the bad news is we're out of band aids...

...the good news is i recycled the box to make some pretty washi flowers for this week's ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ card in celebration of earth day. want to see?

recycled elements: band aid box used as a base for the poinsettias, red heart earring used in place of a brad; patterned paper: echo park, my mind's eye, studio calico; journal card: echo park; poinsettia die: bosskut; washi tapes: october afternoon, my mind's eye, recollections, heidi swapp, martha stewart, love my tapes; ink: colorbox; glossy white cardstock: paper accents; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

i covered the inside of the flattened box-- which is nice thin white chipboard-- with strips of all my pretty red washi tapes, then used my bosskut poinsettia die:

i've also up-cycled a garage-sale earring, to use in place of a brad; jeff bent the back over for me, so it would hold the flower together:

i used the sketch and flowery elements of kirsty vittetoe's awesome card, the CASE-ing of which is this week's challenge at city crafter:

this is a pretty restrained card, for me, but i love the bright colors and i'm pretty excited to have at least one greeting which will be mail-able with just *one* postage stamp, lol!

meanwhile, stephanie has also made another lovely card for your inspiration, why not jump on over to ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and see that right now?!

SOS197: lost and found

can you guess what we want to see for this week's challenge at shopping our stash? it's called "lost and found" which should give you a pretty big hint: we're looking for creations that feature something you lost track of for a bit... whether it was actually lost, or perhaps you just forgot about it? i've got a bit of each on my tag, which i'll esplain in a minute.

ok, i realize as i start typing this, there really aren't any official papercrafting products in this one, unless you count the (admittedly awesome) dymo label sentiment, the tiny mrs. grossman's heart sticker, and the basic grey patterned paper i used as background for the photo. lots of vintage and thrifting goodies tho: sheet music and chinese text from two seriously elderly falling-apart volumes found at book sales; little buildings cut from a new york tourist brochure; a real (tho expired, obviously) metrocard and o'course my "FOUND" items: plastic slide mount of which i have nearly an entire box (yahoo!) and that funny little heart pin (jeff ripped the back off it for me) which was in a box of treasure i'd started to think got lost or donated when we moved! oh yeah and a fab tag from amy tsuruta, who rocks, as i'm sure you already know! ♥

the thing i thought i'd lost is the little blue plastic heart pin; but actually i thought i'd lost my whole entire tin of little pins acquired at various garage sales over the years. worse yet, i knew that was in the same box as my buckle collection, a bunch of game pieces and cards, lots of weird funky earrings and other dimensional "treasures" i haven't seen since we've moved. i'd love to say i suddenly found it now because i've been doing a major organizing project in the basement, but in fact, it was a fluke discovered whilst looking for something else entirely for lovely husband jeff! the thing i'd forgotten i owned was the cool half full box of plastic slide mounts i got at goodwill, i think, quite some time ago. those guys turned up while linda was here, and we had fun playing with them.

the layout of my tag is based on miss leslie's latest crooked stamper sketch challenge (CSSC #2 to be precise); though admittedly i've done a pretty a loose take on that fab sketch:

i've been doing a lot of mixed media backgrounds lately, so it felt really cool to be making an old school collage this time. oof i nearly forgot to mention my favorite bit of this, which is the tiny picture of the queensboro bridge-- it's from an illustrated children's encyclopedia-- which is the absolute perfect size for the slide mount. even more exciting is the fact that the book in question has LOTS of illustrations about this size, so yeah, you'll be seeing this trick again for sure! :)

the other sos designers have been busy finding treasures, too-- you really need to hop on over and see the fabulous things they've made! ♥

let there be peace on EARTH (day)

if you've played along with ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ any time within the last few years you'll know that the prompt which falls at the beginning of october is always "pink xmas" (in honor of breast cancer awareness) and the one that encompasses earth day is always to create holiday cards that re-use, recycle or upcycle something! here's my take on the latter:

leafy panel trimmed from a holiday card; vintage sheet music from my stash; tim holtz reindeer diecut from a just-slightly-too-small scrap of wood veneer from kate's paperie; red and gold cardstock from paper source; ink: prima; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, xyron

the pretty laser-cut panel comes from my brother-in-law alan's card this past holiday season. he's told me many times he intentionally chooses cards that have some dramatic or interesting element he thinks i'll want to save and use on a card, and he is successful in this goal quite a large percentage of the time! on the original card, the panel was layered over a fancy gold embossed sentiment:

i carrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrefully pulled the top layer off the card... (thankfully it was only attached at the edges!) ...trimmed it down and placed it over some lovely patina-ed vintage sheet music. the reindeer is cut from quite a small scrap of wood veneer; if you look closely you'll notice that it was so small, this reindeer didn't quite wind up having any feet!!! needless to say, i'm saving this one to send back to alan in december, i hope he'll be suitably impressed!

this fortnight we're lucky enough to have our fellow belle (and my fellow jersey girl!) lorraine of paper vernissage with us as lovely guest star over at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥; both she and stephanie have made gorgeous masterpieces of inspirational up-cycling just for you! why not check those out right now, darlings? you could leave them some love, too, whilst you're there! ♥

sing a song of SPRING!

