NC Black Bear Festival

Scrappy Monday, y'all!  I'm looking forward to this morning...I'm taking Ryan to a babysitter for four hours, and I am taking the morning OFF.  No cleaning, no going through stuff for our upcoming move.  I'm planning to put on some good music and play in my craft room for those four hours, and I'm gonna ENJOY it!

But first, I have a scrapbook layout to share!  We went to the NC Black Bear Festival in Plymouth, NC, in June of 2018.

The festival turned out to be really tiny (I had seen a billboard advertising it when I was driving up to DC and thought hey that sounds like fun; it was about a 2-hour drive to get there from our house).  Well, it probably didn't help that it poured down rain part of the day that we went there.  Anyway, there's some kind of black bear museum or something so we did that first thing and it turned out to be a whole lot of taxidermy and the look on Ryan's face pretty much mirrors my feelings on that subject.  We had more fun walking around the festival; they had a lot of food vendors with blackberry-themed foods and really we should have at least tried the blackberry ice cream.

Today's color palette comes straight from the photos:  Concord Crush, Baked Brown Sugar, Wisteria Wonder, Garden Green, Basic Black, and Whisper White.  Just one stamped bear from Rustic Retreat as an accent, and the name of the festival was on the giant inflatable arch in one picture so I let that be my page title.  It seems like I don't get to use purple very often in my scrapbook pages so this layout makes me happy :)

Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Rustic Retreat
Ink:  Memento Tuxedo Black, Garden Green, Basic Black marker
Paper:  Concord Crush, Wisteria Wonder, Garden Green, Thick Whisper White, Baked Brown Sugar DSP
Accessories:  Layering Circles dies, watercolor pencils

Rustic Cabin

Friday at last!  Hope y'all have had a good week.

I'm still resisting Christmas cards, but I did bust open a pack of Christmasy plaid paper for today's card:

I'm so happy to have more patterned paper with Shaded Spruce, it's such a gorgeous green.  I made my cabin in the woods for the Paper Players theme challenge:

Usually I don't work in my craft room at all if my kid is awake, because he's two and trails chaos everywhere he goes.  But I didn't get this card done during naptime yesterday, so after dinner I wanted to finish it and of course he followed me into the craft room...he spent 10 to 15 minutes chopping up scraps of paper with my guillotine-style paper trimmer.  (Fear not:  he did a really good job of keeping his hands away from the blade even before I said anything.)  He'd whack the handle down and then happily announced "I chop it!"  And now I have some white confetti in my trash can.  (I even convinced him to put it in the trash when he was done chopping.)  Maybe in a couple of years he'll be doing paper crafts with his mama, eh?

Anyway, here's the sketch from CAS(E) This Sketch:

I like that sketch, it's really fun and different.  And finally, here's the color challenge from Hand Stamped Sentiments:

Those are the three main colors from the Let It Snow specialty DSP in the holiday catalog, but my brain is a rebel so I didn't want to use that paper even though I have it.  So I put the focus mainly on Shaded Spruce, and used the other two colors for details--Real Red roof and Coastal Cabana sky.

Anyway, hope you have a great day y'all.  Hubby's job has their Thanksgiving potluck today (I guess they're doing it early so no one who's traveling for Thanksgiving would have to miss it) so I was a busy little bee baking all the things yesterday.  Which I'm not supposed to eat :p  Cheers!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Rustic Retreat
Ink:  Memento Tuxedo Black, Shaded Spruce, Real Red, Coastal Cabana, Gray Granite, Soft Suede
Paper:  Gray Granite, Thick Whisper White, Wrapped in Plaid DSP
Accessories:  Stitched Rectangles dies, Dimensionals, Gold Glitter Enamel Dots

Rustic Bear

Hey y'all!  I mentioned on Tuesday that I had wanted to do a woodsy scene for a card, so here it is.  We spent a week in the Bar Harbor area of Maine earlier this month and there were GORGEOUS fall colors, with lots of evergreens mixed in, so that was my inspiration for this card:

I did the polished stone technique on the background panel; you wet a cotton ball with rubbing alcohol and then add drops of ink refill, then pounce on glossy white cardstock.  It starts out looking polka dotty but if you keep going it blends together and you get something like this.  Believe it or not, I had SIX drops of Crushed Curry ink on my cotton ball, and one drop each of Pumpkin Pie and Cherry Cobbler.  Maybe next time I'll try doing the colors in stages instead of all together at once and see how that works.  At any rate, that technique was a favorite of mine years and years ago and it's nice to pull it out again.

I used this week's Freshly Made Sketch:

The As You See It challenge has expired, but I was thinking of it nonetheless:

And my card also fits in with the Cupcake Inspiration challenge:

And here is just one of the pictures we took in Acadia National Park:

We took just over 1,000 pictures over one week, and I haven't gone through them all yet except to just quickly look but I think we got some really nice ones.  We were there for peak fall foliage and happily missed the storms that came through starting the day after we got home.  We didn't see any fauna larger than a squirrel; all the moose and bears were hiding I guess, though I did get a sweatshirt with a moose on it and I love it :)

Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Rustic Retreat, Rooted in Nature
Ink:  Shaded Spruce, Early Espresso, Versamark, ink refills in Crushed Curry, Cherry Cobbler, & Pumpkin Pie
Paper:  Shaded Spruce, Crushed Curry, Thick Whisper White, Glossy White, Vellum
Accessories:  Nature's Roots Dies, Stitched Shapes Dies, Mini Dimensionals, Clear EP

Happy Fox

Hey y'all!  Once again I've been playing with new stamps :D  Apparently I was in a rustic mood the last time I ordered, because I got Rustic Retreat from the main catty and Nature's Beauty, which is in the holiday catalog and has some beautiful animal images in it.  Of course I had to ink up the fox first!

I'm planning to sneak this into my husband's truck one morning before he goes to work :)  Isn't that a GORGEOUS fox?!  I stamped him in Versamark + Early Espresso on watercolor paper and heat embossed him so I could watercolor.  I also did a light wash of Mint Macaron on the whole panel, but it didn't show up too well in the picture.

I used the sketch challenge from the Global Design Project:

I just picked my own combo of colors and I need to play with Shaded Spruce more often, it's beautiful.

Time to get moving, y'all.  Have a great day!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Nature's Beauty, Rustic Retreat, Country Home
Ink:  Shaded Spruce, Early Espresso, Cajun Craze, Mint Macaron, Versamark
Paper:  Shaded Spruce, Mint Macaron, Soft Suede, watercolor paper
Accessories:  Clear EP, linen thread, Dimensionals