Finished Flinging!

Wow, I had an amazing time at Spring Fling last weekend. Yes I know, it was last weekend and I haven't posted in a week - sorry!  I had a great trip there and back with my upline, Wendy, and another friend Colleen. I prepared 56 card fronts for swapping...odd number I know but hey. I had traded about 50 of them when the root beer I bought decided to explode when I opened it. So much for the other 6! :-) I also made 16 3-D mini photo albums. They took a long time but I love how they turned out.  Here's some pics

And here's a close-up of one of them:

These are the cards I took to swap. 

If they look familiar that's because they are.  I made a whack of these for another swap I was in, and just made extra for this swap. Less work is a good thing. The most popular one was the one with Gable Green background. So many people said they hadn't seen that colour combo before.  But I love it.

Check it Out!!

Here are the cards we completed today at Caroline's workshop. 

Card #1

I am in love with this colour combo- so fresh and "springy"!!  The stamp set is Just Like You, and $2 from the sale of each set goes to Ronald McDonald House.

Card #2

This card has a different fold, and is held closed using the slit punch and flowers from the Flower Fusion kit. Notice it uses the fabulous designer series paper Bali Breeze and has almost no stamping!   And I love the rhinestone brad in the middle of the flower.

Card #3

This card uses card stock from the the Wild Wasabi Special offer. I just trimmed a 1/4" off the long side and 3/8" off the short side. We embossed in clear on the background, and coloured in the flower with markers, and also used them for the ink on the sentiment. 

All in all, an excellent day up in Mansfield.  Now to go and work on my swaps!!

It's been a while!

Hello All

Sorry I haven't had much time to blog of late.  I've been house-hunting in-between trying to get ready for a workshop on April 20th, my Bitty Birthdays Class on April 25th, and all my swaps for Spring Fling on April 26th! It's a wonder I remember where my bed is at night!!

I will be posting some pics of our April 20th workshop cards tomorrow. The workshop is being hosted by my wonderful friend Caroline, whom I have known since grade 9. 

In the meantime, here's a picture of my beautiful cat Dustbunny:

Why "Dustbunny"?  Well actually I can't take credit for that. When we went to the shelter to pick her out she was the only long-haired kitten in a litter of 4. The shelter had named her Dustbunny because of the colour of her fur.  She really is a beautiful cat, although I am not biased in the least! HA!

Sympatico is SOOO Wonderful!!

So I come home tonight to find my email not working. Nothing I tried did anything. So I make the call to Sympatico. Now normally I have no problems with them at all.  But I think they have a MAC deficiency.  

Anyway, so nothing is working, and the agent, who is of course in another country and has a heavy accent, tells me that they've changed the servers.  And just WHEN were they going to tell people??? So fine, we change everything, and still not working. Then he says we need to delete the accounts and establish them again.  I hesitated because "delete" is not a good thing. He assured me no problem. So I did. And, you guessed it, it deleted all emails in my inboxes. I had more than 200!! Yes, yes, I know, I need to file them blah, blah, blah...but I just didn't have time. And now they are gone forever. I am so mad I could spit.  

I ended up speaking with a supervisor. He's the one who told me they couldn't retrieve them and that I shouldn't delete my accounts. I politely suggested that he tell his other agents not to give customers the wrong directions!! What I wanted to say I can't leave in print here. Anyway, he did apologize several times. What else could he do? He's not the moron.  Sigh.

And now it is almost 8pm and I am finally going to go and eat my dinner.....that I was supposed to eat 2 hours ago before I had to make this wonderful call. Yes, I was on the phone almost 2 hrs! Thank goodness it wasn't long distance, then I'd be really ticked!

Card Swap Time

Ok, so I finally finished my entries for a demo swap that my upline is hosting. The idea was to use the same stamp set and make 3 different cards with it. Two cards should be demonstrate-able and the third can be as complicated as we want. We'll then swap with each other and we all get a fresh set of samples to show our customers.  My stamp set was One of A Kind.

Card #1

 

The background is Taken with Teal, and the designer paper is from the Bali Breeze collection. I layered Whisper White on Pumpkin Pie and then stamped the flower in Old Olive. You can't see it very well but I also used Taken with Teal marker to put dots in the flower. Next a piece of Old Olive Poly-Twill ribbon (love this stuff) and a ribbon slide from the new Hodgepodge hardware, and finally the sentiment stamped in Pumpkin Pie and layered on Taken with Teal. I rounded off opposite corners using the Corner Rounder punch.  And of course coloured in the tiny flower with the Taken with Teal marker.

Card #2

For this card I used the Purely Pomegranate as the background, and stamped it in the same ink with the small flower stamp. Then I took 2 co-ordinating pieces of designer paper from the Berry Bliss collection and cut those diagonally and made a rectangle. Then I have Shimmer White cardstock stamped with the Purely Pomegranate layered on Chocolate Chip. The flowers on this piece were off-stamped 2x on scrap paper before stamping on the cardstock. The sentiment is in Chocolate Chip on White and layered on top of Pretty in Pink. Then I whipped out the markers again ( I LOVE my markers) and coloured in the tiny flower. Then a piece of Purely Pomegranate double-stitched ribbon was added with a loop at the top.

Card #3

Now here is the more complicated card, but I think it is my favourite....and of course it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that there is purple on it! (nudge nudge, wink wink). The base is Whisper White with a Basic Black mat on top and then a Gable Green mat on top of that. I took a piece of Lovely Lilac and ripped the edges (gasp! shock!) to give it a distressed look. 

Now comes the fun part!  Using the Dazzling Diamond Dust technique, I sponged the ink all over pieces of Glossy White cardstock in Lovely Lilac, Gable Green and Bashful Blue. This took a while until I got my latest delivery with my Stampin' Sponges. They are huge and were just the ticket to cover such a large surface. Then I stamped the flower in Basic Black. Then I applied Versamark all over the surface and sprinkled everything with Iridescent Ice embossing powder. Then out came my trusty heatgun (my version of the "power tool") and voila! This technique gives the most amazing, shiny, sparkly finish, I just love it!  Plus it 'texturizes' the cardstock, if that makes any sense, which adds dimension. 

I then sat in front of the TV watching CSI New York on Wednesday night and cut out the flowers. I used the Boho Blossoms punch to punch out the small flowers and added a silver brad to each; these were glued in the middle of each large flower.  The sentiment is in Lovely Lilac on White and then Layered on Bashful Blue, also with distressed edges.

Surprisingly, what took the longest with this card was designing the darn thing. But it's done and I think it's really lovely.  I hope you do too!

Isn't the sun beautiful this morning!  

Sometimes I get in a design slump. I have so many ideas running around in my head that I can't decide what to do.  I have 2 of 3 swaps finished and they are due tomorrow. Luckily I only need to make 5 cards.  Once they're all done I will post some pictures.

Ok, now back to work!

Ok, so here it is. My very first post on my very first blog! I can't believe I'm doing this! I can't believe I'm doing this, and looking for a house at the same time! More importantly, I can't believe I figured out HOW to do this! :-)

I hope that this will be a place that I can post some of my artwork, let people know what's going on in the world of Al-Karena, share new ideas and generally wax poetic about the joys of stamping!  There will be tutorials at some point, as soon as I write them!  

Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy!