family, followed by loads of cooking and travelling to visit with jeff's family. in between came the "terrible news" part, which... if you read crafty blogs you may already know, but if not, i'm sorry to be the one to tell you: our lovely blogging friend and SOS mastermind, leslie hanna, aka the crooked stamper, died suddenly on friday.

needless to say, all of her online friends-- and she had LOTS-- are reeling a bit from both the shock of such unexpected news and the sadness of the loss. i'm not even going to attempt any kind of eulogy here; i don't think i could do it at the best of times, and frankly i'm still very much in the processing phase. besides, if you knew leslie, you already know everything i'd say: that she was smart, talented, creative, incredibly productive, and funny as hell. she was also exceedingly generous, with her time, with her words, with encouragement for fellow crafters, and especially to any one new in the papercrafting or blogging spheres. she left fabulous comments, she'd drop everything to answer a question, or find you a link, or explain how to do this or that. and always in a way that made you feel that it wasn't a stupid question, that she had been there, too. she was, in fact, incredibly kind... but in such a matter-of-fact way that you almost didn't notice it except in retrospect. which is the essence of graciousness, really, isn't it? though if you said any of that to her, i suspect you'd get an *eyeroll* of epic proportions, lol. 

i suppose it might seem weird to grieve for a person one has never "met" in real life, but i think that my fellow craft bloggers will GET IT. i marvel constantly at the astonishing good luck of having made so many cool crafty friends online... too many to list, really, like leslie, and stephanie, and june, and amy, and all my lovely SOS sisters, and well, all of YOU reading this. the serendipity and good fortune of it never fails to blow my mind. i didn't really have any papercrafty friends irl when i started blogging, so it just felt AMAZING to me to suddenly have contact with people who spent a lot of time thinking about just the right adhesive; or taking photos of store window displays b/c the design *might* look cool on a card, or cutting out an advert from a magazine because the font was pretty. up until then i thought i might actually be the ONLY person in the world who did those things. then, in the crafty blogosphere i found my tribe, lol, and i'm grateful every day! ♥

i'll miss hanging out with leslie at SOS. i'll miss her you-better-not-be-drinking-coffee-unless-you-wanna-wear-it blog posts. i'll miss seeing pictures of bobra, the world's most handsome cat (just ask him!) in her instagram feed. i'll miss the little flurries of short-n-silly emails we'd exchange when we were both online at the same time. in the way of human nature, i expected, without really even thinking about it, that i'd have a few more years of all of that. i suppose we all take the good things --and the good people-- in our lives for granted, on some level. but it's probably not a bad idea to really *SEE* them once in awhile, and express our gratitude to each other and to the universe, whether it be inside our heads, or perhaps in a really long, somewhat meandering blog post, lol! :) i for one, am one of the luckiest beings alive, and being friends with leslie hanna for the last few years was both a pleasure and a privilege i will not soon forget. if there's a crafty afterlife, i figure she's already up there organizing the supplies and thinking up fun challenges for the other inhabitants. meanwhile, i think i'll go cry for a bit, and then make a card... both of which i hope are a fitting tribute.

ciao for the moment, darlings, 

and lots of love to you all!

♥♥♥