Chococat.

I got a really fun new calendar this weekend. Actually Marcia found it, I looked several places and didn't find one. It's a Chococat calendar. Do you know Chococat? Say you do... Ok, if you don't Chococat is Hello Kitty's friend. Named for the chocolate brown nose. He even has a birthday near mine, his is May 10, I'm May 9. (go on ahead and put that on your calendar) Anyhow I love Chococat.

The calendar came with stickers. It's a full 12x12 sheet of them. I decided to use them tonight on cards. I also got some goodies from the "Dollar Spot" at Target, so you may see some of that stuff here too.


The first two cards were inspired by two different cards I saw this weekend on two different blogs. One of the cards was this one. I love the drawn border and how it leads into a stamped image. (Ok, her's is handwritten, and it's unfair that people have handwriting like that) Kristina has a video of her making that card by the way. That is just adorable! It is really cool to watch someone make cards. (I'm new to her blog and I'm loving it!) The second card is this one. Lauren's cards are always adorable and what I liked about this was how she worked a lot of elements into the smaller space, but the card is not super busy because she left a lot of "white" space too. (Kristina has nice white space too, but I want to include Lauren's because it really did directly lead to me getting up and making this card. Lots to learn from both ladies though.)
be happy stamp is SU, white gel pen by SU, patern paper is cut from a card front from the Target Dollar Spot, dot stamp is by SU, ribbon from the Target Dollar Spot, sticker from my calendar
be happy stamp by SU, tombow marker for inking the stamp and drawing the line, patern paper cut from card front of card found in Target Dollar spot, ribbon came on an order of stamps sent to me from justjohanna, sticker from my calendar
birthday wishes stamp by Green Grass Rubber Stamps, patern paper cut from card front of card found in Target Dollar Spot, ribbon from stash, sticker from my calendar, the black circle cut with coluzzle.
don't tell the other cards, but this one is my favorite! happy birthday stamp by Green Grass Rubber Stamps, ribbon by SU, patern paper cut from card front of a card found in the Target Dollar Spot, sticker from my calendar, black circle cut with Coluzzle.

I thought this would be fun to show you as well. This is a huge magnet memo board. (you get it at the Costco *wink*) that I have in my stamp area. All these cards are NOT mine. They have been sent to me by my tons of online friends. I love you guys! I love seeing all your cards every day.

Want a $75 gift certificate to justjohanna?

I know you do!

So if you said yes then check out Julie's blog and enter her contest.

Now it's HARD, you have to put a favorite blog, but it can't be one someone has listed and it can't be one Julie already has linked. So think hard then go on over to Julie's and enter to win!

Illustration Friday

This is a first for me. Illustration Friday is a website that has an inspiration word each week (On Friday, get it??) and all these artists make things inspired by that word. Now it's not just stampers, I don't even think it's mostly stampers, but all sorts of art, painting, collage, mixed media, all sorts. So here are the cards (I made cards cuz that's what I do) I made for Soar. All stamps are by justjohanna.

These next two are just slight variations of each other. If you have nestabilites you may notice, the one I embossed with the cutting side down, the second with the cutting side up. I love that I have the options!

Thank you

Look what I got. This patern paper and ribbon is by SU, it's really yummy gray color. :) I love it. My BCBW SS sent it. I don't even know who they are yet, but this card is for them!

The pink paper is that color that is in the "In Colors". I can't keep track of the SU color names. Then the tag I cut with my cuttlebug and the stamp on it is by Green Grass. It just says "thanks" the one time and I used a stamp-a-ma-jig to get it lined up three times on the one tag.

I also got from this SS a stamp set... I can't remember the name of it. Has a rabbit jumping out of a hat, a hanger with hearts, a graduation cap... Anyhow it's painfully adorable, which is just what I love. Also recipe cards from her! :) I'm so spoiled.

Those are my only craft gifts I got. Tons of other gifts though, it was a good year.

My regular readers will be thrilled to learn I got a gift card to Costco! We ALL know how I feel about the Costco. ;)

I hope you have everything you could hope for this Christmas!

a package, a cat, and some dirt...

Today was a good day. It was Costco day. I love Costco. It was sorta poop though because I was out of all our big ticket things so it was $140 for some boring stuff.

Shortly after getting home though I got this package:
It's from my Bow Chicka Bow Wow Secret Sister. (you probably don't want to know.) I can't decide if I should open it now or wait until Christmas.

Then I made a card:

These stamps are by Pink Cat Studio. I have a complex with this particular cat where I always color her pink (I think because the name of the company is Pink Cat) So I forced myself to make her this retro shade of blue instead. The little paw prints were Stephen's idea, he instisted the card needed more stamping.

Also I had to repot a plant today. I'm not much of a gardner, so I thought I'd show this because it's pretty rare:

Real live gardening dirt under my fingers. Makes me feel like some sort of super gardner. Like I'm so at one with the earth it doesn't bother me to have it under my nails... totally not true, I'll be finding something to dig it out soon.

