Jack O Lace!

Autumn is shaking out her frost-kissed curls all over Baltimore, and I'm having my yearly should-I-or-shouldn't-I pumpkin carving crisis. I have many wonderful childhood memories of our yearly pumpkin, which was carved, gutted, and turned into garlic pumpkin seeds, maybe a pie, and compost. I also have many fond memories of nearly stabbing myself repeatedly in vain attempts to copy what was always an overly complicated design I drew on with ballpoint. My Jack-O-Lanterns always looked a little worried, and the candle never sat straight, but my folks proudly went through the whole process. When I started living on my own, however, I found that I burned the seeds, regular pumpkin makes a boring pie, and I'm totally incapable of parting with anything I've created for the house. Makes sense, considering one of my favorite childhood books was Mousekin's Golden House. Anyhoo, I'm mentally saving up for some awesome carving action with any eventually children, so for now I thought I'd make a nice, safe, non-organic spin card.
I've had my eye on Therese Travis's newest Halloween Friday Freebie cutting files, and finally an idea clicked. Her Jack O Lace made the whole idea fall together, and I couldn't resist using her Boo border for the inside of the square version. These were a lot of fun to make, and fairly easy since I used a spin card template I've used before. For color inspiration, I chose the simple yet elegant combo from this week's Scrapmaster's Paradise Color Combo: basic black, pumpkin pie, bashful blue. My blue isn't very bashful, but I love the way it informs on the back and orange. The SP Design Team example cards for this challenge are really inspiring!


Cutting files: Jack O Lace and Boo Border by Therese Travis
Challenges: SP Color Combo Challenge #69 (basic black, pumpkin pie, bashful blue)
Supplies: Cricut personal cutter, SCAL2 software, Recollections cardstock, ZipDry glue, Stickles, Michaels brand gem brad

Paisley Birdies Card

I took a week's break from cardblogging and I feel like I've been away for months! I'll never get over the energy and talent out in the scrapworld...
To get myself back in the swing, I pulled out a paisley frame SCAL file I created early this year and used it to make little birdies. My mom saw the idea in PaperCraft inspirations and this was a really fun way to refresh my old pattern. Basically, you stick an eye on a paisley, and the result is really striking. For extra inspiration I turned to the Color Throwdown #114: poppy parade, chocolate chip, pear pizzaz, and so saffron. How can I have so much paper and never quite the color I want? But I do like how the colors come together.


Challenge: Color Throwdown #114
Original Paisley element: The Quilling Patch (thank you!!!)
Final Paisley frame and birdie elements: Christina Gay (If you would like this file, I'd be happy to share it with you. Email christina [at] saysomethingloudly [dot] com and I'll send you the SCAL file. And I'd love it if you could leave a comment and/or become a follower.)
Supplies: Cricut personal cutter, SCAL2 software, Recollections cardstock, ZipDry glue

3x11

By popular demand - by which I mean I need to share it - I'm posting the text of a poem that spilled out of the other day as a mini book. When I say spilled out, I mean that like a glass of milk that spills into yogurt and just looks right on the counter. I hope you will take from it whatever is right for you...like yogurt.

American Mouth

How can you call that
thing you have
an American mouth
she said, her voice crammed with memory,
an American mouth is the Old English mouth
serifed in Irish, it is the Persian mouth
all reed and pigment;
you don't have room in your mouth
for the paddle of Polynesian, the cut of Norwegian,
your sharp little chompers couldn't bite
the kernel
of a Native tongue, it can't hold
the blade and hook.
The American mouth hides its language in its new language;
it's the space between all islands. Every word is
a breath.
My mouth is a million other mouths,
I said, the memory of their rhythms...but I'm alone,
lonely with my American teeth,
missing all the syllables I need to go home.
Look at your new little mouth, she said,
it's a parrot's mouth,
full of accent and without dialect.
You don't fill a mouth if
it's already full of air.

Where Pink Lemonade Comes From

So last week my life was pretty much changed forever when I saw a card made with orange scent by Loni Spendlove. She added the scent onto her image by heat-embossing a stamp with a mixture of clear embossing powder and Kool-Aid. Needless to say, Kool-Aid got on my grocery list above vegetables and dog food. It's a really fun process!

I used this method with my new favorite stamp to create this card for Color Throwdown #111: Melon Mambo, Pacific Point, River Rock.

• The pink lemon tree has a notable appearance – they can grow much larger than their yellow cousins, reach heights in excess of 15 meters (50 feet), and unlike their cousins have sharp serrated leaves. Like other members of the Rutaceae family they have a distinctive aroma; the smell of the pink lemon tree is sweet and spicy, reminiscent of boot polish. It can take the pink lemon tree 20 years to begin flowering and producing fruit; pink lemons are slightly larger than yellow lemons and have a tougher rind.
  - Ken VeryBigLiar
  

One stamp, four cards, five challenges

I found lots of great challenges this week, but I couldn't quite decide what I wanted to work with...digi stamps? recycled materials? pop-ups? I just couldn't land on any one idea. As they say, It must be fall, I'm feeling a little leafless.
But Saturday morning we got up early and headed to one of the many Shopping Villages that populate East Coast Suburbia. Armed with a 50% coupon for A.C. Moore, generously posted by the Scrapmaster, we braved a classic Corvette show, a dog store where we found 4-foot-long rawhide sticks for our foot-long dogs, and finally found refuge in the craft super-store. I had a bit of a time deciding what new thing I wanted to add to my crafting arsenal, what with my handsome hubby playfully poking me in the back with those rawhide sticks up and down the aisles, but finally chose an EKsuccess rubber-and-wood stamp featuring a tree with hidden images and countless coloring possibilities.
As you can see from the photos below, I really fell in love with this stamp. It certainly reminded me what an art stamping is: getting a perfect, every stamp is its own challenge! I tried my hand at hand-coloring multiple ink colors onto the stamp with Marvy paint markers, and am worried that I've found yet another obsession.
I made four cards using different versions of the stamp, inspired by five challenges:
1) Tuesday Trio sketch #35
Supplies: Tree stamp, Marvy LePlumeII, Recollections cardstock, Core'dinations cardstock, stash paper, HP printer, Colonna MT typeface

2) Midnight Madness Sketch Challenge #72
Supplies: Tree stamp, StazOn ink, Sakura Gelly Roll pens, Recollections cardstock, K&Company Designer cardstock, ribbon from Target, Cricut personal cutter, SCAL software

3) clean&simple sketch #109
Supplies: Tree stamp, Marvy LePlumeII, Recollections cardstock, HP printer, Colonna MT typeface, Recollections cardstock, K&Company Designer cardstock


4) Cute Card Thursdays sketch #131 and Colour Create Challenge: White + Embossing
Supplies: Tree stamp, clear Melt Art Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel, Marvy LePlumeII (just a touch to create the watercolor effect), clear Inkssentials ink, heat embossing tool, scalloped circle stencil, Recollections cardstock, Pre-embossed Vintage White stash paper, HP printer, Colonna MT typeface

Thanks to all these blogmasters for the inspiration! Hope you'll check them out.

And for those of you who know of our dogs, Allen was spooked by the height of the rawhide sticks and Walt got both of them through two doorways before we got the groceries unpacked. They ate them in less time than we spent in line at A.C. Moore, but we certainly got plenty of entertainment for our buck!