12 Days of Christmas Fat Book

Back in October, I think, a bunch of us on the Byhand Yahoo group, link in the side bar, decided that we wanted to do a 12 days of Christmas fat book. I am so happy that I got into it! I showed my page in an earlier post but in the interest of continuity I included it here. So we got it done and our wonderful hostess had the pages back to us before Christmas. Now I'm going to decide on how to decorate my covers. I got a Bind-it-All for Christmas so binding isn't an issue! LOL

me


Beth


Carmen


Carolyn


Anne


Darcee


Wendy


Dennis


Suzanne


Yogi


Linda C.


Linda T. closed


Linda T open

Christmas exchange

This is what I made a very sweet friend of mine for our Christmas exchange. At least this is how it left the house but I don't know if this is how she received it! I'm dying to know what she thought!???

Merry Christmas!!

Thank you to all my friends and acquaintances for visiting and leaving wonderful comments. I so appreciate everything and it's part of what keeps me going when I think I'm doing junk. LOL

Have a wonderful, blessed day.

I had a wonderful birthday, doing everything I wanted, DH made me a special dinner and I even got some creative time! Had to, I didn't get cards done for some important people! eek!!!

Merry Christmas!!!!

quick!!!

another countdown

http://countdown.tentwostudios.com

a small Christmas gift

to you. I got word of this through one of the blogs I subscribe to. Thanks Jan at Paper Tango!

Go here for free sample of an interesting glue alternative.

Joy of Christmas/Children

This is for Gothic Arches this week.
I have so many wonderful vintage images of children but the ones I love the most are the angel ones. I thought it was perfect that I had one holding toys!

I am not terribly happy with something I did on this arch. I listened to something someone told me a while back that you can attach vellum with a glue stick, no problem. HA, huge problem. I won't be so lazy the next time and I will go for my vellum tape! Despite that, I'm happy with this!

Someone told me that these arches are addicting, they were so right! LOL

Nope, I think I'm going to have to redo this! Darn!!!

oh my

Living in SW Ontario, we seem to be in a micro climate called the banana belt. Not today! It has been snowing, in earnest here, since about 3 a.m. and this is what it looked like outside about 2 hours ago and it's just about doubled since. You really can't see too much in the pic but it's just so pretty out! LOL I love snow and we just don't get as much as we used to when I was a kid.

birthday card

I made birthday card for a dear friend who's birthday just passed and I used a lovely image that Godelieve had offered up on her blog. I needed to make sure that the card arrived safely before I posted it!

Christmas countdown

It's not too late!!! Some really great images.

Christmas countdown

sparkling wings

well I hope glittered works! LOL

This is for the Gothic Arches challenge this week. A dear friend sent me some punchinella and I had sooo much fun doing the b/g, probably tooo much fun! LOL

Christmas skinnys

for the Altered Designs Yahoo group I'm on. We were to do 1 skinny for 2 other people and in turn we would receive 2 from 2 others. They're pretty simple but I like how they turned out.

another mingle

for the monthly mingle on Byhand. I did this one on St. Lucia. The crown of fire represents the fire that she refused to allow to kill her.

I had such a productive day yesterday

I got 2 commitments, a birthday card and a challenge done.

One commitment was for the monthly mingle on the Byhand group. It's for a 4.5 x 4 page done in any occasion happening that month taken from a list compiled each month by our very talented hostess, Yogi G.

I chose to do St. Lucia's Day, Dec 13 which is celebrated in Sweden, Norway and Swedish speaking parts of Finland.





and the second was for a Christmas skinny mingle on Altered Designs

my favourite Santa image

in honour of Santafest, the link to this great blog is in the side bar. I rec'd this image on a cd I bought from joannabanana designs on eBay. Sorry it's copyrighted.

for Theme Thursday

Theme Thursday this week was for Winter/Snow in non traditional colours. I don't think you can get much more non traditional than this! This is a 4 x 4 using an image I bought after Christmas last year and my new Brilliance Dew Drops ink pad in silver (that's what the grey is). I had fun with this one! Hope you like it!

my 1st

for Gothic Arches with a Winter theme this week. Hope you like it, not sure yet if I do! LOL

great day

I had a great day yesterday! I got 4 loads of laundry done, changed sheets on 2 out of 3 beds (does anyone have teenage boy who doesn't want his sheets washed? GROSS!! I'll do them when he's at school today!), worked on the blog, cleaned my kitchen, cleaned my art space AND did some art! Tired today!

I'm in a music deco RR, I have posted pages that I have done before, and I got another spread done.




Supposed to represent Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy chronicling the building of Canada's railroad.

another old card

until I start making them for this year.




I made this one for the Hero Arts Christmas contest in 2oo5. What a train wreck! LOL The layers really were straight, honest, I scanned it slightly off and cropped it straight.