Great Impressions card

I made this card with my brand new Great Impressions Stamps. I colored everthing with copic markers, then added lots of stickles and some glossy accents (by Ranger) on the shoes.

I have a hard time with scenes that are supposed to be dark. I try coloring the sky a dark blue but it never looks right. This is why you will see me cutting them out and layering them over some darker papers. Then I dont have to color it.

ohmyheck!!!

So you should know Jason Sampson. He is the husband of Kelly Sampson who is this super talented SU demo/blogger type. (they are both must read blogs) So Jason has the whole story on his blog but in a nutshell he was helping Kelly and started playing with the stamping supplies and now he stamps for his own fun and makes funny cards.



You may have heard of The Chicken Who Did It. If you have not you need to click the link and go read it. Basicly it's a whole story told in cards that Jason did. It's been going on for some time and lots of us chicken stalkers have been eagerly reading each card story. (I'm not going to tell the whole story here, I'd never do it justice, just believe me when I say it's funny)



So Jason and Kelly have two daughters, one of them is autistic. Because they are pretty much awesome, they have handled it awesomely. Jason decided to auction his entire Chicken who Did It collection to benifit a local (to them, not local to me) autism charity that has helped them a lot. Bidding happened and I won!!! So I will be getting the entire collection in my hot little hands!!





Erin, what will you do with 42 super funny cards?

Um... I'm keeping them! Duh! I'm going to get an album and stick them all in with the stories for each one and then if you come over here you can see them. (but you can't touch them... well maybe if I see you wash your hands first)



So that's what's exciting for Erin today.

busy busy busy

I'm to busy to stamp! Oh the horror!





I did find a few minutes to go the LSS and pick up a few things, look:

The stamps are by Great Impressions. As part of their Stamp of the Month program. If you look on their site it lists this as the October stamp. Not sure what's up with that, but honestly I love this one best of all so I don't care. If you look here you will see a bunch of samples with this stamp. The snow village is also by Great Impressions, and it's wicked cute. So the snowmen are the actual "Stamp of the Month" so I got them at 50% off! Awesome!

If you are not jealous yet, I got the snow village and the copics at 20% off because of the once a month discount my LSS gives. AND the copics are only 3.99 at my LSS which I think is a pretty good price anyhow. So yea, I have an awesome store! I've mentioned that right?

I bought these copics because I have both copics and prismacolors. Guess what? My prismacolors are all drying out already. :( Now part of this may be my fault, I got a bunch of them in a clearance bin, they were probably old already, but some I bought fresh and they are still starting to dry out. So as they dry up I'm replacing them with copics. (Which my awesome LSS will refill for me for $1.50 a refill!)

Ok, back to work getting ready for our busy weekend!

Look! I finally made a new card.

I thought of this card when I saw the patern paper in a local scrapbook store. I think this sub is so fun because really anyone could be driving it. Right now the flamingo is driving. He wants to get a better look under water, perhaps figure out where all the good shrimp are.
all images are by justjohanna I colored with prismacolor markers.

I'm feeling a lot better. It was pretty much awful. We are having a party on Saturday, but first we are going out to lunch with Brian's family, then on Sunday we are having company for dinner again. So I'm very busy this week with cleaning. Actually my house looks really good right now. I'm sure my tots will have me starting over by Saturday though, plus there is a good bit of cooking I need to work in. So my point is I might not post again this week. Ah... the holiday season, it's busy and wonderful and stressful all at the same time.

hugs,

E

Consider this...

Get ready for the least informative demonstration EVER.

Look at these two colored images. They used exactly the same markers. I did them at the very same time so I'd do the light orange on one, light orange on the other and so on. But look, they are totally different looking. This is because one was on a slight cream colored paper and the other was on a bright white. Cream on the left, white on the right. The stippling background is the very same colors too. I found this to be really interesting. I personally prefer the coloring on the cream, which was news to me and I don't have any paper that color!
which brings me to the unhelpful part. I was given these images by a very kind blogger. She used them on her blog, I emailed and she sent them. I cannot find the envelope or remember her blog name! :( So I don't know what papers these are done on, what ink was used, what stamp this is, and most importantly who was so kind to send them to me. If you have any of this info please tell me.
ETA: The first comment on this post is from Leslie Miller of Running With Scissors who is the owner of this stamp! The image is by Stampendous and is retired. The paper is Stampin' Up! Very Vanilla and Whisper White. Thank you Leslie!


And in publishing news... Here's my pages from the current Take Ten magazine! Turns out I used cool caribbean on all of them!
I'm all those bug cards. :)

I'm the You're the best! card that is in the middle. I'm the cat card that is especially blurry. (just my photo is blurry, not in the magazine.

sorry not much posting

stupid food poisoning.

I'll get better and make things and post them I promise.

hugs,
e

Attention all Morons

That would be me!

I made more than half of my Christmas cards with my awesome new justjohanna seasons greetings stamp.

Let's look back at one:
Click Here

Cute card, but look at the greeting one more time.

It says seasonings greetings!!!

Like it's super clever and funny to use on a cooking themed card, or with the funny "Dasher" reindeer stamps justjohanna has.

