A Clean and Reorganized SMT 34

Folks that know me well, know that I am one nosey parker, which is why I love playing along with the Sassy Cheryl Show Me Thursday challenge. Heck, I'd do it even if there wasn't a chance of winning a free image, but I'm certainly not turning one down. Miss Sassy Cheryl has been on a creative binge lately, and I really need to win, since there are now 8 new images that I have to have.

At any rate, TM was a disaster earlier in the week. I went out there with every intention of cleaning it up before I created another card. I had a bunch of SC images colored, and well, I got a little sidetracked(but I did get my challenge card done earlier than usual). At any rate, after I finished the card, I decided to start cleaning and in the process started some reorganizing. Yesterday I was a slug, so today it was nose to the grindstone.

At any rate this is what it looked like on Sunday night. One of the first things I did today, was to take the wooden crate on the right side of my workspace and resectionalize it with rectangular partitions for those tools I need at hand when crafting. Some of those items are small and drop down too low inside the crate, so DH built me a small shelf(I've got the Copics case on top of it) and I built some cardboard drawers to slide in under it. I have my Spicas, erasers and some colored images in them. The picture on my table is one of my favorites, and one that my DH hates. It's a picture of MM and DH asleep on the sofa after dinner when MM was a  3 months old. Doesn't MM look just like his Grandpa?

I got all the scrap paper either filed in my scrap box, or done away with in the trash as you can see from the view of my whole side of the table. I took my two storage carts that have my rubber stamps in them out from under my tall table and stacked them at side of my fabric cabinet, and then I put my Cricut on the cart that my friend's DH made and rolled it under the tall table. I have another project for DH to work on soon, but it's a modification to the Cricut cart. You'll have to wait to see whether I can make it happen or not.

So that's it for me this week. Come on and snap a shot of your work space, or what you're doing this week and enter it in the Show Me Challenge over on Sassy Cheryl's Blog. Hey you might win the free
image instead of me(and more than likely will)

Make My Circles Funky

I went over to TM with all intentions of straightening up my work table, filing the larger scraps and tossing the rest of paper BEFORE working on my challenge card.  I just happened to have 6 Sassy Cheryl images all colored up, and instead of cleaning, I went into Sassy Cheryl Challenge Blog mode. The challenge this week was to use circles. Now how difficult is that?

It turned out not to be very difficult at all. I quickly got sidetracked in my cleaning, when I decided to take a quick glance through my digital papers notebooks. I had this image, "Just Saying a Little Hello Girl", from Sassy Cheryl Digi Shop, already with Copics, so I knew I was looking for something with purple and orange. I knew I had some paper with circles, but imagine my delight with this find from Raspberry Road Designs. This paper is from a kit called Groovy Garb. I took the liberty of changing the hot pink and the gold to purple and orange. I added some stacked circles of various sizing. I refused to center anyything. I think it makes it more interesting. Finally I created the sentiment in Photoshop.


This kind of reminds me of the Jimmy Dean Sausage Breakfast commercials with the planets orbiting the sun. Do you know the commercial I'm talking about?

Feel free to grab the sentiment.

Pastel Baby Card

I'm going to make it with a second entry into the Phindy's Place Challenge Blog's Pretty Pastel Challenge. I couldn't help myself.

As many of you know Phindy has just recently become a Grandmother for the first time, with the arrival of an angel that I call Sweet Pea.  Phindy drew this precious image, that she calls Brand New, and offered it as a prize to the person that got closest to the baby's arrival and statistics. I started calling the baby Sweet Pea, when she decided she wasn't coming out of the pod(I thought she's be on time). She was two weeks late, but that was all good, because, she came into the world ready to eat and sleep.  Since I love babies, I couldn't wait to do something with this image, and pastels and this challenge gave me just the opportunity. Please go check out all the wonderful children's images that Phindy has at the Phindy's Place Shop. She truly does show children as they really are.

The image is both colored with Copics and paper pieced. I am happy to say, that I created all of the papers and the sentiment myself in Photoshop. One of my favorite things about babies is there sweet sleepers, and I knew this sleeper needed to be something special. The bear in the image sent me looking for some free bear clip art. When I found a dancing bear in a pastel pink dress, I knew I needed to make my very own papers. I found a great video tutorial at Photoshop Elements Users that showed how to create textured paper, striped paper and polka dot papers and used it to create my very own Dancing Bear Kit.

Please feel free to grab the sentiment.

Thanks for stopping in, and I love getting feedback.

Pretty Pastels

This week over on the Phindy's Place Challenge Blog, the challenge is to create a project in Pretty Pastels. This sounds easy enough doesn't it? 

The first thing I did was to start looking for papers. Remember that I am the QUEEN of digital papers, so narrowing the hunt to just one set of pastels and preferably something that I haven't used before made it a little difficult. I finally settled on these gorgeous papers from a free kit called RoseManor Collection from Raspberry Roads Designs.

Next issue is to pick an image. I should tell you I am totally addicted to Phindy's images. However, I wanted to use a new image, so off I went shopping over in the Phindy's Place Shop. One of the papers is words that made me think wedding, so I decided I needed the Love Birds Wedding. The coloring was done with Copics.

