Turtle-y Cool Colors for The Paper Players

Mornin' y'all!  It's Sunday and that means it's time for a new challenge from The Paper Players!  This week the amazing Ann has a beautiful color palette for us to play with:

As soon as I saw the colors, I thought they would be perfect for something floral, but I like to be quite contrary in the style of Mary Mary, so I had to do something different.  Here's what I came up with, nary a flower in sight:

I was actually having a hard time coming up with an idea for this card until I made my Shello card earlier this week for a different challenge, and I realized these colors are perfect for an under the sea card too.  I pulled out my Sea Turtle stamp set and kept the same "hello" I used on the Shello card because it was already out and I'm lazy ; )  The Sea Turtle stamp set is reversible, so to start with I used the "shadow" side of the stamp and used sponges to apply both Mossy Meadow and Lost Lagoon ink, stamped it, and then turned the stamp over and stamped the turtle in full-strength Mossy Meadow ink on top.  I used both Petal Pink and Calypso Coral on my paper strip behind the turtle and I think my Calypso Coral ink pad needs re-inking, but I like the weathered look to the starfish for this card.  Some watery Lost Lagoon DSP from the Thoughtful Journey stack and a couple of retired Tinsel Gems finished off the card.  And I had so much fun making this card that I made another one with these colors, which you'll see very soon.

Check out the other design team creations on the Paper Players blog, and you can hop through their individual blogs to leave some comments too:

The Paper Players Design Team

Jaydee

LeAnne Pugliese

Claire Broadwater

Joanne James

Anne Marie Hile

Ann Schach

Jan Clothier

Stef Perry

you are here --> Christy Stanford

And then upload your card at the Paper Players blog!  Keep in mind a few simple rules:
1.  Create a new paper project
2.  Upload your creation to your blog with a link back to us and provide a direct link to the post featuring your challenge submission
3.  Please link your card to no more than four challenges, TOTAL
4.  Have fun!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Four You
Ink:  Mossy Meadow, Lost Lagoon, Petal Pink, Calypso Coral
Paper:  Mossy Meadow, Petal Pink, Thick Basic White, Thoughtful Journey DSP Stack
Accessories:  Dimensionals, Lost Lagoon Tinsel Gems

Friendly Sea Turtle

Mornin' y'all!  I continue my streak of bedtime-related bad choices, but last night it was a book : )  Some things haven't changed since I was a wee young lass.

I had a very lovely and productive day in my craft room yesterday and here's one of the cards I made:

I started with this week's Freshly Made Sketch, but I thought that maybe the bubble stamps on the background didn't quite read as three panels, so I ended up making another card for that sketch (to be released soon).  I used the TGIF Challenges colors:

And it occurred to me that since Sea Turtle is two years old, I can enter this card at the Retro Rubber Challenge too:

I used a greeting stamp from the not-retro Ocean Friends just because a.) Sea Turtle doesn't have any greetings and b.) Ocean Friends was already on my crafting table.  And now I have yet another sea turtle card to send to my friend Missy : )

Time to get Ryan to school and then I have errands to run this morning.  Cheers, peeps!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Ocean Friends
Ink:  Summer Splash, Granny Apple Green, Fresh Freesia
Paper:  Summer Splash, Thick Basic White
Accessories:  In Color Opal Rounds (retired), Dimensionals

She Lives...Mostly

Hey y'all.  I had an unplanned hiatus last week because I've been under the weather (far, far under).  I went to urgent care on Monday with a sore throat and the doc and I were both surprised when I tested negative for strep.  Whatever I have, it's persistent, so I've spent the last week hanging out with my new besties, DayQuil and NyQuil, and sleeping a lot.

I do have one card to share that I made before I started hibernating, take a look:

Let's check out the Hand Stamped Sentiments color challenge:

Those are all in the Friends of the Ocean DSP, but I wanted to do something different than the lobster and crab so I pulled out the baby Sea Turtle instead.  Paired that with the CAS Colours & Sketches sketch:

I have not been in my craft room at all for the past week except to put up the postage stamps I ordered, so I'm hoping that I can get back in there soon and start stamping, I've missed it.