NOT for every single Christmas card though.

Let's all pretend it's a really FUNNY mistake shall we?

ETA: It's ok to laugh.. I'm laughing. :)

One last Christmas card

At least I think this is the last one. It's kinda simple but I really like it.

All images are justjohanna. Colored with copic markers. The embossed paper is by Karen Foster. This is another really easy Christmas card design for anyone else who isn't done yet! *wink*

New DT news!

The list was posted today. I am a new member of the justjohanna design team! I am really excited. You may have followed along and known that I have applied for this team more than once. So I'm super excited to be on the team. This team has some amazing stampers I will try to get them added to my side bar thingie later today (along with the Eat Cake team) but for now you can see everyone on this post on Johanna's blog.


ETA: I got the DT blog lists on the side bar. Now I think you should look at those lists. If you see names you don't know I really think you should check them out. I discovered two new AMAZING blogs on the list. (I'm sure I will discover more to fall in love with, I'm just saying just now I discovered two.)

little changes..

So you may or may not notice some changes.

1. I don't use the blog roll. I use feeds now and I have many more that I read in feeds than were on my blog roll. It felt strange that some of my favorites were not on the roll, then of course I felt bad if every one of my friends wasn't on there... and then I wasn't even using it. So blogroll is gone. There will be some things replacing it soon though, so if you love to blog hop don't worry. Also I plan to occasionally have a small post where I tell you about some cool awesome blog I go to, because I go to some pretty amazing ones.

2. I just noticed the lables box. So I'm going to be using it sometimes now.

that's all for now, but I reserve the right to make other changes.

You can't have everything

Well, maybe you can, but I can't! So what do I do?

I make it work. (I miss Bravo Channel, my awesome Dish doesn't have it unless I pay like twice as much)

So on this card I really wanted some scroll type accent on the bottom. Alas no scroll stamp. They sell one, but I can't have everything. (although this is a bad example, I'm sure I do indeed need a scroll stamp) Now you look at the whole card, front and back and see if you can figure out what I did to "make it work": also note I colored one dot green. Not sure why, felt like the right thing to do.
I love this for the inside, just adhere the paper to the one flap. Like a commercial card. Oh and this is just computer paper.
Did you catch it? I used the little offshoot parts of the Christmas scroll stamp as scroll accents on my card front. I've also done it before with a fish tail. (I'll do one up for you tomorrow with that trick, as the fish is adorable and the tail is especially good for accents) Oh and of course I'm using Christmas scroll as a back of the card halmark thingie, see how you can use your stamps a variety of ways?

Otherwise this card is a pretty straightforward thank you card. I'm going to use it for some of my Christmas thank you's. I hereby announce that Christmas thank you cards can be in any theme, and do not have to be all Christmasie. I'm pretty sure I'm authorized to make such a rule up. (teasing again) All the stamps here are justjohanna. I paper pieced the bird.

Have a great day!

More justjohanna Christmas cards.

All the stamps for these cards are by justjohanna. Most of them are not Christmas stamps but I'm getting bored of my Christmas stamps (after making my 100 cards) so I'm using these now and having a blast.
This one is so simple. I made 3 of them, I made a mask for the frame. I made it on very thick vellum and I taped it to the actual stamp with removable tape so I'll be able to use it anytime. It is colored with tombow markers. Because it's stamped on watercolor paper I was able to get the marker color to really move and no streaks or lines in the color. :)
This one is even more simple. I like simple cards as you may know. For this one I stamped the two stamps and embossed them with copper powder. Gold would have been lovely but you may remember Stephen got in my stamp room and dumped my gold all over the place a few weeks ago, so I don't have any gold. *sigh* The copper looks good to me too though. Then I used my scor-pal to emobss the two lines at the bottom.
I will be the very first to admit that I'm not super in love with the Figgy Pudding line by Basic Gray (or Grey, I can never remember) But I bought it anyhow for one reason... you ready... It has my beloved Cool Carribean in it! For CHRISTMAS! If you know me you know I LOVE this color. I have it stock piled in my cabinet. I am even painting my bathroom this color. Ok, back to the card, it's really simple. I've actually made a bunch of cards with this basic design. I really like it. Oh and I stamped the bird and phrase in green. I almost never stamp in any color other than black and brown. I'm feeling all fancy.
This is the same card in different colors.

This is a unique card. The fold part is only 3 inches, but the card is 4 inches so it leaves the inside showing. I put a piece of red on the inside and stamped the greeting so you can see it either way. Then I stamped my three new favorite stamps, the owls! (You knew you'd be seeing them today didn't you?) I didn't color them. I love the look of uncolored images when done just right. I'm not totally sure I'm pulling it off here but it's a start.

Ok, those are the new Christmas cards for today. I'm feeling the crunch so I made them really quick and easy, if you are feeling the crunch too feel free to use these designs. Use them with cute birds if you have them or whatever your favorite stamps are. And don't forget if you think you will go insane if you see another candycane or snowflake just use your favorite little critters and a holiday greeting. It will work I promise. :)