The sentiment is from I Corinthians 13:13, one of the favorite wedding verses. I created it in Photoshop, so  feel free to grab it. I colored some sheer ribbon with Copics and threaded it through the Martha Stewart Linked Trim punch. The flowers were made using the Martha Stewart Hydrangea punch.

Thanks for stopping by and I love hearing from you.

A New Look on Show Me Thursday

It's time once again for Show Me Thursday over on Sassy Cheryls Blog. It's just a way to see what folks are working on each week. What I love about it, is that it isn't about showing a card, but really showing what your life is about. I've made new friends and am loving seeing their part of the world, as well as seeing their precious grandchildren.
 
I actually snapped this picture last Thursday night at the end of an evening rushing to get a challenge card finished and blogged, but that's not what my week's been all about at all. I've cleaned it up since, but it looks just about like that right now. I'm headed out there next to clean up before I start carding again.

As many of you know, I live in the country. Now it's not developed country, but farm and cattle land. Not too far from me is a field that was planted in wheat that was harvested in May. I should also tell you that I grew up in the Mississippi Delta, which used to be the capital of raising cotton.  Our family spent a lot of Sunday afternoon driving through the Delta and looking at crops. I tell you this, so that you know, I can tell if it's cotton, corn or soybeans about the first sign of a leaf when the seeds germinate. Well the wheat field got replanted, and both my DH and I thought it was soybeans. Didn't take us long to realize it wasn't, and although these plants had the appearance of cotton, the leaves were too big. There was much discussion between DH and myself, as well as my walking buddy and myself(we even walked down there one morning for a closer look). Imagine my delight when my DH ran into the guy that farms the field, and said he'd planted it in sunflower seeds for the land owner to bring in the doves in September.

It's been a joy to watch them shoot up and to bloom. It's especially nice when I'm coming back from town, since they're facing the east. I got DH to help take the ladder down there yesterday to take some pictures of the field without the background of the trees or the neighboring house. I then came home and played with Photoshop to create a new banner for my blog. I have to tell you, I love it. It's so ME! Bright, sunny and happy! I had no problem with the banner, but the background has me stumped. For some reason, even the blogger background templates don't post right. I guess I'm stuck with a somewhat solid(you'll notice on the sides that the color starts fading about 2" down) background.

The added benefit is that the property owner's wife called to tell us we could have all we wanted. Personally I just like riding by and seeing that great big field of Happy Faces.

Paper Ribbons

Every time I say this I think of that song Paper Roses that Marie Osmond made into a hit after Anita Bryant had sung it. This week's challenge on the Sassy Cheryl's Challenge Blog was to create a card and make your own paper ribbon.

Before I chose an image from my Sassy Cheryl's folder, I decided to go have a look around in the new and improved Sassy Cheryl's Digis Store. Imagine my delight when I found not 1, but 6 images I had to have. Oh and this is before she added the little boy version of this image. She's called Missing You and she's just too cute. Love that haircut as it's how my daughters and my granddaughter wore their hair when they were little girls. When I saw her, I knew her outfit had to be "coordinating fabrics" and thus had to be paper pieced. It's funny, because Sassy Cheryl had the same thoughts when she did the colorized versions. The papers I used for the "fabric" are from a digital paper kit from Lily Bimble called Fiesta Papers. I found them at the My Grafico web site. The rest of her is colored with Copics.

The papers are either from my scrap box, or my cardstock file. I embossed the aqua papers with my polka dot embossing folder. Since I was doing coordinating papers, it worked out that I had two outfits, so I created two cards. OWH is asking for Missing You cards, so this is a Win/Win for me. I created the sentiment in Photoshop, and I'm posting it for anyone that wants it. I printed it and made it looked like it had been printed on a ribbon. I also used a strip of cardstock to create a "ruffled" ribbon.

Can you believe, I got this done before Monday afternoon at 4 p.m.? Yeah, I'm kind of amazed too, and to add icing to the cake, my house is also clean, so there was no guilt while I was crafting.

Taking Lemons and Making Lemonade

Yesterday, my 4 1/2 year old grandson,Alex, aka MonkeyMoo, aka MM made his first appearance in the emergency room. He either fell or was pushed at school(stories vary depending on whom was interviewed -he says he tripped over his feet) into the corner of a cabinet and gashed his head wide open. Well 7 stitches later and getting to go home early from daycare, we Skyped with him last night, to find that he was in high spirits.

He was excited about having a third eyebrow until he discovered that the cut was vertical and not horizontal. As my daughter said his imagination was not harmed in any way. He decided that he had the look of a pirate, so he quickly donned his Uncle Sam beard, his pirate hat and grabbed his sword, closed one eye, made a fist to make it look like he had a stub for an arm and posed for this picture.

A group of us were talking about daredevil and fearless children. One of them, Anna says that her youngest son was so fearless his doctor thought he might be the Rep for the company No Fear and that she had bought him a T-shirt that said I Do All My Own Stunts. Those were too such great sentiments, I had to make them into Word Art. I can think of several images they'll work with too. I thought I'd share them with you.