OWH Birthday Challenges No. 1 and 3

An animal for Challenge 1 and a kids' card... for "unique Christmas" challenge 3 -- well how many times have you seen a dog actually write a letter of supplication to Santa... I ask you? Love this Impression Obession stamp! My dog Rio always has this look on his face when he's gone counter surfing but his hat usually falls off....

Dixie: this Bow Easy bow's for you! ;)

Wake Up, "Maggies"! It's a Tilda Christmas.....

Sometimes on a chilly winter evening it's just so relaxing to work on art.. late, when the dog and the husband are blissfully snoring away and no one interrupts you. Right, ladies? I colored these Maggies a month or so ago during a Stampin' Up! scrapbook crop much to the fascination of all the "I do 6 layouts an hour" group, so I shall have to bring pictures to show the final results!

Some of the Maggies were colored with Copics (all faces, flesh tones and more), some with a combo of watercolor pencils, Tim Holtz Distress Inks and a water pen, and others with Stampin' Up! ink and a water pen. Can you tell the difference? All Santa hats were highlighted with Flower Soft, one of my favorite embellishments!

These little ladies are going to my great nieces (the twosome with Santa hats) and the others to my step-granddaughters, all colored as closely as I could to their "natural" hair color and, of course, their favorite colors!

Christmas in July? Midweek Throwdown....

I have friends who start on Christmas cards in February but I've always been a "do 'em at Thanksgiving" person.. being my first year doing the cards for heros, this Christmas card in July thing is new to me BUT if it will break the nasty heat waves we have had this summer, I'll do 'em 24/7!

So a friend had some gorgeous card fronts done with a resist technique I hadn't seen (and we also played with this technique at her stamp-a-stack) so thought I'd try at home. We used new "Liquid Pearls" in opaque to play with, but I had to change it up and try it with the silver Liquid Pearls = not! I like the opaque better!

How do you do it? Put a dollop of the liquid pearls on a plastic plate, aluminum foil (anything not porous) and spread really thin and quickly with your fingers. Ball up part of a plastic grocery bag and dab the pearls onto glossy paper - a pretty good coating but not "even." After it dried I used Distress Ink in the green pine color (Distress Inks works best), swiping the inkpad over the pearly coated paper and then quickly rubbing the ink off with a paper towel - voila! Legal patina and shine without glitter to ship overseas! Like I said, after using the silver pearls, I think I'll use the opaque next time to make it shinier. You can also use a rubber stamp dipped in the liquid pearls to stamp images and I'm going to try that with a new snowflake stamp and a light blue distress ink. If you use stamps with this technique you have to stamp quickly and clean off the stamp even quicker so the pearls don't harden on it. The stamp I used on this NOEL card is one of the "Big on Christmas" set from Stampin' Up! that I got specifially for OWH cards. I stamped, colored and cut a second ornament for the "O" to make it "stand out" a bit and and glitzed up the ornament hangar on the original stamp image with a glitter pen...but the forest green background paper still looks "black" no matter where I photograph it or how... oh well!

I finished a chipboard wall hanging for our Canada/New England cruise. I used 3 chipboard pieces from Keller's Creations and did each double sided. It was no easy task threading the ribbon connector through and I'm not sure I'd do this again.. But it fits in a spot that needed "something." The picture of the Biker Chiks is from Christmas Day. When I was the age of Steve's granddaughters who would have thought that 50 years later little girls would get motorized dirt bikes instead of Betsy Wetsy and Ginny Dolls from Santa....