Merry Christmas!

I know my followers are few, but each and every one of you is special and I wanted to wish you a 

Very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Too!

Feliz Navidad y Propero Ano

Looking Through My Card Stash

The Fiskateer Orange Blog Hop is this weekend and it reminded me I still need one more Halloween card for DH...

So I dug through my card stash drawer and found these four, using two different techniques.  I think I'll wait until Tuesday to decide if he should get the spiders or the pumpkin.  Or... you can tell me which one you think DH should get.

Wood instead of Paper

Have you ever tried stamping on Wood instead of Paper?

It can really add a nice touch to any card or layout.  I love the grain running through my image and I love the way the ink bleeds just a little.  I used Ranger Distress Ink and love the look, but if you want to stamp without the bleeding, try using Ranger Archival Ink or Staz On Ink. 

Layout Event - Challenge #2

I squeezed out another layout while having fun with my cropping group on Sunday afternoon.  The Fiskateer challenge was to use the negative space from a punch in some way.  Because I was away from home, I kept it simple and punched the sailboats along the top and bottom.  To keep the sailboats upright at the top of the page, I cut a slit along the top of the picture mat.  Then I tapped it back in place from the back.  If I had it to do again, I would run the slit clear to the edge.  It would be easier to punch and it taped back together so well, you would never notice.
This is Bill on our Sailboat Sirius, in 1993 when we are in the Gulf Islands, British Columbia, Canada.  We spent a year there preparing our boat for blue water sailing.  (That means being out of sight of land for long periods of time)

Fiskateer Games

See that cute little badge to the right?  

The one that says Fiskateer Games?  

Well... the Fiskateers are having a bit of fun during the Olympics with four events of our own.  The first week, the event is Layouts and there are four possible ways to enter.  Time is short for me, so I may only have one, but here it is:

I designed this with two special pictures I have of Billie (our dog) from 1999 when she first sailed with us.  She would site atop our cabin (on the sailboat) and watch the whole world go by.  Sometimes, she even chased the pelicans, only to find it wasn't so easy to stop quickly on the deck of a fiberglass boat.  LOL!

Unfortunately, our printer gave up, so I don't have the pictures just yet.  I have a new printer ordered and hope it arrives soon.

Summertime in Cardstock

During a recent online crop with the Fiskateers, one of the challenges was to get back to basics and use only cardstock.  I could resist grabbing a bunch of Fiskars Punches to have some some creating this little summer scene.  I love the dimension it has, yet is still flat enough to mail without hassle.

Feeling the Heat

It has been so long since I've posted, and never consistently, so now I hope to add a card or layout or ???  now and then.  Today, it is all about the humidity.

It has been so hot here during our monsoon season, that I needed some time to dream about cooler places.  I made this framed layout (8 x 8) for a challenge on the Fiskateer site using some of my new digital papers and some of the seashells I collected when we lived on our sailboat.  The base is an embroidery hoop and I used Tattered Angels paint to color it blue.  I like the effect of the ColorBok glitter paper (white) and think I might just go back and add glitter to the blue frame.

In honor of

 St. Patrick's Day, 

I am posting four of my favorite green cards. 

I hope you like them too.

Berry Sweet

Just a fun layout kit Mom and I just finished for the Color Suite Challenge at Scrapbook and Cards Today.  The strawberries have glossy accents and each leaf is folded and inked for dimension.  Loved making this layout.

An Altered Book for My Friend, about Her Garden

This is my first altered book and my first project as a Scrapbooker.  I made scrapbooks while growing up, but nothing like what we make today.  Mom showed me an altered book while I was visiting her and I was hooked.  I wanted to make a book about my friends' garden for her birthday.  I selected a book from the early 50's and the binding fell apart to the point that I decided to cover the book in denim so I could hide the repairs.

This page folds out (see following 3 pictures) and I tried to coordinate each set of pages as it unfolds.

It is all about friendship, therefore, it is a friendship garden

I spent a day with my friend, taking pictures of her garden in bloom.  She did not know what I was up to because I told her I wanted the pictures to use as a screensaver.

The colors in her garden deserved to be showcased, so I just added velum between these two pictures to keep them from sticking together.

The dedication page that I include in every book

I love having 3 half pages that coordinate in a series.   Ready...

Set...

Grow!

Oh how I love pockets.

The watermark paper on left page is from an actual picture, as are the tags.

The rabbit in this picture was a playmate to my friends little dog.  The rabbit would sit by the sliding glass door every morning and wait for the dog to come out and they would run around the yard chasing each other.

