Retiring: Magical Day & Seaside Shore

Mornin', y'all!  I was blessed with two good naptime crafting sessions yesterday (thank you Ryan) and it's a good thing because I had a slight dangit! moment.  I was halfway done making a card for a color challenge when I realized that I'd used the wrong green for the challenge.  I even had the colors written down right in front of me! #DUH Oh well, I ended up with two cards I like, so you'll see the wrong color card tomorrow.  Here's the second card I made:

Most of the stamp sets on the retiring list I am content to say goodbye to, but not Magical Day.  I love this set so much!  I wish it was carrying over just because I tend not to use a lot of retired stuff except for on scrapbook pages and I want to play lots more with this set.  Well, it will live forever in my collection.

The card base is Shimmery White, and I used very diluted Tranquil Tide to make a tranquil tide for my mermaid.

I've always got a cup of water with me, so I squished the ink pad into the lid to get a pool of ink, and then I poured a bit of water in the ink pad for an impromptu watercolor session.  I also keep a roll of paper towels in my craft room, so when I was done I just blotted the ink out of the ink pad lid.  No muss, no fuss!

Check out this week's sketch from Clean & Simple Stamping:

And the color challenge from the Paper Players:

You know I love me some Tranquil Tide, so I really don't know why I picked up Wild Wasabi instead on the first card I made (though for that card, Wild Wasabi worked better than Tranquil Tide would have...check back tomorrow to see it).  Wisteria Wonder and Elegant Eggplant are now retiring.  I'll be sad to see Elegant Eggplant go, but I do admit that the ink comes out so dark sometimes (especially with my ridiculously juicy ink pad) that it looks black.  We're getting two new purples to replace these two, and I can't wait to dive in to the new colors.

That's it for me today, y'all.  Cheers!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Magical Day, Seaside Shore
Ink:  Basic Black, Tranquil Tide, Wisteria Wonder, Elegant Eggplant, retired skin tone Blendabilities
Paper:  Shimmery White, Wisteria Wonder, Delightful Daisy DSP
Accessories:  Magical Mates Framelits, Dimensionals

Orchid Festival 2010, Part 1

Happy Wednesday, y'all!  Actually it's SCRAPPY Wednesday :)  I have over 50 draft blog posts, almost all of them with scrapbook pages waiting to be shared, so I may post layouts more often than just once a week.  I love card making but scrapbooking is really my jam, ya know?

When we lived in Okinawa (when it comes to islands, I never know if I should say we lived IN the island, or ON the island, thoughts?), they had festivals for pretty much everything.  We went to the cherry blossom festival for two years, I went to the orchid festival twice, but we skipped the azalea festival and the lily festival (I'm okay with missing the lily festival though, I'm allergic to them).  Somehow I never blogged the pictures from the second orchid festival, which I went to with Missy, but you can see the first year's pictures here, here, and here.

 I pulled out the long-retired Notable Alphabet for my title, and the Barely Banana mat on the left has some subtle butterflies stamped on it courtesy of Butterfly of Happiness (also long retired).  The butterflies are a little *too* subtle, but done is better than perfect I think...especially since I'm so far behind on my scrapbook pages.  Anyway, I often go in streaks with certain colors where I want to use them on everything, and it's fine even on scrapbook pages because I don't work chronologically.  YOU probably don't see it since I don't share my layouts in the order I made them, but I've recently been on a kick with Poppy Parade (which is coming back!  Oh happy day!) and Barely Banana (more than once I've used them together).  Anyway, I love color and I'm very excited about all the new colors that are coming with the SU! color refresh.  In my perfect (very colorful) little world, Stampin' Up! colors would *never* retire, we'd just keep getting more :D

Enough about colors, let's talk about scrapbook sketches.  I subscribed to Creating Keepsakes magazine for YEARS and I collected literally hundreds of sketches in my own sketch binder.  This was back in the day when Becky Higgins was the It Girl for scrapbooking (and well before Project Life, which is not my thang).  I still use BH sketches all the time and I have this book, which I peruse frequently.

I like that it's organized by number of photos, and there's a sample layout for each sketch.  If you go back and look at my scrapbook pages, you'll see that most of the time I crop my photos as little as possible.  Unless they're really old pictures before I kinda learned what I was doing when it comes to taking good pictures.  Well, I had printed out I think 35 pictures from this festival, and by golly I wanted to use all of them, so I had to crop.  Now I have three layouts done and I didn't even pass out when I cut up the pictures.