Christmas

As you may, or may not, have noticed, I am a bit of a Christmas freak! Maybe it's because my birthday is the day before and when I was a kid the 24th was quiet with little celebrating and it was totally crazy Christmas day with family and friends but I just can't get enough. Drives my DH crazy as he is more like a Scrooge! LOL Anyway, please excuse all the Christmas paraphernalia I have on the blog right now, (you should see my Facebook!} but it will all be gone in a month. Thank you for your patience! LOL.

This is a card I made a while back.

3 challenges

done last night! The 1st one is for 4 x 4 Friday's Lace challenge


the 2nd is for Theme Thursday's Chalk challenge. I use Colorbox chalks , Warm Green, Light Green and Iris Blue to do the b/g and Iris blue to stamp the images.


And a late one for Fluffy Fatbottom's Button challenge. I think he's actually trying to untie the tie but he could be undoing the top button? That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!!! LOL


I was so surprised that after having a totally down day that at 11:30 last night I felt the need to create. And I'm actually happy with what I did!!!!!!! LOL

(sigh)

my computer crashed!!!!!!!!!! Had this whole thing ready and it went kaplooie!

Here's a card I did last year for Christmas. I hope to be able to work on some of my favourite challenges so hopefully I'll have something new for you to look at!

The image of this Santa is by Gumball Graphics and he went out of business 2 years after I started stamping and of course at that time I didn't realize he was a must have. A friend of mine, thank you again Kim!, took pity on me a couple of years ago and sent me a whack of stamped images. Unfortunately I don't have anymore left. I'll check eBay for the stamp but it was selling at exorbitant prices last year.

4 x 4 Friday

I really enjoy doing this size and I had a lot of fun doing this piece. As you can see, I really love this image of the child. I also used a background that Hermine made available on her blog for free download. I've been waiting for a chance to use it. So this is my entry for this weeks 4 x 4 Friday - Faces.

Enjoy

Fluffy

Welcome to Tuesday! Are you ready for another twisted challenge? We are thoroughly enjoying the artwork created from our themes and I can't wait to see what you do with this one. The theme this week is "When Fairies Go Bad". Think of fairies being where they shouldn't, unwanted fairies and fairies up to naughtiness.

I haven't had an original idea in my head for Fluffy Fatbottoms Twisted Tuesdays for the last couple of weeks and this week when I saw faeries, I said Yippee, I love faeries!!! And, when I post my next piece, you'll see that I love this image, the look on the child's face is priceless. Hope you like it!!

whew

I had so many commitments lined up and due to a funk that appeared out of nowhere, I got behind. This weekend has heralded the disappearance of said funk and the reemergence of my creativity. Thank G_d!!! I hate not being able to function, not even my housework was getting done and in a household of 3 men, that's a no no, esp for the bathroom, that I mentioned in an earlier post. LOL

Anyway, I had 2 cards to make, one for a friend who's ill in the hospital and another for a friend who suddenly lost her mother early Saturday morning. Unfortunately the details of these cards are lost in the scans.

for my friend in the hospital


for my friend who's lost her mother

your 3 words

I found this video on Jillian's blog this morning, love her art, but what she said about this made me want to see what it was about. She cried, I cried. Hope you watch it, maybe leave me your 3 words

I have many:
I miss Mom - passed away in 1984 from metastatic breast cancer
Just do it
Get over it
I'll be fine
I love you

art day

I actually got some art AND housework done yesterday. I got the dreaded bathroom clean, again, why does it never stay that way? and my pages for a 12 Days of Christmas Fat Book swap in which I chose Day 1. What a moronic thing to do. Being the 1st page, you'd expect something spectacular instead of mediocre, well it's not mediocre but not spectacular either. Oh I forgot, I still have to add some colour to the partridge.
I have that wonderful 12 Days of Christmas set of stamps from Stampington that I use every year in some way, shape or form, and this time I cut out the partridge and 2 pears and foam dotted them to the tree that I designed in The Gimp and had printed out on the paper that I had already printed the text, Porcelain font out on.

At one point during this, I thought I had ruined it but maybe it turned out O.K.. You can't see it in the scan but the stars are gold, the harlequin b/g is stamped in gold and I rimmed the page in gold Krylon.

tagged again

well I was going to do a tag but just as I was uploading a pic, blogger crashed on me and I lost an hours worth of 'work'. So instead, I'll leave you with this oldie. This was also a gift and the recipient loved it, thank goodness! Enjoy!

tagged again

I love being tagged. It means that people think enough about me and my art to want to send other people to see. Thank you so much Suzy for tagging me with the 7 random and or weird facts about me tag.

