When it rains it pours!

O.K., so the stamp isn't quite the Morton Salt girl, it's the Rainy Day set from Hanna Stamps. (I heard there was some rumor about Hanna Stamps being out of business, and I don't know whether it's true or not, but as of today, this set is available at Addicted To Rubber Stamps, which is where I purchased it originally.)

The layout came from Taylored Expressions' Friday's Cupcake Challenge. I love sketch challenges, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it in this card, but somehow it didn't turn out quite like I expected.

I'm thinking of using this as one of the cards for my Create A Bunch at Lunch group in April, but I haven't decided yet.



The image is colored with Copic Markers BG09, BG13, Y15 and RV19. The hair, skin and umbrella handle are Skin Tones pencils. The yellow DCWV paper is embossed with the Spots and Dots Cuttlebug embossing folder, and the patterned paper is from the DCWV Holiday Collection - The Christmas Stack that I had leftover from the holidays. There are also some very faint blue rain drops on the image panel, but it looks like they didn't show up on the scan.

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.