Not every page turned out as I intended, but they all had meaning, so I kept them.

There were so many great pictures, I added 4 envelope pages to hold the extras.

The picture on the right is also from her grape vine trellis.

This pathway represents all the journeys we have shared over the years as friends..  The pebbles are real.

More fun with nature.  The plants on these pages are all weeds from Oregon.  I glued them in by sealing them with gel medium. 

We worked together and were instrumental in the design of these two collector items.  So I just added a page to commemorate our careers.

The last page is a tribute to my friends wonderful little dog, Thor

Lighthouse Altered Book

It's been a while since I created this book, but I've never posted all of the pages.  My brother and his wife love lighthouses and love to visit them.  Because I lived on a sailboat (at that time), I was always trying to downsize my stuff.  Every year I would look at this unbelievably awesome book about the lighthouses of the Pacific Ocean and I just couldn't part with it.  I bought it originally to learn more about the areas where I went scuba diving.  When diving a light house, it is always fun to learn the history.  Then I started altering books and I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do with this book.

Because this book is about lighthouses, I didn't want to cover all the pages, so you will see whole chapters that I left available for reading and reference.  However, I did alter some of those pages too.  You'll see.

Starting with the first page.

The inside covers had a great map of where the lighthouses featured in this book, were located.  I added two fun little tags to leave the entire map open.

I didn't want to totally cover the title page either, so using velum, I printed a picture of my brother and sister in law standing in front of a lighthouse.  The left page is a string embossed lighthouse, a technique I love to use to add subtle images.

I appliqued printed material by stuffing it with yarn (it's what I had on hand) and covering the edges with a smaller version of white nautical rope.

Some pages are just that, pages.  Nothing special, no great technique, etc.  This is one of those.  I used stickers with a seashore theme and glued broken, smooth, seashells around them.  The sea shells are ones I collected from a beach on an island in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico, for this book.

The book came with a protective paper cover that was in very bad shape.  I cut it up to add here, including the description from the inside of the jacket (paper cover).  It was very long so I cut each paragraph and linked them together in this pocket using ribbon.

The story of the right page is about a storm, so I made a sheet of very lumpy paper and marbled in the darker blues of an ocean storm.

 

The story on the left references a specific lighthouse (highlighted script) that we passed in our sailboat on our way to Mexico, so I used a cut from the actual chart that we used to chart our course during out travels.  It's hard to explain, but the charts from our journey are very special memories because of the notes we made, the way it shows our progress, etc.  My brother and his wife, also avid boaters, understand this so I added our chart as a personal touch.

One way to alter part of the chapters I left open for reading.  I used chalk to highlight the story and added the title around the edge.

In each of my books, I create a dedication page to say why I chose that book and why I gave it to them.  This is the dedication page for my brother and sister in law, and the picture is one our father took of a local lighthouse at night.

I have 5 favorite pages in this book and this is one of them.  It's a story page about a shipwreck on the Oregon Coast that we visited every year.  We watched it sink farther and farther into the sand.  The pictures are from historical records and ones our father took throughout our childhood, again making the page personal.

Each one of the torn ocean papers is glued to the torn book page and opens.  So this is actually four pages with more of the same inside.

On the left page, at the base of the lighthouse, I used dried weeds that look like seaweed.  It is important when using plants to seal them entirely onto the page using a gel medium or similar paste.

 This page actually tells a story.  The clip art graphics show what happened in the story, and the numbers correspond to the numbers in the actual story.  This page did not turn out as I intended, and I still don't like it.

 This page has it's own special story for my brother and his wife, so I left the left page open, and gave my sister in law the velum, to tell her own story of this lighthouse.  (She's also a scrapper).

The next several pictures are just ways to add a little fun in the chapters that I left open so they could read them. 

 Now we are back to just fun, decorative pages.

 

The lantern and firewood (above), cannon, gloves, etc. (below) are all items mentioned in the stories unfolding on these pages.

 

This was my first page for this book and by the time I finished making the sunken ship, I knew I was going to be hooked on altered books.  Again, I used weeds from the Oregon area to simulate seaweed.

Even though the Eddystone Light is not part of the lighthouses in this book, it is by far, the most famous lighthouse in history.  The left page is the words to the song, "Eddystone Light" and the right pages record the history of the 5 lighthouses that stood on this sight.

Oops!  I have since painted the inside of the door.  I drew the stairs and brickwork as described in one of the stories in this book.

 The CD is the entire Eddystone Light story (a very fat book).

Inside the back cover... a different section of map from the front cover.