When You're Strange...

Faces Come Out In the rain, when you're strange. No one remembers your name... Ok, I'll stop. Those are the lyrics to one of my favorite songs by the Doors. So what does this have to do with my post? Club Anya is having another challenge. It's the Rockin' Rebel challenge! The challenge is to make your favorite Rockstar out of an Ian or Anya image. I LOVE the Doors, so I made Jim Morrison! Here he is: I really love the way this turned out. I added some hair to Dress Me Ian, cut off his arms and his body below the waist, drew two arms then cut them out and glued them onto "Jim", filled in his lips just enough to get Jim's look, and drew in the necklace. I colored his hair with my Kohinoor colored pencils and his body with my grey copic marker. Since the original picture of Jim was black and white, I decided this card needed to be in black and white (and grey). The "doors" word was done with some punches and fancy cutting on my part. ;) I had a ton of fun with this challenge, but I didn't want to stop with The Lizard King, so I also made a Cher card! Here it is:

I used Dress Up Anya, masked off her underwear and stamped her. Then drew in the outfit and added the blingy belt. The line across her legs is actually the cord from her mic that I drew in her hand. I actually really like the song "If I Could Turn Back Time" and her outfit from the video was quite the phenomenom at the time so that's the one I chose to dress her in. Also, my favorite line from that song is perfect for a card! The outside says "If I could reach the stars..." and the inside says:

"...I'd give them all to you!!!" I used the yummy DP from SEI's Chocolat paper pack and some other papers that were scraps. The bling is actually selfstick rhinestones for a cell phone and I used my Stampin' Up! punches for the stars. What do you all think? Do you think I have a chance of winning the "Rockin' Rebel" contest? I actually have a few more cards in mind and Andrew made a special request for one rockstar, so you may be seeing more to come! If you want to see all the fabulous entries for the contest click HERE and you'll go to the Gallery for all the entries. Some of the first entries are actually from the Design Team (thank goodness) and they are all awesome. I'm particularly fond of the David Bowie one that Traci (the Wicked Pixie) did! Ok, signing off for now. Next post should be tomorrow. I have a lot to tell you about from this past weekend!

Until next post, be blessed.

No Tour Today...

But I do have a couple pictures for you! I made a couple videos of a "tour of the house" but I can not get them to load onto the internet. I tried, I really, really did. Hopefully I can figure it out tomorrow. Any tips would be greatly appreciated! In the meantime, here are a couple pictures. This first one is of abeautiul tree blooming behind our house.
The pink blooms are so beautiful in real life. Now, just for the fun of it, here's a picture of Angel when she woke up from her nap yesterday:

LOL! Don't you just love the hair and expression on her face?!? She cracked me up when she woke up because she was in a fantastic mood even though she looked like she had been through a hurricane! Well I hope you enjoyed this brief post today, until next post, be blessed!

I owe you a post

But it is not going to happen tonight. It's already 10pm here and I'm super tired. Good news is that I've had a productive day, bad news, no blog post. Today I rediscovered my love for writing, reminisced about decades past, and got the last of my boxes emptied. I also remembered that my camera can take videos of things, not just pictures... so look for a tour of the house soon! I know I promised some pics of Italy (I didn't forget Mel) but I plan on doing better with a guided tour of our interesting Italian home very soon. I just need to film it and figure out how to post it. Want some cool news? Angel is WALKING!!! YUP! Took almost 10 steps all on her own! She still isn't brave enough to just get up and walk somewhere, but she'll do it if we stand her up and ask her to come to us. I had a cool video of that, but David accidently erased it when he was trying to watch it on the camera. I'll do another video and post it for you all to see. I hope your Thursday is a great one, see you tomorrow.
Until next post, be blessed!

Hatter the Leprechaun

Hi Everyone! So this is gonna be a quick post. Angel Baby's sleepy and wants to cuddle so she's pulling my hair and trying to give me kisses! Yesterday was St. Patty's day, and even though I forgot until I read a St. Patty's day blog post, I did manage to get some stamping time and get the kids some little treat tins made. I used The Greeting Farm's Hatter stamp from the Wonderland stamp set and colored his outfit green to make him into a Leprechaun! Here's a pic of the three tins I made: They are all pretty much the same only I used different colors of twine and a few different buttons on them. I used scrap green paper to cover just the tops of the tins, added a little DP from Making Memories (I think) and the buttons are a mixture of SU!, Wal-mart, and stolen buttons from my mom, heeheehee! Of course I colored Hatter with my Copics. Here's an upclose of Ashton's tin:

I put some Ritter Sport mini chocolates in there with some green M&M's and the kids LOVED them! It only took me about an hour to make all three tins which is relatively quick for me. What did you all do for St. Patrick's day? Any "green" traditions? I forgot to wear green, so Andrew pinched me! So I just used one of my Copic markers and swiped a green mark on the back of my hand, lol! Well, I hope you all have a Wonderful Wednesday and leave me a comment to let me know you stopped by!

OH! P.S. As I've been cleaning and organizing the house, I'm finding a ton of books that I've read but don't really care to read again. (I love to read, that's my second favorite hobby next to cardmaking I think). So, is anyone interested in a little Book Blog Candy? Or maybe a Book Swap? Hm, maybe I'll just list a few here, and I'll send them to whoever wants them first? Let me know what you think. If no one is interested at all, I'll probably end up keeping them, lol!