Here are the 'rules'

1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself (on your blog, we all want to know them).
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. I went prematurely grey. I coloured it for about 10 years then decided that I like the grey which is almost silver and stopped colouring. I am also letting my hair grow out, that's how much I like it! LOL

2. I hate to cook, love to bake.

3. I don't think there is anything that I'm terrified of except being away from my family.

4. I've only ever had 1 pet in my life, a little Heinz 57 dog when I was about 10 yrs old.

5. I can't stand shopping for clothes. I'd much rather my DH do it for me. My shopping is for my 'art'. LOL

6. My mom taught me how to knit, purl 1 knit 1, in a lunchtime and I taught myself how to crochet in about a month. I crocheted a baby blanket for my 1st baby.

7. i'm extremely shy in new situations to the point where people think me a snob.

Hope I didn't bore you! I now would like to tag these 7 people

Alice K at Yellow House Studio
Britta at Enjoyland
Deborah at Cards and Things
Kathy at Altered Antiquity
Kelly at Artsy Visions
Pauline at paruscircle
Wendy at Crafty Butterfly Stamping Blog

Have fun with this ladies!!!

And another blast from the past!

see

told you I'd have something new soon! LOL

This is a spread I did in another artists music deco. I was stumped on this until a friend steered me in the direction of Broadway, after that it was easy. LOL I had a vision for this spread but I don't know that I pulled it off very well. The poster is actually a windowcard and I wanted it to look like it was propped up in a shop window in the Christmas season. The letters are glittered to mimic the huge production number in the movie where everything was glittery gold. Yes the movie, I never did see the play. :'(

my apologies for my absence

a lot of not so nice things have been happening in my household recently, a fried laptop, a fried monitor, not at the same time, dead t.v.last week, a son who wants to go to his university of choice this weekend to check out the open house, a mouse in the house, just a bunch of things that's sapping my energy and I've not been able to get much art done. I hope to be able to rectify that this weekend but only if this feeling I have doesn't turn into the flu.

If you've managed to read this far, thank you for your patience with my rant and please check back. There will be new art soon.

In the meantime, I'll leave you a pic of something I did ages ago.

another spread

in a music deco. The theme of this deco was music legends. The owner started off with Mick Jagger, the next artist did Elvis and I did Ella Fitzgerald, know for her scat singing, among other things. She had such a full life I couldn't include everything I wanted into the spread so I went minimalist and included just a few facts. The scan didn't turn out well due to the fact that the page before was so dimensional, my spread wouldn't open properly. LOL

I did it, I did it

Fluffy Fatbottom's Twisted Tuesday's challenge today was for wicked witches and here's my attempt. It feels so good to get something done!

me bad

I have been such a bad blogger lately! I haven't been able to do any art this week and I'm so swamped with swaps, I'm frightened now I won't be able to do a really good job just so I can get them finished.

Please be patient with me while I get everything straightened out and get some art done to show. Thank you!

finally

I got the challenge for Fluffy Fatbottoms Twisted Tuesday fish challenge just in time for tomorrow's challenge!

A FISH OUT OF WATER

If you do things differently–or try new things–you sometimes feel like “A Fish Out of Water”–So, we want you to use a fish image–and have that fish doing something totally different than swimming comfortably in water.

I was tagged

I was honouered by my dear friend Heather at Creative Solace in a middle name tag and it goes like this:

Players, you must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had. When you are tagged you need to write your own blogpost containing your own middle name game facts. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.

Well I don't have a middle name and ever since Heather tagged me I have been wracking my brains to come up with one that I would have loved to have and still can't come up with one. After many, many years of hating my name and wishing for anything else but the one bestowed upon me, I have finally accepted it.

But I do remember that I was supposed to have been called Leslie until my Mim put her foot down and said no! LOL What's strange about this is that my dear friend Heather's middle name is Leslie and there's no way I could do as good a job of this tag as she did.

L - loving
E - energetic
S - supportive
L - learner
I - intuitive
E -emotional

Lame eh? LOL

Now I'm supposed to tag as many people as there are letters in the name so I'll try to pick artists who's work I really love but don't get to often enough.

Karie
Linda C.
Beth A.
Dianne
Gayle P-R
Jane

Ladies have fun with this!

P.S. - can you tell I'm trying to get caught up all at once? LOL

world cardmaking day

was 2 days ago but because of my silly schedule, I wasn't able to to do anything for it, shucks, I missed all the fun! So yesterday as I was doing a bunch of catch up I did these 2 cards for Halloween. I had got a big sheet of chipboard accents at the dollars store, gotta love the dollar store! and i did this with some of them. These are just off a 3 x 3 format.

music deco

my spread

my sign in tag, the owner supplied the basic white tag and we are to decorate it


this is my page in another artist's deco. Her page featured Louis Armstrong and was so delightful I had a hard time figuring out what I was going to do until I heard a song by Frank Sinatra. Now, I was born to and raised by older parents and the only music I heard in the house was 40's and 50's 'stuff', swing, jazz, big bands, etc ... and I loved it all. Frank for obvious reasons was and still is one of my absolute favourites.