paint

This is a card I made with a bunch of paint. I love playing with paint. It's the sample for my book review up today over at Craft Critique. Supplies used: golden fluid acrylic paints, foam stamp, watercolor paper, grungeboard, laminate sample, grosgrain ribbon, stazon ink, penny black stamps, and krylon copper leafing pen.

Thanks for the funny comments on my post of my messy craft room. To calm your fears that I am a complete slob, please know that the rest of my house is very neat and tidy. I do laundry regularly and the dishes are clean. It looks much better today than the photos.

I had hoped to be sharing a post with you today about my yard sale treasures, but mother nature had other plans. We got snow instead of yard sales. Here is a view off the front deck this weekend...


Happy Memorial Day to all. Thank you to those who have and are serving our country.

I am a pig

Truly in many senses of the word. I am a completely messy person at my very core. I married a man who is a bit of a neat freak. It doesn't have to be clean, but he doesn't like clutter. If I don't keep things picked up, he does. The exception is my craft room. It's truly my room except the family computer lives here. He has to come in here to use the computer, so occasionally I really look at the mess and feel bad for the guy. These photos were taken after about 30 minutes of clearing the left side of my stamping table. I spent over 2 hours on my mess yesterday and it's still not finished.

My family of origin completely gave up on me. Just shut the door they would say. I always had a pile of dirty laundry, books, and heaven knows what in my room as a kid. My mom tells the story of a half-eaten sandwich way past it's prime that she found in my sock drawer. I believe her. The funny thing is that I'm paying for all of my messiness. My almost teen son has inherited my messy nature. I occasionally sneak into his hovel when he is at school to remove science experiments and dirty dishes. Oh, what a mess. There were ants in his closet recently...ewww!

I am a pig in another sense. I can't pass up a fantastic yard sale or thrift shop bargain. I want it all! Today officially kicks off yard sale season here on the mountain. There will be a few pre-sales today. Tomorrow Mom will come up for the day for our annual yard sale mania. We start with chocolate donuts and the yard sale map and see what happens. The church in my neighborhood is having a sale starting at 8am tomorrow. That's where we will start.

I'll try to finish cleaning up all this mess today, so I have room for more stuff tomorrow! I surely don't need anything, but you can see I'm piggish, so I'm sure to find something. Here is the rest of my messy room:

mom's day

Happy Mother's Day my artful friends. This one is for my wonderful mom.

supplies used: art declassified stamp, timber brown staz-on ink, worn lipstick distress ink, basic grey paper, SU glossy white and kraft cardstock, HA pearl, prima flower, fiskars threading water punch, vintage pin and lace.

ellen rocks

Yesterday was our big day to go see the ellen show. I am a huge fan of her show because it's always just so fun and so positive. I am so happy to tell you that her show is even more wonderful in person. She has an amazing spirit with an almost child-like sense of fun. Every single person on her staff was amazing to us. We did have to wait a long time because they taped two shows back to back yesterday. The show they taped before ours was the mother's day show that will be on today. Those ladies went home with lots of stuff, but they were all pregnant, so we are ok with that. I'd rather go home with less and not be pregnant, LOL! The show we watched will be on Monday.

Mom and I sat right at the top of the second aisle that ellen dances up. She danced really close to mom, so I think you'll definitely see her. Mom wore a white top with black and red embroidered flowers on the front and black pants. I was wearing a black, white, and melon print top with black pants. Also, we danced together during a commercial break like we used to dance in the kitchen when I was a kid. Ellen giggled at our slow dancing to her crazy hip hop music. It was wonderful.

Now on to the guests....Dr. House, the dude with dreadlocks that got kicked off American Idol, and a really skinny blonde from the MTV show The Hills. Even though I don't watch any of those shows we loved the guests. Dr. House was hilarious and the singer was amazing. The young girl who is all over magazine covers was a stick...we couldn't get over how thin she was. Even ellen hasn't watched the hills, so that made me feel a bit better about being out of the loop on popular tv stuff. The teen girls that we sat with in line and who were in front of us knew each one of the people on the show. While we were waiting they texted all their friends. They even had the magazines with the hills girl's pic on the front to show us. It was great.

Ellen dances and sings every word of every song the whole time even during the commercial breaks. She took time at the end of the show to talk to the audience and thank us for taking time to be there and for supporting her with our applause. She was genuinely interested in every guest and talked to them during the breaks. There were no re-takes or re-shooting. What happened is exactly what you will see on Monday. It's a real show, nothing is fake about it. I was really surprised by that. I've seen other shows taped and there is always re-taping if something went wrong. Ellen just goes with it. It's not live, but it could be. She gave us all La Coste classic polo shirts. We filled out a form for color and size and they will be sent to us.

Before the show we ate at the Bob's Big Boy that Jay Leno goes to with his classic cars for cruise night. It's an old classic drive in, car hop and sit down restaurant that's listed on California's Historic Places. We didn't see any celebs, but the cheeseburgers were wonderful. We cruised around all over near the studios trying to figure out where to go and where to park. All of the studios were there, warner bros, nbc, abc, disney...so fun.

The very best part is that mom and I did something new together yesterday. We believe you should try everything once in life as long as it's not illegal or immoral. If you like it you should do it again. Lately, reality has gotten in the way of our quest to try everything life has to offer. I guess we have been trying new things these last 6 months, but mostly not things we wanted to try like buying a shower chair, dealing with hair loss, learning more than we ever wanted to know about valley fever, c-diff, and kidney failure. It feels so good to try something new, dance, laugh, and act like kids. Good stuff!

brayer fun

Still busy here inking things up with my brayer. I have a review up today at Craft Critique on the subject. When I wrote the article, I assumed everybody has one of these handy tools. Well, we all know what happens when we assume. I thought I'd go into a bit more detail on using one of these nifty tools here.

First of all, don't be afraid of this tool. It's fun to use and cleans up easily with a quick rinse in the sink. I put down some old paper under my project to protect my work surface. One of my favorite ways of recycling is to use an old phone book. Tear off the front page and put your paper to be colored on top of it. Brayer to your heart's content, then tear off the top page and recycle it. You now have a fresh page to work on your next color. Also, while you have your brayer and ink rolling, make a bunch of backgrounds. I usually ink up tons of stuff at once and then have a stack of backgrounds ready to go for later. I tend to make alot of A2 sized cards or arches based on the same size which is 4 1/4" x 5 1/2". Ink up whatever size you work with most or use whole sheets that you can cut down later.

Ok, just how the heck do you actually make a brayer work? Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are some tutorial links that might help.
~Brayered Sky.
~Bouncing Brayer.
~Video tutorial of Brayered Cuttlebug Ink Embossing.
~Crayon Resist.
~Brayer resource thread with links to samples, ideas, and techniques.

I'm certain that there are more video tutorials out there showing a brayer in use, but I just can't seem to find more right now. If you know of any, please share the link and I'll add it to the list. For now, here's another card I made using my trusty brayer and the plastic wrap technique.



I hope you are getting some crafty fun time this week.