Wow Christmas came early for me!

Well, I was pleasantly surprised one day recently when I got home from work and looked at the mail. I had received a wonderful gift for Christmas! I got stamps from Starving Artistamps! They are awesome! And such a wonderful and thoughtful gift from such a good friend! Jody you are so thoughtful and I truly appreciate it!

I love these stamps they are awesome. Since I live so close to the ocean, beach scenes and such are some of my favorite stamps and these fall right in line with that. I have been really busy with Christmas things but had to give a few of them a whirl! This was my creation.

I used the Buckaroo Blue, Chocolate Chip and Very Vanilla cardstock and Buckaroo Blue ink all from Stampin' Up. The ribbon is some of the fabulous ribbon I got from Jody in her recent ribbon swap that I participated in. Thanks for looking and I hope you enjoy it!

By the way here is a link to Starving Artistamps if you are interested in checking out the stamps they offer! They have some really cool ones! http://starvingartistamps.com/index.html

Chinese Auction Gift

Tonight was the annual Christmas party for my local stamping group. We always have a very nice time each year and this year was no exception!

We have a wonderful potluck meal, the hostesses pass out some door prizes and then we have our auction.

The auction always proves to be the highlight of the evening. It is called a Chinese auction here. I am sure it is known by many different names but that is what we call it. You get a chance to steal someone else's gift or pick a new one. I am very pleased with my gift it is a lovely box with coasters and the lid has glass with a pretty stamped picture in it. There were so many cool and beautiful things there. The gifts are suppose to include hand stamping and be of a value around 15-20 dollars. (Like if you were to sell it at a craft show or somewhere.)

Well, a while back I found this frame and knew that it would make a wonderful altered gift. So, this is the gift I made and took for the auction. I used Wild Rose and some various saying stamps that I have. The colors are Perfect Plum, Pale Plum, Certainly Celery and Always Artichoke. The card stock is Very Vanilla and Always Artichoke. The ribbon is some of my lovely Jody ribbon! The like frames are double sided so the pictures are on both sides. I think they are all stamped the same on the reverse.

Orgami Shadow box Christmas Tree

As promised my Christmas Shadow box is finished and here it is!

I am very pleased with the way it turned out. The picture really does not do it justice, it is much prettier in real life.

I used the deisgner paper from the holiday mini to form this. I have seen these on Splitcoast but really had no idea how to do them or what they really looked like. My local stamping group met last Monday and one of the girls demonstrated it, and I fell in love with it.

At first I thought 'heck no, there is no way I am going to do that'. Then I thought about these shadowbox picture frames that I have and the idea hit me. I figured it was perfect for inside of it! Anyway, I am very happy with my creation. And I hope that the person that is receiving this will like it too. Yes believe it or not I am not keeping it, but I will be making one of my own real soon!

Shadowbox frame

This is a shadowbox picture frame that I found at the dollar store. It is really cool for doing altered pictures/frames. The depth of the shadowbox part allows you to embellish and such with out smashing everything in the frame. I have an idea for a Christmas one that I hope to work on here real soon.

I made this as part of the matching gift box that I sent to Jody. The only real problem I had doing this was stamping the main mat frame piece. It was too big for my background stamp so it had to be pieced in places. Hence the primas! They came in quite handy for covering the little goofs where the stamp didn't line up very well. There are still a few spots but I figured they weren't too bad to just leave be.

I will post back here when I get the Christmas one done!

Personalized Box

Well, Jody and I usually do a swap each month. This is a small box, actually a hallmark box, that I found at a discount store here locally. I decided to personalize it for her. I can't seem to get away from using the Wild Rose set. I really love it! And it seemed appropriate to use on this box.

The letters are chipboard letters that I used the Alcohol inks on to try to match my colors a little better. They turned out to be sort of marbelized. They originally were black. The ribbon is some of the fabulous ribbon from Jody's ribbon swap. It matches very nice and I am in love with all my new ribbon!

Purple snowflakes!

Ok, so I know snowflakes aren't purple! But I have had a real block with the new Stampin' Up Vintage Violet. I can't seem to make anything work with it and it is very frustrating because I really like the color. Well, I fiddled and messed and finally decided I like this combination.


