Tattered Florals Leaves

Don't you just love how Pinterest sucks you in and the next thing you know 2 hours have gone by and you haven't accomplished a thing?  I was determined to actually create something from some of my pins the other day and decided that the Tattered Florals die was the chosen guinea pig for my creative juices. The pin I chose lead me to 3 different tutorials from which I chose to try 2 of them. The first one is here and my examples are below. I love the centers of these flowers, made with the skinny petalled flower on the die.

And the second one is here  with my examples below:

I also made some roses with the Pinecone die, which I absolutely love!

Then I decided that I needed some leaves to go with my flowers, but I don't have a leaf die and I left all my punches in Arizona. What about the Tattered Florals die? Could I make leaves by cutting the petals? Let's give it a try.

Start with some patterned paper or misted paper or whatever kind of paper you'd like. I chose some waste cardstock and spritzed with greens, blues and purples. Cut out several of the large, medium and small flowers with the die. Scrunch them up and then unfold.

Cut the petals apart into leaves. I shaped the wide end of the leaf a little by rounding it and narrowing it. If your leaf tears a little, that's ok, just smooth it out with your scissors. You can make the leaf a little narrower or shorter, after all, no 2 leaves are the same anyway.

To finish the leaves fold in half to the point making a nice vein down the center and unfold. Use a tooth pick or bamboo skewer to curl the edges a little. Pinch the end into a nice point and you have a leaf ready to glue onto your flowers.

I used these on my Pinecone Roses. I think I need something bigger for the Tattered Florals flowers that I made.

And here is a finished art piece using some of the flowers and leaves I made this week.

Hope you enjoyed the Tattered Florals Leaf tutorial and have a great week creating!

Waxed Paper Embossing

Saw this on Pinterest the other day and had to give it a try. Started off with plain white cardstock and waxed paper. Added some collage bits and several layers of mod podge.

After it dried I ran it through the Big Shot with some different embossing folders and did some sanding to distress them.

Next I did some inking and more sanding. Inking and sanding, about 4 or 5 times for each one.

I added more embellishments and mounted the one with the musical theme to another piece of cardstock.

Really, a fun technique and I'll definitely be doing it again!

Got Crab?

Wow! It's almost been a month since I've posted on my blog. Where in the world did that month go? Lots of family visiting and then visiting family, that's where. And mom and I had a great time getting the genealogy papers out and adding info and gaining headway. But that story is for another time and blog (got an idea for that and just need to sit down and do it) Stay tuned it's gonna be fun!

So, we got home to Florence on Tuesday and according to the weather report Wednesday was going to be calm wind and warm temps leading to blowing winds on Thursday. Guess which day we decided to go fishing? That's right, Wednesday. First day, this season, poles in the water hoping for one of those early, confused, salmon who forgot to wait for the starting gun on the run at the end of the month. Decided to just take 3 traps with us 'cause if you don't catch a salmon the next best thing is fresh Dungeoness crab, YUM! Well, not a single bite happened and the fish finder only yielded sporadic blips that might have been a fish on it's way, but when we started pulling the traps up to head on in, we got 5 keepers in the first and another 5 in the second, we were thinking, yeah! at least there's crab for dinner. Pulled that last trap up and Roger couldn't even lift it into the boat. I had to pull on one side and that was a struggle as well. The trap was literally FULL of crab. And get this, 16 keepers!!!!

We were thinking it might be our first ever limit in a trap (limit is 12), but 16? This may be a hard record to break. We actually had to have a crab fashion show on deck and throw back a few little keepers to get back down to our limit. Whoo hoo, we're canning crab today!

Stretch Your Stamps Day 2

I signed up for an online card class called Stretch Your Stamps and had to jump right in and try one of the techniques from Day 2. This one is focussed on collage stamps. I'm also playing in Club Scrap's summer camp psl and it's stamp week so we get a 2fer out of these. Yeah!

This one uses the Papillon collage stamp from Club Scrap along with some Refresh paper and a Nature's Wonders sentiment tile.

Again, from Club Scrap, I used a Nature's Retreat flower and quote stamp on Milestone's yellow green paper then mounted on the back side of Academy red.

And last, another Nature's Retreat stamp mounted on Nature's Wonders paper and 3 NW tiles up in the corner.

Thanks for stopping by my blog!

Let Freedom Ring

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope everyone has a joyful time celebrating the nation's birthday. I participated in a challenge titled Let Freedom Ring. The object was to create an art piece using some kind of bird cage, so, of course, I went on a De Paul crawl searching for something that I could alter to use as a birdcage. I found this flower arranging frog and put it up on a shelf to stare at me for a few weeks. (this is often how I come up with ideas) It was brass colored and I immediately painted it white.

                                                   

After having it stare at me for almost a month, I decided it was going to have a beachy theme. After all, I'm at the beach. So, I took a trip to the beach to look for small pieces of driftwood to poke into the "birdcage" as a kind of nest.

I found some great beach themed stickers from K& Company  to add to the centerpiece, along with a few seashells from my collection.

The banner is some crepe ribbon that I misted with Memories Mists, blueberry and pink lemonade flavors.

And, finally I needed a crab in there somewhere so I created my own sticker with a stamp and dug through my treasure jar of jewelry finds and found this tiny little flag (I think it's an earring), wired up a flag pole and put it in the crab's claw.

Enjoy the holiday!

Herb Garden ala Repurposed Basket Rack

Saw an idea on Pinterest the other day to plant herbs in mason jars and hang them up. So we are on a DePaul crawl the other day and found this old shower/laundry wire basket rack for about $3 and thought we could use it for an herb garden for the deck. First thing, we took it apart and spray painted black.

Then we decided to split into 2 short racks so we'd be able to move them around the deck to get maximum sun. It rains alot here, ya know!You can also see that I lined the bottoms of each basket with a piece of pond liner so they wouldn't just drain on to the lower basket or lose all their dirt.

As I planted each basket I lined them with soaked sphagnum moss to help with water and dirt retention.

This one has strawberries on the bottom and rosemary and thyme in the middle basket. Mmmmm......I love the smell of rosemary.

The top of this one got italian parsley and the second one has lettuce seeds in the bottom, a different rosemary and sage in the middle basket and will get a ginger mint and one basil plant in the top.

We also decided that the middle baskets were too low so we moved them up a notch and can move them farther if they need it as the summer progresses.

Here they are completed and ready for sunshine. Can hardly wait to start using them. Hope you enjoyed my little gardening tut!

Egils!

We spent the holiday weekend at Egils, an SCA event hosted by the barony of Adiantum held near Eugene. We had soooooo much fun. It really is nice to escape to the middle ages once in awhile.

John and Doug joined us for the week end. Their first event and I think they really enjoyed it.

John and Will all garbed up and heading off to watch some of the festivities. Check out that new sword John is sporting.

Here they are walking along merchant's row. All we needed were some horse drawn wagons and it really would have been authentic due to some serious rain the week before the event. And, where did Will get that gorgeous hair from anyway?

Will, fighting in the first rapier scenario of the day, Capture the Documents. We're all in the background to the right watching the fight.

A nice parry and thrust.

A good kill!

Will received this awesome shield as an award at the final court. The other rapier fighters voted him one of the mvp's of the tournament. Nice job, Will!

Admiring the new shield and enjoying our last campfire.