Stamping Mojo

You know, it's been a while since I've made cards.  And when I was working on cards the other night, I definitely felt as though I'd lost whatever stamping mojo I may have once had.  Things were just not turning out quite as I'd hoped.

I did appreciate how quickly one can make cards with the Cuttlebug, however. 

 
Still, that seemed a little like cheating.  And so I kept at it.  And things started gradually getting a tiny bit better. Still feeling a little rusty on the card making though.

handprint skulls

My son and I came up with this cute and easy Halloween decoration yesterday.  He decided to paint his hands white and rather than just wipe it off, we made handprints on black paper.  At first we thought we'd make ghosts, but they seemed to look more like skulls.  A little help from a black sharpie and we were done!

Measurement Swap

Crafting again!  I joined the Carving Consortium again and have signed up for a couple of swaps.  Here is my contribution for the measurement swap.
Of course I am late getting it into the mail.  I thought it had to be postmarked by today, but it was really supposed to be received by today!  I normally don't like background marks and usually try really hard to clean them all out.  I'm trying to be less anal about that.  Sometimes the background marks add a nice effect.

Sun Flares

Remember Tracy's Trinkets and Treasures? She had a sunset, sunrise, and sun flaire photo party that ended last week. Since I took my photos yesterday, I didn't participate but it was cool to learn a new technique. I really like the photos I took. There was an amazing ring around the sun for most of yesterday morning:


Of course I got a couple shots with interference:

The clouds were amazing too!

360 degrees

I am loving this blog: Tracy's Trinkets and Treasures.  She does amazing stuff and I am learning more about photography. She's having a link party on her site in which the photographer is supposed to take pictures 360 degrees around them. Usually I'm just a lurker but she just did a post asking what you've done to push yourself lately so here goes.  Unfortunately, our yard is pretty dreary to look at right now:

And there's no way I wanted to document the full range of messiness in our house so I decided to do a different take on the 360 degree thing. Here's the garuda we bought when we were in Bali. We usually only look at the front of it, but it's beautiful all the way around:






P.S. I took all these in manual mode.  YAY!

Carving

Getting back to my roots! I introduced carving to the kids last week. They did amazing jobs at cutting safely and making cool stamps. Kalin did two designs, a leaf and a flower. Cam did some crazy randomness, but also managed to trace a snake that I drew for him. I even got some carving in-- but no pictures of that of course. And I was motivated to rejoin the Carving Consortium. Hoping for some swaps in my future!

Rice Critter

A few weeks ago I made another rice-bag critter for the fourth birthday of one of our friends. Figuring out the fabrics:

The finished product:

Birthday card

Here's the quick and dirty card I did for my sister's birthday.  It looked better in person (I think).  The punch is Martha Stewart.  I am thinking I'm going to try making a few more cards with this punch but I may turn the gifts into skyscapers.

crafting again

I have a new craft space in the basement and finally got it usable enough that I could do some crafting! I went on a card making frenzy based on this sketch from Clean & Simple.