That's it for me today, peeps.  Cheers!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Everyday Arches
Ink:  Calypso Coral, Lemon Lime Twist, Summer Splash
Paper:  Lemon Lime Twist, Unbounded Beauty, Thick Basic White
Accessories:  2 1/2" circle punch, Perennial Postage dies, Mini Dimensionals, In Color Shimmer Gems

Insert Clever Message Here

Hey y'all, how's it going?  I'm back to writing posts in real time, whee.  Also I feel like I'm starting to come down with something again, I had strep throat a couple of weeks ago right after we arrived here in Colorado.  Ugh.  BUUUUUT to focus on the positive today, my craft room is up and running and here is the very first card I've made in Colorado:

Had to start with the Paper Players challenge:

I didn't want to dig through all my retired stamps for something beachy, so Sea Turtle it is!  Plus I've started sending my friend Missy sea turtle cards.  I think she expressed an interest in sea turtles at some point but my brain could be making that up, but regardless, every time I make a sea turtle card, I send it to her.  And if I don't have any sea turtle cards on deck, the USPS recently released sea turtle postage stamps :)  All that to say, I know who's getting this card!

And also congrats to the Paper Players for making it to more than 700 challenges!  Wish I could have played along last week but it's taken a while to get unpacked and organized.  Sooooo do you want to see my new crafting CASTLE?  Stay tuned, but first here's the recipe for the card:

Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Saying Hey
Ink:  Azure Afternoon, Blueberry Bushel, Night of Navy, Lemon Lime Twist, Garden Green, Whisper White
Paper:  Basic Beige, Thick Basic White
Accessories:  Adhesive Glitter Sequins, Wink of Stella, Dimensionals



Okay, just to get this out of the way, my craft room is the master bedroom in this house.  We had wanted a four-bedroom house (master, Ryan, guest room, craft room), but this one is three...however, the master suite has a huge bedroom and a sitting area separated by a wall with a dual-sided fireplace on it.  All our bedroom stuff fit in the sitting room side just fine, so here's my craft room which I realize is RIDICULOUS.

Pictures aren't the best quality, I think because of all the light coming in from the windows, but I took this one standing in the doorway between the craft room and the master bedroom.

The movers had beat up my old file cabinets sufficiently over the years that they were pretty much done, so I got two new file cabinets that Ryan and the hubs put together for me.  I salvaged one of the old file cabinets (the shorter one on the left) because it's still standing, albeit dented.

My old bookshelves were also toast, but I'd had most of them since high school so they hung in there for quite a while.  So I got these four Ikea bookshelves for all my stamps.

Okay this is a terrible picture but it's the only one I took of this side of the craft room.  I have two giant shelving units in the corners, one with all my 12x12 cardstock and DSP (except I'm missing one of the paper totes and can't find it anywhere), and the other has my completed scrapbook pages and some other miscellaneous items.

So here's the wall between the craft room and the bedroom, you can see through the fireplace if you want to, and the doorway is to the left of the fireplace.

The hubs took yesterday off work to attend to a few things around the house, and we put up artwork in my craft room which makes me so happy.  So above the file cabinets I have Maleficent, The Princess Bride, and Megara (sorry for the glare).  We still have a LOT of things to hang up around the house to cover up that greige paint until we can paint the house something nicer.  Even the ceilings are greige!

And in one corner I have my happy coyote who makes me think of Mercy Thompson (heroine of my favorite book series), and Indiana Jones and Marion on the bottom.

And to represent my first fandom, I have an entire Star Wars wall.  Mostly the ladies of Star Wars, focusing on Princess Leia, but the Mandalorian is in there too.

My two largest pieces that I got on a May the Fourth sale last year and just framed right before we packed out in Texas.  Whee!  This room is YOOOOJ and there's still enough room to put a second 6-foot table in the middle so the hubs could work on projects in there too, though I absolutely drew the line at him hanging up a giant RC plane from the ceiling anywhere in here.  Well, really, anywhere in the house.  I think giant planes hanging from the ceiling would be claustrophobia-inducing, and I don't want something that 3D on any of the walls either.  That stuff can stay in the garage, thankyouverymuch.

So yeah, there's my crafting castle.  Guess we'd better stay here awhile because I don't know how I'd fit all that in a smaller space...

Cheers, y'all.

