Get Well Card

My "get well" section at Cranberry Hill was getting low so I made a stack of cards last night.
I'm finding out that if a do my cards in stages (one section at a time) I can get more done with less stress. Before I go to bed, I stamp images I think I may want to use and add whatever color looks good. In the morning, I finish put the cards together.
I made a series of cards using vintage scrapbook paper (from a huge stash) and an image from A Muse. Everything else is computer generated.

Sympathy Cards

Another set of cards for my cards rack at Cranberry Hill. It's very hard to find many stamp company that make any thing for condolence cards. Flowers stamps are Penny Black and Hero Arts and sympathy stamp is from Stampin Up.

Asian Cards

I have tons of washi paper, so I decided that I should start using it. During my marathon card making day, I made several of these for my card rack at Cranberry Hill. The washi paper is so cool on it's own, the style of card is very simple. Makes for a very fast card.

Valentine's Day Cards

I spent the whole day and most of the night on Friday making cards for my booth at Cranberry Hill. I have to fill up my Valentine Day section! The robot stamps are from Paper Source (a very fun store to visit) and the frog is an A Muse stamp. Words are all computer generated.

Angel Card

Miss Lucy again posing with one of my cards. It 's been a long time since I've done a card that took a few days to do.

For the background I used twinkling H2O on heavy water color paper that has a thick coat of gel medium on it. As I was smearing the gel medium over the paper it started to crack and peel. I thought all was lost so I put it aside. The next day after it had dried, I was left with this great alter look. Where the gel medium had cracked the gold from the H2O paints came through. I used Staz On ink to tone down the silver heart charm the angel is holding. Angel stamp from Stamp Happy.

Valentine Card

This is one of my cats - Lucy. She's much more of a normal cat with all her many attitudes. While I'm working in my studio, she likes to sit on the highest spot under the lights. I just got this spot cleaned up last week. I couldn't take Lucy hissing at Purrcy when he would be napping in the only clean spot in the room. Now everyone has a spot under the lights.
This morning I decided to use he Lucy as a model. She's a great little model and for a cat she has many expressions. I made this card last night using an A Muse and Stampin Up stamp. I made the beaded heart last year for a class. The little hearts in the background are from glitter confetti.

Senoir Center Cards

Cards the ladies at the Yu AI Kai Senior center will make in my class on Thursday.

Late Night Fun

One of the things I look for at auction are old typewriters for a local artist, Renee Berglund of "Monka Paws" who creates jewelry from the keys. I ask her for the guts or striker keys (the parts that hit the paper and ink ribbon) for my alter art booth. She dropped of a type writer carcass and I started last night taking it apart. This is a time gone by where everything in that typewriter was metal and held together with thousands of screws. It took hours to get to all the parts I wanted.

Mr. Purrcy

Mr. Purrcy just can't walk by anything that looks like a box without wanting to get inside it. I was getting ready to fill the tin pail with my wooden stamp blocks (some have little magnets behind them so I plan to display some on the outside of the pail) when he walked in and decided it was something to check out. He liked it so much that he didn't move until it was time for bed a few hours later.

Alter Art Atelier

My Alter Art Atelier booth is now open at Cottage Crafts in San Jose! I wasn't planning on opening it until next month but everything just seem to fall into place even with California being hit with one of it's biggest storms. I was able to get a huge lot of wood block letters and number stamps - very cool, which started the ball rolling. The next day I went to a local auction house and found an antique Victorian bookcase that was the exact size to fit into the booth. I'm now running around my house trying to get everything that are still in boxes waiting to be tagged or interesting items that need to be taken apart. I will post pictures as soon as I remember to take the camera in.

SplitCoastStampers

Split Coast Stampers is a great (if not one of the best) websites to get ideas for cards and techniques you can do with a rubber stamp. I've been going through my creative files and thought I would post some of the Valentine's day ideas I've saved. This one was done by "stamp4funinca", a member of the splitcoaststampers community.

Happy New Year's!

I really wanted to take a family photo this year and didn't think it would be that difficult to do now that my children are adults. Chad was home after a year deployment to the Middle East and Evan was home from college. We had to take so many shots that my niece had to put down the digital camera several times because her arms were getting sore. It was the usual reasons, bunny ears, Chad making funny faces, eyes closed, others walking into the photo etc... I think in this picture I'm pinching Chad to keep him from doing something silly.