It's HOT outside! I'm trying to do as little outdoors as possible (luckily for me stamping is an INDOOR activity). This weekend my focus was to catch up on swaps, design projects for upcoming classes (lots of big events coming my way) and do a little stamping from ideas stored in my head. In fact, here is one of those ideas. This card uses the beautiful Baroque background stamp. I ordered this because I thought it had lots of possibilities with it's bold design.The first thing that came to mind was using it several times to replicate velvet wallpaper. You know, the wallpaper that one finds in an old Victorian home. The problem is how do I get those bold images to look and feel like velvet? Hum. Flocking is an option; unfortunately I don't have black, nor do I have the patience to look for it online much less wait for it to come in. Looks like my velvet card idea is out! Sooooooooo, I decided to simply stamp with a Black Staz-on dye pad onto Pumpkin cardstock and again on a peice of acetate. The acetate is raised with dimensionals in select spots (obviously under the solid black images). I went back and forth as to whether or not to add more to this. A mini bow would look great (if it was velvet). Nope...covered to much of the bold images I wanted to show off. So, I settled for simple black brads. Oddly, the Staz-on made gaps on the acetate where the ink did not cover; so I took a watercolor brush and a bottle of Staz-on reinker and simply filled the gaps.Here's the final result. What do you think?
In between making cards and swaps I decided to take a little break and water the glorious garden I spent 4 weeks in Spring preparing. Well, it WAS glorious, before the heat of July and August arrived. This is the 2nd year we tried a vegetable/fruit garden. Can you guess what this was supposed to be?
It's a cantelope! Yep, that's what it is. I cropped part of the photo where the fruit looked bad (yes...it looks WORSE than this).Leaves were falling everywhere with Fall approaching. As I watered one garden in the back yard a twig fell on top of my shoulder. I kept watering figuring the movement of my arm with the hose would make it fall, but no. I turned around to brush it off myself to find it wasn't a branch at all!!! It was THIS..........
ACK!
I ran around shaking my shirt and screaming. The dog was completely confused! This thing would NOT shake loose. It's feet were stuck to my shirt and it would not budge. Finally I finger plucked him off from underneath my shirt (becuase I was NOT touching it). He plopped loose and fell at the tree base.Yuck! That's when I decided to get back to my stamping room. I'd rather deal with rubber locust than the real thing.
