Black Friday! Shop 'Til You Drop!

If you've been following my blog for a while, or been part of my newsletter in previous years, you know that my sister and I consider Black Friday to be it's own holiday. It started out a few years ago when we said "if we happen to be awake early, we'll go and check out the sales". Turns out the two of us woke up every hour on the hour all night long, until I finally tip-toed to her room at 4:00 am, cracked open the door and whispered "are you up?" to be greeted by a flurry of activity in the dark. We went out together and had a lot of fun and have been doing it ever since.

Last year, I decorated coffee sleeves for the occasion. This year, I was more organized - and I made organizers. You can find them all over the Internet, but I got my instructions from Vicki Hook's Christmas Planner Tutorial.

The pink one, is for my sister and takes a quote from an e-mail we exchanged earlier in the week "Who needs sleep? Just give me coffee and let the shopping begin!"



The aqua one is mine and matches my purse.






The paper comes from JoAnn's Peppermint Forest stack that my Mom picked up on sale and left for me to use. The stamp is from Hanna Stamps, Vogue Hanna set that I got just because it reminded me of my sister, who really does consider shopping to be one of her hobbies.

I colored the images with Copic markers, in so many colors it's probably too much to list them all, but predominantly the jeans for both girls was B34 with a little B32 to lighten them up a bit. The pink girl has a paper pieced shirt taken from the background paper and her hat is R83 and R85. The "magenta" on the aqua girl is a combination of RV34 and V01 with the accessories done in G00. The inside labels are printed on the computer and cut with the Labels 1 Nestabilities dies.

Family, Food and Friends - Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Here's a little card I made for the occasion that uses The Angel Company's Reece paper collection, the retired Family, Food and Friends set, the Give Thanks set and a ton of punches and Stickles.



Mom loved this card so much, she made a bunch of them for her friends, but she turned the card candy (graduated punch) section into a magnet that could be removed from the card and used on the fridge.

Girls Rock Party Favors

Two things as follow-up to my post about the GTA Rocks! The first is that I was blown away when most of the people in the band said they couldn't open the bags and eat the rocks because they wanted to save the whole package. I even had someone tell me it was one of the best gifts he ever got. That's quite a statement from a bunch of hardcore hard rockers.

In addition, the rocks inspired a friend of mine and her step-daughter. They were in the process of planning a rock and roll themed birthday party. At the Stamp With Me night I had a few weeks ago, we talked about various party ideas and came up with the idea of purchasing a bunch of blow-up guitars and microphones from the party store and having the girls dress up and take pictures in rock gear with the props. They would get some pre-cut picture mats and the girls would decorate them with stamps, markers and glitter pens and then the photos would be added. It would count both as an activity and a party favor. This past weekend, they came over and went through all my music themed stamps and picked out the ones they wanted to use. Then they saw my post on Sunday with the GTA rocks bags and decided that they would make those as well using each girls name on the package "-----" rocks! All this positive feedback makes me feel like I rock too!

GTA Rocks!

My husband's band, Grand Theft Audio, a.k.a. GTA, is in the studio today recording their first demo CD. The whole band is excited and it's rubbing off! I made these little treat bags for everyone filled with chocolate rocks we found at The Southbend Chocolate Company. The toppers have the recording date and information on the back so they can be kept as souvenirs. I doubt that the guys will keep the souvenirs, but the singers might, and it just seemed like a fun idea in the spirit of their excitement.

To decorate the front of the toppers, I used The Angel Company's Kamalaht paper collection, which was retired, but is available for a limited time. This paper was from the Classic Soar With It Collections, that are very similar to Basic Grey. I stamped the background with T.A.C.'s retired Music Notes stamp and used the retired Distressed-bet set for the "rocks". The GTA is cut using the Graffiti Sizzix die.





If I've sparked your interest in Tom's band and you'd like to see information, you can go to his MySpace page. He's even got some videos that I took of their first gig posted (I had heels on and was crouching on the floor in front of them, so you'll have to ignore my shaky camera skills.)

Pink and Green Trees

No post last night because I was holding a stamp a stack at The Art House. We had a great turnout and everyone had so much fun that they wanted a second class. So we're holding another Christmas card workshop on Wednesday, December 2nd. This is a sneak peak of one of the cards we'll create in that class. I used Heather Scott's Monday sketch challenge this week. I've noticed that pink and green are trendy colors for this season, and I thought I'd try my hand at it.