Thoughtful Sea Turtle

Happy Friday, folks!  It's the last day of Ryan's karate camp and this afternoon they'll have a little showcase and hand out some awards, so I'm looking forward to seeing what Ryan has learned this week.  But for the next few hours I will be trying my best to be productive in my craft room while I still can ; )

I was cruising through my current stamp sets with a particular color challenge in mind and this is what I came up with:

At first I had picked up Thoughtful Expressions with its beautiful hummingbird image, but I couldn't resist the sea turtle (and I still used Thoughtful Expressions for the sentiment).  Here's the color challenge from Hand-Stamped Sentiments:

Just realized that the last time I used the Sea Turtle stamp set, it was for a different color challenge on this same site :)  Anyway, this time I used Lost Lagoon for the bubbly background stamped off once, and then full strength for the sentiment.  My Petal Pink ink pad is extra super juicy for some reason, so I had to experiment a bit to find a way to make the sand dollars dark enough to see but light enough that they didn't look weird.  For the sea turtle, I inked up the back side (solid side) of the stamp and then used a sponge to remove some of the ink so it wouldn't be quite as dark.  I also didn't worry about getting absolute even coverage when I stamped, as I figured it would just give the sea turtle some extra texture.  Then I stamped the detail side twice to make it stand out, and then covered it in Wink of Stella which you can actually see in the photo, it's a miracle!  A few retired Polished Dots and there's my card for today.

I've been very focused on scrapbook pages lately and I have a stack of like eight layouts (soon to be nine) that I need to write journaling for, and then add those to the other seven or so that I haven't taken pictures of yet.  The movers are coming to start packing out the house on June 24 so I'm trying to squeeze in as much crafting time as possible.  At least this isn't an overseas move so it won't be months before I get my craft room set up on the other side.

That's it for me today, peeps.  I'm going to do my morning blog surfing while I finish my tea, then it's up to my craft room to make more things.  Cheers!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Thoughtful Expressions
Ink:  Lost Lagoon, Soft Sea Foam, Petal Pink
Paper:  Soft Sea Foam, Thick Basic White
Accessories:  Dimensionals, Polished Dots

Sea Turtle Salutations in Stereo

Today I have a pair of cards to share : )  Here they are:

I was intrigued by this week's color challenge from Hand Stamped Sentiments:

First I made a CAS card:

I used the sketch from CAS Colours & Sketches:

I made another card with this sketch but I'll have to share that later.  It was fun to use the "shadow" stamps in the Sea Turtle stamp set for both of these cards since I hadn't done that before.

After the CAS card, I wanted to give the colors another go with something different, so I made this one:

That's the same stripey paper I used on yesterday's submarine card.  I just looked through past blog posts and I've made another card combining the Sea Turtle stamp set with that fun hello stamp from Filled with Happiness so apparently my brain just likes that combination.

That's it for me today.  Got another busy day ahead...cheers!

Supplies, all SU!, CAS card:
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Filled with Happiness
Ink:  Pretty Peacock, Petal Pink, Garden Green
Paper:  Thick Basic White
Accessories:  None

Supplies, all SU!, second card:
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Filled with Happiness
Ink:  Garden Green, Pretty Peacock, Petal Pink
Paper:  Petal Pink, Thick Basic White, Bright & Beautiful Stack
Accessories:  Deckled Rectangles dies, Dimensionals, Adhesive-Backed Sequins

Hello, Miss You + Goals

Hey y'all, happy new year.  This is actually the first card I've made in 2024 and the first blog post I've written (I wrote the last one before I went back down to Houston in December 30).  So let's get stuck in, shall we?

I decided to go with sea turtles today thanks to the Color Throwdown:

I used Blueberry Bushel, Old Olive, and Very Vanilla for my colors, with a bit of Crumb Cake for a neutral.  I didn't have any Blueberry Bushel DSP that matched what I had in mind, so I used a blending brush to add color to some plain Vanilla cardstock.  I rinsed the ink out of my blending brush and just slung water from that onto the cardstock and that's how I got my watery background.  And now my fingers are a little bit blue, but it gave me the look I wanted.

Check out the first Freshly Made Sketch of the new year:

I used some linen thread to represent the long skinny panel on the sketch.  My sentiment today comes from the brand new set Filled with Happiness and while I got it mostly for the stamp with the oranges, I do love the '80s-inspired fonts on the hello and thanks sentiments in the set.  I know who I'll be sending this card to, and I will be writing in some cards later today to get out in the mail in my ongoing single person effort to keep the USPS going.  Also, buy postage stamps ASAP, prices are going up again.

