I'm baaaaack!

Aloha everyone,
Sorry I've been gone so long! My painting project was more involved then I was expecting (funny how we forget all that's involved in that job between episodes of completing the task!) UGH! Anyway, both bedrooms are mostly done...still need to do some of the trim in my bedroom and both closets. I'm also planning to finish the hallway over the next holiday from work, which will be in just a couple of weeks. We get the 21st off for Admission's Day (Hawaii will have been a state for 50 years!) and I've enlisted some help for that project so hopefully it will go quicker.

Anyway, I was all ready to create stuff last weekend but when I sat down to do it I just couldn't get into the groove...so I spent the time re-organizing some of my materials and creating some tools to help (e.g., a doc of all the fonts on my computer). I think what was really holding me back is that I hadn't gotten my ink cabinet back up so all my inks were in a box which I don't think I wanted to dig through. Oh well, got that back up on Tuesday so I was good to go this weekend (I hope to eventualy get good enough at this that I can do a card in the evenings during the week, but right now I'm not quite at that skill level.) Also, although I wasn't posting I was getting a kick out of keeping up on some of your blogs and I'm working at getting better at leaving comments (I love to read them on my blog, but not so good at leaving them...not sure why that is. I'm working on it tho)

So here's what I did today.

This card is for SCS challenges LSC 232 (I'm Hungry) and CAS25 (Krystie's Sweet Cherries). The cherry stamp is from an older SU! set called "Fruit Melodies" and the phrase is from the set called "Fruity Phrases". As the LSC was to use food as a focal point and only CS with "food names", this card is done in Very Vanilla, Purely Pomegranate, and Kiwi Kiss. I even kept the ink and ribbon in the food family with both being my interpretations of Close to Cocoa.


This card is a little different and wasn't done to meet any challenges purposefully. I received these hula stamps from a friend who's grandmother had them. I've had something like this card in my head for awhile and finally put it down on paper. I ended up trying to keep it "vintage-looking" so I used Very Vanilla as the base and stamped the girls in VersaMagic Jumbo Java. I then "tried" to emboss that ink and then versamarked the rest of the image...some of the Java ink smeared a bit (hence the "tried to emboss" mentioned above) when coloring over it with the versamarker. I liked the effect as it gave it a bit of shadow. I then used various VersaColor inks to create the sand, water, mountain, and sky. I tried to create some shadows under the dancers, in the water, and on the mountain; but they don't show up quite as well in the photo. As this was a fairly involved scene I limited the embellishments on the front. The inside says "Hau'oli La Hanau" which means "Happy Birthday".



This last pick is part of the 3rd card I made today. However, as I'm planning to send it to someone that regularly reads this blog, I'm not going to post the whole picture until after she receives it (Ha, mom, gotcha this time! Now I just hope I can get it in the mail soon). I'll give the deets when I post the whole thing, but I gotta say I think it turned out super cute!


Well, that's all for now from my little rock in the middle of the sea. I was planning to make another card this evening but my cricut was giving me fits, so I'll try again tomorrow. Thanks for looking and hope you're having a wonderful day wherever you are!

Aloha, Kim