Eeek! and a WINNER!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Just popping in to share a card for Halloween! I've got lots of fun goodies on this one: chipboard cat from Maya Road (inked with black pigment ink), washi-tape-covered tags and punched scalloped borders (orange stripes washi tape from DeNami Design), black May Arts corduroy ribbon, black Paper Smooches twine, alphabet stickers from Lily Bee, and a fancy background stamp (Looped Flower) from Hero Arts. I sent this one to a very dear, cat-loving friend. I hope it brought a smile to her face!!

I'm also sharing the winner of my washi tape giveaway from Monday. I used Random.org to select a winner. It was lucky #12, which was

terriavidreader (IN-USA) !!!

Congratulations, Terri! I've emailed you :D Thanks to everyone who entered!

I hope you have a fun Halloween wherever you are! My oldest is now a freshman in high school. She decided that she's too old for trick-or-treat, so she will be manning the door at our house tonight to hand out treats (most likely in her mad scientist costume). My fifth grader is very much looking forward to trick-or-treating tonight. He was very happy to recycle his Apple iPhone costume from last year, which made me very happy. I'm glad that last year's hard work lives on!

Hope your day is filled with more treats than tricks! Thanks for stopping by,
Emily

Summer Lovin'

It's time for another stamp release at Flourishes, and this time the release week challenge is called Summer Lovin'--a challenge to create with summer in mind. So how about this for summery?

I used a fun silhouette stamp set from Flourishes called Country Road, which was a birthday gift from a sweet friend. It was so much fun to ink up for the first time! I stamped the pasture scene on watercolor paper and then colored in the grass and sky with some of my new Gelatos, blending them with water and a paintbrush. I LOVE how this scene turned out! The patterned paper is from a new Dear Lizzy Neapolitan 6x6 pad that I just picked up on sale at ACMoore last week. So fun to use so many new items at once!

The last few weeks have been sooooooooooooooooo busy for me. I've spent a lot of time tackling long-overdue projects around the house, getting the house ready for company, and hosting my parents from Ohio for a visit over the weekend. Today was the first time in quite a while that I've been able to do some crafting!

Thanks for taking a peek and stopping by!
Emily

Pine Boughs at Night

The first noontime release-week challenge over at Flourishes is called Night & Day, and the challenge is to show a time of day in your creation. It gets dark so early around here at this time of year, so I was inspired to try to capture the look of snow-dusted pine boughs at dusk.
I used Meg's fabulous Poor Man's Spectrum Pad technique with a brayer to create my dusk sky, then stamped the pine branches from Flourishes' All That Glitters set in black to create a silhouette. I glittered up the boughs with some glitter glue and did some scoring on a panel of Marina Mist to give my scene a subtle background. The sentiment, from the Flourishes set Country Charm Labels, is stamped on a panel of vellum.

It's a simple card, but hopefully elegant--that's what I was going for, at least! It will do nicely as a post-Christmas thank-you card.

Thanks for stopping by!
Emily

Grassland Sympathy

A quick and easy card for this morning! Challenges incorporated into today's card creation:

• Splitcoast CAS91, with Sympathy
• Create for Fun, CR84FN2
• Card Positioning Systems, CPS191

We took our kids out trick-or-treating last night and had a fabulous time, despite the brisk temperatures and biting wind. DH and I wore our winter coats and gloves (and I should have taken my earmuffs!!) and were just barely comfortable. However, the thought of limitless sugary candy must have warmed our kids' hearts because they never once complained about being cold--and this is without the benefit of coats. Neither one wanted to ruin the look of their costume with extra bulk so they let an extra sweater layer underneath their costumes suffice. And the gloves we took along for them just in case? Too much bother!! They just got in the way of handling the candy and treats.

By the time we returned home, my fingers (in my gloves!) were numb but their bare hands were toasty warm. DH and I sipped hot cocoa while the kids sorted, tallied, and traded their candy. And first thing this morning before school, DS had to make both a bar graph and a pie chart of all the different kinds of candy he received. That's my boy!! He's all about the data. Of course, he had me print out his graphs (in color) so he could take them to school to show his second-grade teacher and class. Too cute :)

Thanks for stopping by to visit today!!

Card Recipe:
Stamps: Mark's Finest Papers Bold & Free, Mark's Finest Papers A Walk in the Woods (sentiment)
Paper: PTI kraft CS, MFP hazelnut tan CS, MFP Snow Storm ultra smooth finish CS , SU baja breeze CS, DCWV textured teal CS
Ink: Palette charcoal, SU baja breeze
Accessories: CM circle cutting system, sponge, hemp cord, dimensionals
Techniques: sponging

Spooktacular Halloween

Happy TGIF, everybody!! I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on my kids' school schedule and the time I have in my day for doing my freelance work, so I took a little time this morning to treat myself to a little slice of bliss. Here's what I've been up to!!
I played along with today's Free for All Challenge, F4A30, over on Splitcoast. The challenge is to use a punny saying on your card. No problem!! As a DT member for Mark's Finest Papers, I'm amassing quite a collection of MFP sets, many of which include a variety of punny sayings. It seems to be one of MFP's hallmarks!! I wanted to add to my stash of Halloween cards to send to far-flung family next month, so I went with the MFP set Broom Rides which includes the punny saying "It's SPOOKtacular!"

Next, I went looking for an awesome sketch to use for this card and found a great one in Repeat Impressions' What If? Wednesday Sketch challenge S810. Then I thought I'd see if I could play along with Jazzy Paper Designs Inspirational Challenge #13, which was to be inspired by an album cover on the Verve Music website. I found the perfect inspiration piece in John Fogerty's Revival album cover: Perfect idea for a Halloween card, doncha think? I set to work with my brayer and some pumpkin pie and so saffron ink to reproduce that awesome sky on the album cover. Didn't get it quite right, but I'm still quite happy with my results. Finished up my scene with some silhouette-y Halloween elements.

Finally, I made sure that my card included something that tweets or flutters for the Cute Card Thursday Challenge 130, to include a bird or butterfly somewhere on your card. I've got my spooktacular owl to cover that base. ;)

So that's the story of my card creation and bit of fun for today!! Next, it's time to get down to work on today's allotment of my freelance project. I'm looking forward to my "book group" tonight--our first meeting since the end of the last school year in June. Gotta use those quotes because we never do any reading or anything--our "book group" is just an excuse for a bunch of girlfriends to get together on a monthly basis and socialize. If we didn't make our appointments for "book group," we'd never find the time to get together!! Sometimes we just get together at someone's home to chat; other times we might craft, see a movie, go out for dinner, or whatever fun someone cooks up. And we always have a visit to a local day spa in March. Fun! It's going to be great catching up with everyone tonight. :)

Well, have a fabulous weekend. Thanks so much for checking in today!!

Recipe:
Stamps: MFP Broom Rides
Paper: SU basic black CS, SU pumpkin pie CS, HP glossy photo paper, Pink Paislee 365 Degrees DP
Ink: SU pumpkin pie, SU so saffron, Marvy Le Plume II black marker
Accessories: EK BOO border punch, MS postage stamp punch, black satin ribbon from Mark's Finest Papers, foam tape
Techniques: brayered sky