Long-awaited

Well, that was a long tease. Sorry about that. I posted on Twitter like a week ago about a project I was working on, and then it took me the whole weekend to get it wrapped up, and I still managed to leave the finished product at my parents' house.

So here's what I was working on:



Coffee sleeves! The first photo is the cut-out shapes - I used a Starbucks sleeve, cut open, as the template - two layers of felt (to protect hands from the heat) and a layer of cute flannel, with a felt pocket for cash or, as the Starbucks one suggests, one of those mini-Starbucks cards.



I'm making these to raise money for FMSC, so the numbers I'm stitching on to the pockets represent how many meals one will buy. These are going to be $5, and provide 21 meals.



This is the nearly-finished product - edges are stitched and they're ready for buttons. I did a button/ribbon closure on these, so that you can undo them and store them flat. I'll upload a picture of the finished one with a button when I go get it. I didn't realize, when I was taking pictures, that I took them all of the purple-number/red stitching combo - I actually did assorted stitching in different combinations of purple/red/orange.

I'm going to be doing some more masculine ones, next - just need to find a good flannel!

Grab bag

I teased a new project on Twitter yesterday, but I'm not quite far enough along to blog about it yet (need my mom's serger), so I'm going to give you some fabulous odds and ends today.

First up, a "masculine" card I made for a family member's birthday.

Here's the deal - let me tell you how difficult it is to come up with suitable ideas for a card for a man. It's impossible, is how difficult it is. Which means I've given some weird ones over the years. My favorite, and also the weirdest probably, was a card I made for Father's Day a few years ago using the gel card technique. I printed out a drawing of a koi fish, watercolored it, and put it under the gel packet to make it look like the koi was underwater. Simultaneously pretty cool and kind of weird, honestly.

So anyway, on to this one. To be honest, all of the elements I used for this card have the potential to be... pretty girly. For the background, I was originally looking at another paper from the same collection that was "light red" - then realized, once I cropped it, it would just look pink. So it was either pink or blue stripes with flowers. I decided that the rest of the card would butch up the flowers a little bit, and went with the blue. The paper (top, bottom, and sculpted border) is all from one sheet of Sassafras Lass paper - I love their stuff so much. The top is the front of the paper, the bottom is the reverse side, and the blue sculpted bit is the border. I don't know now what this paper is called, because it looks like it's discontinued and isn't on their site. The frame (which is not, as my husband asked, a snake head eating the tickets...) is from the coordinating chipboard elements that go with the paper, and the tickets are from the same Papertrey ticket die and stamps that I used the other day on the Get Well card.




This little guy, it seems, is everyone's favorite. I've had a lot of comments from people who've seen it in person. I pretty much love it, too. I picked up a pack of giant paperclips at Staples, then found in my chipboard stash (I have a ton of chipboard) these circles that are just the right size - one for each side. I covered the circles in paper from Basic Grey (my other favorite designer paper company) - this is from the Bittersweet collection, and I used the small card-sized pack rather than the full-sized scrapbook pack. I love that they scale down their paper designs for cards. I stamped an image from the reading set I mentioned a few days ago in Dark Chocolate, stuck the chipboard circles together around the paperclip with dimensional Zots, and tied on a bit of Spring Moss ribbon. Easy and super-cute!

An Experiment

Next-morning update: The pickles are very tasty, just still a bit too cucumber-y for my taste. I took out about half the horseradish, because they definitely have enough of that flavor, so I don't think it needs to be in the jar any more. Next time, I might leave the horseradish in bigger slices (so there's not as much surface area exposed to the brine) and put a bit less in there. So far, so good though!

So this isn't stamping-related, but I had a wild hair to try something new this weekend. When we were in Atlanta several months ago, I had the most amazing homemade bread-and-butter pickles at a restaurant (restaurant-made, I guess?) - they were so good fried, too. So I wanted to try making my own bread-and-butter pickles.