Vintage Violet and Almost Amethyst. My Amethyst is a little on the blue side but I think this worked out pretty good. The stamp sets used are print pattern, snowflakes, and an Anna Griffin set. The saying I purchased at AC Moore.


Ok, so yes I said Anna Griffin set! I didn't think I would ever buy one of those! But I found a steal (at least I thought so) at a store we have here locally. It is fairly new and very similar to a Big Lots. They had the set in there, it came in a box with 4 little stamping spots, ribbon and some card stock. And I must confess, I really bought it for the box it was all in. I was envisioning a really cool altered box. So, hopefully I can make that one of my projects in the near future. I will keep you posted on that.

Country Blessing Challenge

Well I started the splitcoast sketch challenges a couple weeks ago. I really like having the idea to go by. Some of the sketches are more challenging then others. This weeks was very nice, but I was having an extremely hard time coming up with something. Until I went to my mailbox yesterday that is!

I received a wonderful card from my Secret Sister and in it were some skeleton leaves. They are very pretty, most are coppery looking. So, as I was walking in from the mailbox it came to me to try to incorporate one of the leaves with the new Country blessings stamp set and do the challenge.

Well, I tried and tried to make that leaf work. It didn't matter how I placed it or what I placed it on, it just was not working. I started to get discouraged because I thought it was such a great idea! Then finally I was able to pull this out of it! I am very pleased with my results, especially since I was beginning to think it was all a waste of time!

Scrapbook recipe swap

I told myself I wasn't going to get into any more swaps but I came upon this one a while back and just could not say no. Cheesecake - who can resist it? And it is a desert that most of my family loves! So I thought getting a bunch of cheesecake recipes sounded like an awesome idea.

I have a favorite recipe that is so easy and so good. I love to make this when we go to a picnic or family gathering of some kind. And everyone always raves over it.

It is called Creamy Lemon Cheesecake, but it got a little pet name at my house. My husband always gave me a hard time when I made it because no matter what I did it always got this huge crack down the middle of it when it cooled. I had followed the advice of my mom and others and tried many things all to no avail. It still got the crack every time! I tried to cook it at a lower temperature and a little longer along with other suggestions. Still a huge crack! So he decided to start calling it my Fault cake, because he said it kind of looked like the San Andreas fault line!

So now it is known as the "California Fault Cake" in my house. Crack or no crack it is still yummy!

Any one out there an expert baker that knows what needs to be changed to lose the crack?

Wintry snow scrapbook page

This is my other scrapbooking attempt for my party. I made a 6x6 page, but to me the chief complaint is that you can't get many pictures on that size page. So, this has tags for inserts into the pocket. Each tag has a different picture on it and you can add as many tags to the page as you would like!

I used the Spot On Jumbo wheel in Bashful blue on the lower section and filled some of the circles with the stamps from Snow Flurries in Buckaroo blue. I love the way this looks! And the party goers were excited with the way this looks! I then put Snowflakes on the back portion of the page in Bashful blue. The page itself is Bashful blue, the tags are Night of Navy. I am pleased with the look of this!

Well, scrapbooking is not the easiest thing for me to do. I do like scrapbooking but always have such a hard time with it. Haven't really figured out why, maybe because I over analyze the whole thing.

Anyway, I have a party to do a demonstration for tomorrow. My hostess did not want to do the normal cards, she really wanted to focus on scrapbooking because that is mostly what her friends like to do. So it was time to conquer my fears of scrapbooking! I decided to kill two birds with one stone so to speak! Scrapbook some of the many photos that I need to do and come up with a few pages for the party!

Christmas always seems to generate a ton of pictures in our house so that is what I tackled!

Ok, so finally I am doing the challenges on Splitcoast. I love the layout sketch challenges, they really get the mind thinking! And everyone posts such beautiful samples to look at. Here is my card from this weeks challenge. As soon as I saw the sketch, I knew this set would be perfect for it!

Well, I decided to jump on the band wagon before I got left behind! It looked like the wagon was fixin' to pull out on me.

So, here it is, my own little blog!

I really can't believe that I did this. I told myself I wasn't gonna get sucked into this one. But, guess what! It happened, here I am!