bright birthday plaques for SCS!

turkey day count down!  and a super short week for pezza and hubby too! 

i am cooking here - after a particularly BAD thanksgiving meal at someone else's house when the boys were young they made me promise to never EVER make them eat tday dinner somewhere else so i have been making it ever since - even years when it was just me and the 2 kids i made the whole nine yards!  this year my MIL, FIL and 1 BIL will be coming also.  no drake though BOO!!!!  him and GF both work at Best Buy and will be doing the crushing black friday retail gig.

i did a big batch of cooking this weekend too - split pea soup with sausage and carrots, chicken, rice and gravy, and meatballs with sauce - i made enough for meals now plus 8 full meals and 8 individual sized meals in the freezer!  so nice having back up meals for days when i just can't get to it or when me and pez just feel like having cereal - hubby can't do cereal for dinner.  even better - we are 95% done with our christmas shopping!  i just have two items to make and a few things to get for pezza and a friend's kids.  my kitchen looks like a bomb went off though so i will be working on that this morning when i finish this post!

so i have been feeling a bit lonely in my art journaling/mixed media switch-over lately.  the card making world is so HUGE!  i always participated in the card challenges on SCS and i asked over there about other folks who like this stuff.  well they said card challenges don't really have to be cards!  so i jumped into the challenge that day (friday) and lo and behold it was PERFECT for mixed media (and even hosted by my sweet friend wendybell) - she challenged everyone to use newsprint on their projects.  AWESOME!  i have been wanting to do that for ages and just hadn't gotten around to it.  not only that but i had the perfect thing for it!  I had created some foundations on MDF awhile back and was trying to finish them but i did not like the papers i had tried so far.  turns out newsprint along with some music pages was EXACTLY what i needed to use!

now when i posted these on SCS folks mostly just looked at the pics and didn't read (like i do) and thought they were cards anyway!  one person even thought the party hat was a christmas tree and that i had made a very unconventional christmas card!  but they are actually wood plaques.

i began by painting both boards with pink acrylic paint (gesso first!).  Next i used a sponge to lightly dab on more acrylic paint and Luminarte Silks acrylic glaze (to give them some shimmer!)

Nwxt i took some foam squares from pezza's foam shapes stash and stuck them onto my tack n peel block in a checkerboard pattern and stamped with a bright pink Silks glaze - foam shapes and paint are FAB!  I drew my hat and cupcake and cut them out of the newsprint and music sheets.  i edged them in bright pink and orange Brilliance metallic inksa nd then doodled a bit with a black pen.

i added a bit of a shadow around the edges of the images using my charcoal pencil and a blending stump to smudge it out.

as a finishing touch i added some luscious shimmering orange swirls!  I mixed a bit of Ginger Peach Luminarte Primary Elements into my heavy gel medium and smoothed it on through a stencil.  Some large orange pez-a-bling completed them! 

i still have two more boards to do - i think one will have a pennant banner and the other one a bunch of balloons.  i DO think these would be fun cards - maybe have these pics printed onto card fronts and make like a card collection...?  what do y'all think???

i also discovered something else with my post on SCS - Em over at stamping bella has been getting into art journaling - she has some great stamps out for it and issues a challenge on her blog every tuesday - then she posts the entries on her blog the following tuesday.  the current one is to use your fingers on an art journal page so i have an entry done for that that i will be posting tomorrow along with a tutorial for folks who may want to get into the art journaling thing but have no idea how to start!

whew! on a roll...sketches

SO...i have NEVER used sketches before - even when i tried i never stuck to them. but i am suddenly really enjoying them. i got inspired to start trying them from Amy Sheffer's blog - she does them alot and i wanted to get more involved on SCS SO here ya go.



This first one is for the Ways to use it Challenge WT155 - i had to use something that had to do with music. I had read this challenge a few days ago and blew it off but as I was working on this card this morning it suddenly came to me that I had this CTMH paper with musical notes on it that would match my cracked glass image perfectly.

the next few are for the sketch challenge this week SC166.



Two are cracked glass and one is embossed.






I have just begun an SCS gallery but I need to be much better about keeping track of the names of the stamps i use and colors and such so my details are better :P

all of these will be going to my mom who has requested some everyday cards she can use for thank yous or just to say hello type cards. hope she likes them!!