My card uses Ki Memories's Joyful Twinkle paper and The Angel Company's stamp set Holiday Cheer with snow flakes from Winter Tags. The pink ornaments in the tree are colored with my RV02 Copic marker. I couldn't find a light pink paper that would match properly either, so I just colored the edges of a piece of white paper with my RV02 marker too and now it matches perfectly.

I will post the Christmas cards from last nights class later, but, fall is my favorite season, and I'm not ready for it to be over before Thanksgiving gets here, so I'll post those cards after Thanksgiving.

Another Turkey-day Card

If you read my last post, you know that the card I created there was inspired by a fall coffee promotion at Starbucks. I took my card to work and showed it to my coffee-mate Jen and then we took it to the coffee shop with us to compare it to the original display. While we were comparing it, Jen said that she preferred the actual bag of coffee over the display and said I should create a card that looked like that. So with the challenge issued, I came home and made this card.



This card also utilizes the turkey template I made for the card in my previous post. (Hey, once you've gone through the trouble to make it, you might as well use it, right?) And in fact, all of the colors and stamp sets are the same as my previous post with the exception of the sentiment that came from The Angel Company's Thinking of You Hostess Level C stamp set.

I'll have to take it to work tomorrow and see it if meets with Jen's approval. Could be difficult, since her suggestion was to add a line of small turkeys behind the large one, and that just wasn't going to work out.

Thanksgiving card inspired by....??coffee??

Yep, you read right. This card was inspired by coffee. A friend and I go to Starbucks consistently to catch up on things with each other. On this visit, our Starbucks had it's fall coffee promotion. The bags are in fall colors and have a turkey on them, and the display is sort of the reverse. I thought swirls on the display turkey were really neat, so I came home and made this card.



In order to make the card, I had to create a turkey. I searched images on-line until I found one I liked, adjusted the size, and printed it out. I cut around it and used the cut-out as my template to cut my cardstock. Then I used The Angel Company's retired Fantasy Flourishes set to stamp one layer of flourishes in Raw Sienna Palette Ink and then a second layer in Burnt Sienna Palette Ink. I ran the background panel thorugh my Big Shot with the Flourishes Impressabilities plate and cut the brown paper behind the turkey with my Labels One Nestabilities. I added the Turquoise Stickles to pick up the blue in the ribbon and stamped the sentiment in Burnt Sienna with The Angel Company's Give Thanks stamp set from the Inspriation Avenue magalogue.

Leafy Thanks

This is a card made using Cut N Dry foam, The Angel Company's retired Luscious Leaves stamp set and the Thank U set in the current catalogue. I demonstrated Cut N Dry Foam at the Tinley Park Rubber Stamp Expo in September, and made the background panels you see on this card during my demonstration. I completed the cards by adding the thanks panel and a bunch of leaves I made with leaf punches. This card was created in a matter of minutes.

If you're not familiar with Cut N Dry Foam, it is a piece of foam you can use to make your own personalized ink pad for a certain stamp. You stamp your image on the foam, and then use re-inkers to color the image on the foam in in the colors you want your stamp to turn out. Then you line your stamp up with your inked image on the foam and use that as your stamp pad. It's a great way to get multiple colors on a stamp without having to color it in with markers every time, and it's perfect for when you need to mass produce a bunch of the same card, like I did with this one that went out to everyone that visited me and signed up for my mailing list at the Expo, or for Christmas cards where you want the stamped image to have more than one color.

Be Marvelous Fall Card

This is a card I made from one of Heather Scott's sketch challenges from a week or so ago. I got the Halloween Set 1 from Rubbernecker Stamps at the Rubber Stamp Expo in September and have only now had a chance to use it. (I spent all of my October playing with the Spooky Boys and Spooky Girls stamp sets and my Copic markers).

This card also uses Copic markers for the leaves on the tree. It was so simple and so fun to randomly put dots on the tree and the ground to represent the leaves and gave it a real fall look. I used Copic marker colors YR68, $29, G24, BV08, E47 and Y28, which go wonderfully with The Angel Company's Penelope paper collection that I used as the background. The sentiment is from The Angel Company's retired Be stamp set.

Vintage Santa Sketch Challenge

This week I had a chance to play along with Heather Scott's sketch challenge. This week she's giving away Blog candy, but that's not why I participated. I'm a big one for sketches. I'll make my own sketches before I start a project, I'll use sketches others post online, or I'll see things in magazines and make the sketch from a card someone else created and then store them away for when I get a chance to play. It seems to make my creative time more efficient.

My card is made with the Vintage Santa and Trendy Greetings stamp sets, combined with Reece patterned paper.

Because Vintage Santa is a collage stamp, this card comes together very quickly, and let's face it, sometimes those are the cards that you really need.