I documented the process:

I started with the slicing and dicing - horseradish is PUNGENT. I could make like 10 jars of pickles with this giant thing.



Slicing up the cucumbers - I had to go to Central Market to find "pickling cucumbers." Found the horseradish there, too.



The pretty jar, with all of the chopped-up cucumbers and horseradish, along with a bunch of fresh dill:



Brewing up my stinky, stinky brine - turns out that "signature" flavor of bread-and-butter pickles is turmeric. Who knew?



I'm glad I actually thought ahead enough to think to put the jar in the sink... usually I spill something bright-colored or stinky everywhere before I think of that.



Pouring - nerve-wracking!



I'll keep you posted on how they turn out - the jar's just cooling now so I can put it in the fridge.

Evolution of an idea

Today's cards were made with my favorite new stamp set - I ordered it with the other stuff I showed off yesterday. It's called All Booked Up, and I got the bookplate die to go with it. When I ordered, I got a bag of cute green buttons that coordinate with their Spring Moss green that I love to use, along with some saddle-stitched ribbon in the same green and some twill tape (my favorite ribbon, I think) in the Hibiscus Burst pink. I wanted to integrate some of that, so I chose these colors and put it all together:



I liked how the first one worked out, but I felt like the overall color scheme was too dark for the springy pink and green, and it needed a little jazzing up over-all.



So when I made more, for a friend's birthday present, I went a shade lighter on the neutrals - white instead of kraft, kraft instead of Dark Chocolate. The rest of the colors and layout are the same, but I also used my Cuttlebug embossing folders to add a little texture to the background and pink stripe. Oh, and I wasn't very smart with the first one and put glue on the ribbon to stick it down - the glue soaked through and didn't dry clear like I thought it would. So with this one, I taped it to the back, then glued the bookplate shape over it to give it a little more stability. Turned out much better, I think! I love the effect of tying through the button with twine - I think it's a nice detail that gives it more interest than just a button by itself.

Back in the saddle again

At Lori's request/encouragement, I'm jumping back into this blog thing. For a while, I was living in an apartment with no good creative space - my office was basically a glorified laundry room, with no natural light and a noisy dryer running half the time, so I just wasn't that inspired to create. I also didn't have much storage/organizing space. Now we've moved to a new place where I have tons of great light, and I've been able to get my craft stuff out of storage bins and onto shelves where I can see everything to get inspired.

I also ordered some new Papertrey things - it's been a while since I've done a crafting order, so it was nice to have some new images and colors to get inspired by.

Since she encouraged me, I'll start with the card I made for Lori:



This card uses mostly new Papertrey materials - I based it around the"It's Official" patterned paper, picking up the colors and theme from that. The base is Dark Chocolate, with one of the It's Official patterns on top. I'd also ordered the cute Library Pocket die and Library Card stamp, so I used those, along with the Fresh Alphabet, to make the library card. On top are Hibiscus Burst tickets punched with my favorite new die, also from Papertrey, and stamped with Just the Ticket images. A couple of individual tickets, also stamped, are inside as a little accent.

I've got a few more things created, some with my new favorite stamp set - more blog posts coming!

Check it out!

If you enjoy my blog, take yourself on over to my new joint venture:

Now seating

The long-awaited furniture is finally here! At last, we can seat more than three people in the living room without having to drag in broken-down office chairs!

We ordered the couch the week of Thanksgiving, and when we ordered it, the salesman decided to order the matching swivel chair along with it, just in case. He was so convinced we'd love it, he wanted to make sure it'd be in the same leather as the couch and didn't want us to get the couch in, love it so much we needed the chair, and then have to wait another 12 weeks for the chair. And if we didn't want it, he'd just keep it in the store.

Smart man.

So we went to look at both of them last night, and (of course) ended up liking the chair too, and now we have a great, put-together living room!

Of course, there is that gaping space above the couch now... isn't there always something?