this week at shopping our stash we're teaming up with words 2 scrap by for their challenge #16: the earth has music; which means you can make one card for TWO challenges, and we all love that, right? there are lots of ways to go with this theme, both literal and figurative. i did a little of each, expressed by quite lot of vintage paper, which always adds up to a happy time for me! :)

sheet music, bird illustration, and garden painting from my stash of vintage goodness; lovely old lace from my MIL; patterened paper: prima, basic grey, my mind's eye; florals: petaloo; leaves: prima 

i used the sketch from the current fusion card challenge, which is pretty awesome, as i think you'll agree:

i was heading towards yellows in my color scheme in order to incorporate the color aspect of the fusion, but then i saw this gorgeous photo, which is the starting point for the shabby tea room's current challenge, beautiful blooms; and suddenly i found myself veering more towards neutrals with little pops of pink and green:

my favorite part of this is the sweet sparrow, which came from a vintage nature dictionary. i fussy-cut him so he could perch on top of the beautiful floral illustration that came from different falling-apart book i found at a rummage sale. (both elements are backed with thin white cardstock i ran through my xyron machine to make them a little stronger; vintage paper can be very thin and rather brittle.) the little scrap of lace is from a bag full of odds and ends my mother-in-law passed along to me, which is kind of making me think that this will turn out to be her mother's day card... hence the lack of sentiment... i want to be able to hedge my bets, lol!

one bet of which i'm absolutely CERTAIN is that you will very much enjoy seeing the other design team members' gorgeous projects at both SOS and W2SB... why not give yourself a treat and visit those right now! ♥

speaking of art friends...

...on saturday i finally got to meet up with my fellow cardmaker and jersey girl lorraine, of paper vernissage! together we drove up to paper anthology in kenvil, nj, to take elisabeth's utterly awesome ranger techniques class. here are my cards:

is that distress ink bokeh-effect card gorgeous or what?! and howsabout that sweet dina wakley bird on his background of blended distress paints? not to mention the fabulous alcohol inks we combined to make a granite effect and then embossed on top of. want to learn how to make all of these? elisabeth will teach this one last time on april 21st and there are still places available.

meanwhile, i'll be teaching my scraptastic rainbow cards twice more: this coming wednesday, april 8th; and sunday, april 19th... i'd love to see you there! ♥ see full details for all the great offerings in the class section of the paper anthology website.

from norway (& nj!) with love

recently i had the very great pleasure of having my lovely friend linda brun come to stay for 10 entire days of art-making, treat-eating, shopping, cooking, journaling, crocheting... in other words, pretty much the best STAYCATION ever! :)

cool chicks onna train
(photo by linda brun)

during that time we made several excursions into new york city: we had dim sum at golden unicorn, took in the feast for the eye that is the rubin museum, and even cruised a couple of favorite thriftshops on 17th street... (angel street and housingworks chelsea) ...tho alas, we have no amazing finds to report from the latter.

sesame balls... my favorite!

on a different day we met up with massachussetts' sweetest and most talented freestyle crafter sandi taloumis, and together we all rode the subway a few short stops out of manhattan to visit the brooklyn art library, home of the massively inspirational sketchbook project*! obviously we had to do a bit of art shopping, as well, at blick and the ink pad. in the face of such overwhelming fun, i somehow managed to take NO PHOTOS AT ALL, so i'm posting (with permission) this one linda took of the three of us (plus 2 extraneous passers-by, lol!) that i really love:

in front of the ink pad
(this pic and lots more awesome ones by linda brun; go check out her instagram account!!!)

the main purpose and event of linda's visit, though, was what we came to call "art camp". we set up a big long folding table in the living room, loaded it with supplies-- paint, stencils, stamps, pens, pigments, vintage paper, magazines, modelling paste, and pretty much anything else that struck our fancy-- and spent the majority of our free time playing and experimenting in our journals. you can see linda's work on her blog-- my favorites are the series of "found faces" that she made over the course of several days; i posted some of my things on instagram at the time, but here are a couple more pages, both finished...

craft paint squirted right out of the bottle, tinted modeling paste thru circles stencil, lots of outlining, plus hand drawn and shadowed bricks. the latter were linda's idea, she thought the word looked like graffiti--this is why it's great to make art in the same room with other people, i would not have thought of bricks! :)

...and unfinished:

modeling paste through a fern stencil, shadowed with stabilo pencil on top of random ink spotches; i'm not in love with this one, but i wasn't really going for a finished product, just playin' with my stuff! 

finally, to cap the whole visit off in style, linda made fabulous new multi-media journals for herself, sandi and i:

we are going to all three work in each of them in turns, via the mail, so that at the end we will each have a book with work by all of us in it. i'm thinking we'll all need to meet up again next year to review the end result! well, ladies? who's in?

♥♥♥♥♥

*the sketchbook project-- both as an idea and an exhibition--is AWESOME; however one thing you might not realize until you get there (at least, we didn't!) is that you won't be allowed to just randomly pull books off the shelves and flick through them, each item must be requested electronically and will be brought to you by one of the librarians. for maximum enjoyment, it's a great idea beforehand to cruise the digital library, create a free account, and make yourself a little queue of examples you'd like to see in person! meanwhile, the brooklyn art library is a short, safe walk from the L train at bedford ave, through a neighborhood with plenty of shops, restaurants and other fun places to visit! well worth the trip! ♥

still singing...

...christmassy songs at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and then making cards inspired by them; alternatively, one could make a card using sheet music. mine does both-- gotta love a holiday card which can multitask, right? ;)

vintage sheet music from my stash adorned with festive rub-ons (by kaiser + basic grey; patterned paper: little yellow bicycle; kraft cardstock: core'dinations; poinsettia: michaels; brad: mme; ink: colorbox; adhesives: xyron, elmers gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

i made the big "NOEL" by tracing some large basic grey chipboard letters onto vintage sheet music (backed with plain cardstock for strength) cutting them out, and adorning them with a little collage of rub-ons. some of the rub-ons rubbed on more seamlessly than others, but the nice thing about a vintage collage style is that it can be a bit distressed without causing distress, lol.

stephanie has another great musical card for you this week... why not stop over at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and see it right now!