Here's the sketch that I used for this layout.  Most of the time I don't use this many pictures on a single layout (12 here), so this was fun for me and I thought you'd like to see how I got from a big stack of photos to finished pages.  I'll share the other two layouts sometime soon.

 

And now we're back to colors for a minute with today's color palette: Pink Pirouette (retiring), Sweet Sugarplum (retiring), Rich Razzleberry, Barely Banana (long retired), and Wild Wasabi (retiring).  I love the soft pink as a background for all the flower photos, I just thought it worked so well here.  If you're curious, you can see my scrapbook pages for the 2009 orchid festival here and here.

If you actually made it this far, and read the whole thing, I salute you!  Thanks for "listening" to me yammer.  Cheers!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Notable Alphabet, Butterfly of Happiness
Ink;  Pink Pirouette, Barely Banana, Sweet Sugarplum, Rich Razzleberry marker
Paper:  Pink Pirouette, Barely Banana, Rich Razzleberry, Wild Wasabi
Accessories:  None

Retiring: Swan Lake

Mornin', folks!  Yesterday, Stampin' Up! dropped their retirement lists in preparation for the new catalog, so I'll most likely be revisiting some of the soon-to-retire stamp sets between now and June 1.  And first on the list is Swan Lake.

Honestly, a big part of why I got Swan Lake is to do scrapbook pages for Neuschwanstein (the castle in Bavaria that was the basis for Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland; there are swan motifs everywhere in the castle).  I haven't gotten to those pictures yet, but I did use the swan on another layout already.  I do like this stamp set.  So anyway, I paired the soon-to-retire with a couple of brand new (and continuing in the next catalog) stamp sets:  Waterfront and Lots of Happy.  I can't wait to play with Waterfront a bit more, and Lots of Happy is part of a card kit in the Occasions Catalog...I can now report that 4 out of 5 of the Lots of Happy sentiments fit perfectly in that Tailored Tag Punch.  Yay!

Enough chatter, let's take a look at this week's color challenge from Global Design Project:

I love Tranquil Tide so I was happy to see this combination.  I inked up both the swan and the sentiment with Versamark and then Night of Navy ink, and embossed both with clear embossing powder.  That allowed me to watercolor some Crumb Cake shading on the swan without making the colors run.  For the lake and shore, I stamped off once on scratch paper before stamping on the cardstock here to make the colors a little lighter, and just added more stamping until I liked how it looked.

Here's the sketch from Sunday Stamps that I used:

I like this sketch, it was fun!  I left off the two little flagged pieces on the "any shape" element in the interests of keeping my card on the simpler side.  I just hand-cut the mat for the Tailored Tag punch, easy enough since it's all straight lines.  A few pearls and that was it!

Time to feed Ryan his second breakfast...he gets a bottle first thing and then a bowl of cereal a little later, and it's time for that.  Plus I'm hungry too!  Cheers!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Swan Lake, Waterfront, Lots of Happy
Ink;  Versamark, Night of Navy, Tranquil Tide, Crumb Cake, Calypso Coral
Paper:  Crumb Cake, Night of Navy, Thick Very Vanilla, True Gentleman DSP
Accessories:  Tailored Tag punch, pearls, Dimensionals, clear EP

Copenhagen

Scrappy Monday, y'all!  I've got a LOT of scrapbook layouts waiting to be shared which means I've gotten a lot of pages done :) So how about one I finished up just last week?

Copenhagen was the last stop on our Baltic cruise; we got a hotel room so we could spend a full day there before we went back home (check out all the pictures here).  For this one, I used Mindy Backes' favorite color combination of Tranquil Tide, Lemon Lime Twist, and Calypso Coral.  Are you squinting to see where I used Lemon Lime Twist and thinking I made some mistake?  It's there...the patterned paper strip that goes across both pages used to be a Tranquil Tide pattern on Whisper White, but I sponged it with LLT.  I wanted to tone down the white a little so it wouldn't compete with the journaling block, and that did the trick!

I stamped my title directly on another piece of patterned paper in the Delightful Daisy pack.  I liked the watercolor feel of the patterns and thought they went well with the Little Mermaid statue in the photos.

So there's my color palette, as I mentioned:  Tranquil Tide, Lemon Lime Twist, Calypso Coral, Night of Navy, and Whisper White.  I had fun with these colors together so thanks to Mindy for the combination!

Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Spencerian Alphabet, Hello Lovely
Ink:  Night of Navy, Calypso Coral, Lemon Lime Twist
Paper:  Tranquil Tide, Night of Navy, Whisper White, Delightful Daisy DSP
Accessories:  None

Springy Butterfly

Good afternoon, friends!  I had a big nasty headache yesterday, but this morning I managed to get a card made to share today.

For a wonder, the Wink of Stella on the butterfly actually shows up somewhat!  So of course the Soft Sky sponging behind the butterfly doesn't show up as well.  My springy colors are courtesy of Fab Friday:

 And I used this week's Freshly Made Sketch:

Just for good measure, I'll enter this over at Retro Rubber as well:

Watercolor Wings is almost 3 years old (I got it in July of 2015); Orange Blossom isn't quite a year old yet and of course Beautiful Peacock (where I got the teeny flowers) was from this year's Sale-a-Bration so it's pretty much new.

Okay, kiddo is running riot and angry that I won't feed him any more goldfish so I'd best attend to him before he starts chasing Sadie around again.  Cheers!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Watercolor Wings, Orange Blossom, Beautiful Peacock
Ink:  Soft Sky, Night of Navy, Powder Pink, So Saffron
Paper:  Thick Whisper White, Naturally Eclectic DSP
Accessories:  Bold Butterfly Thinlits, Dimensionals, Wink of Stella

Wild Lion

Mornin', y'all!  How's it going today?

 I just got the stamp set A Little Wild with this super adorable lion, but I'll admit I'm not in love with this card.  I don't know why.  I didn't have time to ponder the problem or fix it though because Ryan woke up from his nap while I was working on it so I just had to call it done.  I mean, it's okay, but I hope I do other stuff with this lion that I like a lot better.

I used this week's Fall-To Layout from Clean & Simple Stamping:

Except I couldn't for the life of me figure out something to do for the dark stripe across the card, so I ended up doing nothing.

I also used this week's CASE the Designer challenge from the Global Design Project:

I know my card doesn't look very similar, but I used the same colors (or at least, what I thought they were)--Pool Party, Pear Pizzazz, and So Saffron (though I think the inspiration card looks more like Crushed Curry).  And I have my die-cut focal image on the lower left quadrant of the card.

So that's my card for today.  Here's a sneak peek at a layout that I'm almost done with now:

Sometimes I'll move photos around to try to find something I like, and I take pictures of possible ideas.  I didn't end up using this arrangement but the pages are all done now except for journaling.  Whee!  Oh, and Mom:  yesterday's layout was from Sapporo, Japan, not China.  I have just two pages left in the China books; I need to order a photo for one of them so it's on hold for the moment because I still have to go through some pictures and SOMEBODY was going to email me pics from Christmas in Texas.  Not naming names...

Cheers, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  A Little Wild
Ink:  Basic Black, So Saffron, Soft Suede, Pear Pizzazz, Pool Party
Paper:  So Saffron, Basic Black, Whisper White, Whole Lot of Lovely DSP (I used a tiny scrap!  Yay!)
Accessories:  Little Loves Framelits, Dimensionals

Sapporo, Part 7: Maruyama Zoo

Scrappy Monday, y'all!  Hope you had a great Easter weekend.  The kiddo started walking on his own this weekend...he's been able to walk for quite some time, but before now he's mostly refused to do it unless he's holding on to your hand or pushing his lion car toy around.  But on Saturday he started toddling around under his own power.  We're in trouble now!

But right this minute let's talk scrapbook pages.  This is my last Sapporo layout!

See the pics up close here.  Lee, Missy and I went to the zoo as our last hurrah in Sapporo; you saw the polar bears last week.  In American zoos it seems like you can't get closer than about 50 feet to most of the animals, particularly the carnivorous ones, so it was quite a shock to see the big cats here with nothing in between us and them but a sheet of plexiglass.  And that lioness took umbrage with Lee taking pictures!

There's my title.  At least this time I only had to cut out three letters?  And also you can see a closer-up snippet of that patterned paper on the left, I LOVE that pattern!!

I took my colors from the Nordic Noel pattern:  Garden Green, Soft Sky, Calypso Coral, Real Red (though I usually don't like Calypso Coral and Real Red together, today we'll give them a pass), Baked Brown Sugar and Whisper White.

Well, my toddler is getting into stuff he shouldn't be, so cheers for now, y'all!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Tall Tales Alphabet, Calendar Alphabet & Numbers
Ink:  Calypso Coral, Chocolate Chip marker
Paper:  Garden Green, Baked Brown Sugar, Real Red, Whisper White, Nordic Noel DSP
Accessories:  hexagon punch