Until next post, be blessed!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Hey there readers! Sorry I didn't get a chance to post yesterday, things have been busy around here. It's a good thing I had Friday's post predone, because on Friday we got our household goods! Here's a picture of the trucks dropping off our stuff as seen from inside our front door: It was fun finding all our old treasures. Here's a picture of Ashton wearing his Daddy's riding gear:

And here is David, Andrew and Angel rediscovering some old treasures:

I think that box was full of movies and video games. The house slowly filled up with our boxes and furniture as you can see in the photo below:

We just enjoyed seeing all our stuff finally get to us. Angel decided to lounge on top of one of David's speakers that was on the couch:

Unfortunately, after the movers left and we started unpacking all our boxes, we discoverd many many things that were missing. We think maybe the movers didn't open up one of our crates (there were two trucks as you saw in the first photo, but they only opened a few crates from each truck), and a bunch of our stuff is still in a crate somewhere. Some of the missing items include most of my kitchen supplies including baking dishes, utensils, my favorite coffee mugs and wine glasses that were a gift from Julie; also most of our linens including our comforter that matches our bedroom curtains (but we got the curtains!); A lot of David's guitar stuff including an expensive pedal, tube screamer and guitar cords; and I know there is more. I need to go through the inventory list and file a claim. Maybe they'll magically find our missing stuff and bring it by sometime. Yeah, right! Well, needless to say, I haven't had ANY stamping time. I've been organizing, unpacking, and moving furniture. Our house is slowly coming together. I still need to pick up some special nails to hang our pictures because our walls are concrete (or plaster, or something hard to nail into) and we're still waiting on the rest of our entertainment center to be delivered. We ordered that a few weeks ago from the BX. I will get more pics of Italy posted soon (I promise Mel!) but until next post, be blessed!

Hatter and Rockstar

It's Friday! Woohoo! I am actually posting this early since the boys don't have school on Friday-Teacher work day. This way I can schedule this post to show up on Friday, but I can take the whole day to keep them occupied. I think we'll take David to work in the morning, come home and relax for a couple hours, meet David for lunch at Markos (DELISH gyros, OMG!) and then hang out at the skate/bike park until David gets off work. I think the kids will like that, and if the weather stays nice we'll all enjoy ourselves. Well, speaking of the boys, Ashton has been having a few typical "issues" with his responsibilities. He just refuses to do what needs to be done! Forget teeth brushing, hair combing, following directions and behaving! If it's something that a typical 5 year old needs to be responsible with, he will NOT do it. And I thought it was just at home... NOPE! Apparently he is having problems at school with getting his work done in a timely manner, getting up and sauntering over to his friends for a little chit chat, and just plain obeying the rules. I think it has a lot to do with adjsting to a new place and growing into his own independance. Well, I wanted to let him know that I was thinking of him and that I know he can do his best at home and at school, so I made him a little ticket: Ashton absolutely loves collecting things; especially little piecesof paper like tickets. I knew he would like this, so I stamped out my new Mad Hatter stamp from TGF and colored him with my watercolor pencils and OMS. I glued it onto some paper (Rockstar pack from DCWV) and cut the corner to look like a ticket. He liked it and will be keeping it in his backpack for a little reminder at school whenever he needs to start following the rules.

On another note, TGF is having another Case of the Curious Card Challenge! I participated in the first one (remember my Sumo card?) and had so much fun so I had to participate in this one too! The card we had to CASE is from GabbyYou can see her card HERE. I pretty much just made a female version of her card, afterall it is a CASE challenge! (Copy And Share with Everyone). And if that wasn't cool enough, Kristina Werner's Color challenge for this week is Black, Gray and White; so my card qualifies for that one too! Score!!! I've been wanting to participate in Kristina's color challenge for awhile now but I never seem to get it done on time. My handmade flower card (a couple days ago) qualified for her last challenge, but I didn't get it uploaded in time. Oh well. Here's another pic of the card. The first pic is better, but this second pic shows the glitter on her headband and dress.
I think it turned out pretty good, and hopefully Gabby thinks so too so I can win a stamp set! LOL! And double score if Kristina picks me as one of her top cards for her Color Roundup!!! I'll keep you all posted.
Well, my projects and pictures are winding down, so I think I'm going to take the weekend off from blogging. David is taking a friend of ours to the airport in Venice on Saturday, but since the five of us and our friend won't all fit in the truck, I'm going to miss out on a trip to Venice, POO! Maybe we'll still have an exciting weekend. Come back on Monday and I'll let you know what we did (hopefully there will be something worth blogging about, lol.).
Until next week, be blessed!

Rockstar Anya!

Hello! How are you all today? Here in Italy we've had some gray days, some sunny days, and some rainy days. Yesterday was nice, sunny, and not too chilly. Let's hope today is the same! Well, while blog surfing the other day, I came across THIS adorable card by Elena. She has some great cards, I love her coloring, and she is so talented! You should go check out her blog The Red Haired Girl; great stuff! Anyway, when I saw the adorable Deer card, I wanted to CASE it and use the layout for some Rockstar Anya cards. Here's my Red Rockstar: I also just got my Stampin' Up! order in last Friday and it had the Rock Star stamp in it. I got the stamp set just because I knew it would work with my Rockstar Anya's. Here's a green Rockstar:

I used the Rockstar Paper from DCWV on both of these cards. I thought this green card needed a little something else to it, so I poked holes through the guitar pickups and threaded some twine in them. I know that in real life guitar strings don't go through the pickups, and that any guitar with just three strings is missing a few, but for the purpose of the card it worked (I think I know a little too much about guitars, because of DH). Also, if you look closely, you'll notice that both my Rockstars are not playing guitars, they're playing basses! LOL! (It's a secret wish of mine to be able to play the bass to my husband's guitar melodies... ah, someday). Here's a closeup of Green Rockstar and the twine:

I had a total blast making these cards, and they really came together quite easily with the inspiration from Elena, the Rockstar paper, and Rockstar Anya of course. I think Rockstar Anya is my new favorite Anya! I have another card to show you using her tomorrow.

Until then, be blessed!