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Filled with Happiness
Ink:  Blueberry Bushel, Old Olive, Crumb Cake
Paper:  Old Olive, Thick Very Vanilla
Accessories:  linen thread, Rhinestone Waves Basic Jewels (retired)

Okay, you can feel free to skip this bit if you want to (really, you don't have to read anything that I write, I can't make you), but at the beginning of January I like to take a minute to think about the things I accomplished in the previous year and what I want to accomplish in the year to come.  You can see last year's post here, and here's my thoughts on what is to come in 2024.  As I said in last year's post, I don't do resolutions, I kinda set intentions and I think for like the third or fourth year in a row my word for the year is BALANCE.  We all have about a billion things vying for attention at any given time, and I am forever striving to balance what is most important and what is most effective at keeping me and my family happy.  So in addition to that, let's revisit my yearly intentions.

1.  Scrapbook layouts:  I made 142 scrapbook pages in 2023, which is pretty dang good with an international move in the middle of the year which means I had no craft room from May to August.  I always try to make at least 100 pages, and this year I have an additional goal--make my wedding album.  Yeah, the hubs and I had our 20th anniversary last October and I've never put together our wedding album!  I want to do it before we're all reunited at the end of the hubs' deployment this summer.  (He doesn't read this blog so I'm not worried about spoiling the surprise here.)

2.  Organize and pare down pictures:  Um, need to reattack.  I haven't done anything on that since we moved, other than putting new pictures in folders (which is important), but I need to get back to sorting through the older ones.  I feel like this is going to be a project forever.  And I need to find a place to print my pictures for future scrapbook pages (see #1) because the last place just had horrible quality and I haven't printed pictures in over a year.

3.  Reading:  According to Goodreads, I read 95 books in 2023, about 40% of which was Terry Pratchett's Discworld and it was SO FUN.  Discworld was definitely the reading highlight for the year for me personally, but Ryan and I read through the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and that was fabulous for both of us.  I love that he's getting old enough for me to share some of the books that I love with him.  Yesterday I started rereading a book that I loved as a kid and it was so fun to start off my 2024 reading with something that I loved 30+ years ago.  This time last year, I had 545 unread books on my Kindle and today that number is 731.  I continue to be amused at how large my TBR stack is, and also grateful that it's all on my Kindle so I don't have to worry about a mountain of books falling on me in the middle of the night and suffocating me.  If all those books were hard copies, then "book avalanche" would 100% be my most likely cause of death, ha.  I'm not even going to bother to check how many books I've bought just since January first.  I shall never lack for something to read...the bigger problem is choosing what to read next.

4.  Stitching:  I'm still working on last year's temperature tracker, which has been an interesting project but I admit I'm ready to move on to something different.  I'm currently stitching the October line and it shouldn't take me too long to finish it up, I just need to sit down and work on it.  I didn't start on the last three Pretty Little Cities patterns, but I did make a beautiful tiger on some amazing hand-dyed fabric and I have so many projects I'm itching to start.  Let's be honest, I have enough potential projects to keep me busy for at least the next thousand years.

So yeah, that's where I am as of right now.  I have lots to look forward to this year :)

Sea Turtle Salutation

Mornin' y'all!  After spending two days at home not feeling well, Ryan is back at school today, hurrah!  Unfortunately now I'm under the weather.  Might be moving a bit more slowly today, but I still have things to do.  But first, a card!

Sea Turtle is another stamp set I got in the recent one-day stamp sale.  I thought the larger sea turtle image would be perfect for the 600th Freshly Made Sketch:

Congrats to the Freshly Made Sketches team for making it to #600, that's amazing!  As is my custom, I paired the sketch with the Color Throwdown:

I used Smoky Slate (on the sentiment, I didn't use a lot I know), Lost Lagoon, and Garden Green for the colors.  I started this card last night while Ryan was in the tub, really all I got done was stamping the turtle and the sentiment.  I got up this morning and saw the theme at As You See It:

And my sea turtle fits the theme, serendipity!  One of my favorite ever beach experiences was when the hubs and I were visiting Hawaii, we were driving around and happened to stop at a beach to take some pictures, and we discovered that there were two or three giant sea turtles enjoying the beach as well.  We stayed back a respectful distance (I think there were people there from a wildlife conservation group to ensure the turtles' well-being) but we got some really great pictures of them with our zoom lens.  I think that experience is only trumped by the time that hubs and I were walking along a beach in Florida and that's where he proposed : )

Hope your day is beachy keen!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Sea Turtle, Inked & Tiled
Ink:  Garden Green, Lost Lagoon, Smoky Slate
Paper:  Lost Lagoon, Thick Basic White
Accessories:  Mini Dimensionals, Polished Dots