CPS challenge

A wonderfully simple sketch at http://www.cardpositioningsystems.blogspot.com/ this week.

I pulled out CTMH Veranda paper pack along with Follow Your Heart stamp set. The birds tail is pop dotted and I used a Bitty Sparkle for it's eye. A very basic, simple card!

CardPatterns birthday

It's CardPatterns first birthday! They are having a blog hop and card challenge, so hop on over and see what's up!

Here is my take on the first challenge. I pulled out an old Judikins Asian inspired stamp and used my CTMH Sorbet, Sweet Leaf and Garden Green ink pads along with my water brush to color the image. I used CTMH Twitterpated pp along with Kanji Phrases stamp set. There are CTMH Bitty Sparkles in the corners of the sentiment for just a bit of bling! I also used some Washi Tape and my Nestabilities to cut the circles.

LOVE My tapes!!

I'd love to win some fun new tapes! I entered on their blog, but didn't win in the intial drawing. This is a second chance. I'd love to be able to try some new tapes! Check out the new blog! http://lovemytapes.blogspot.com/

Thatz mah boy!

Wackadoo Orleans! Savannah's normally my constant companion in the scrap room. This morning, Orleans decided to come in and keep me company. He's relaxed and chillin...which is not hard to do this morning. It's cold again. 26 degrees at my back door. Weatherman said last night that our temps have averaged 7 degrees below our normal for this time of year for both January and February. The days are getting longer and the sun's getting higher in the sky, so we won't see too many more cold days and nights.

There IS some green

in the yard! Not much though. I took a walkabout yesterday just to see if there was any green peeking out from all of the yukky brown. Found a few gems!

The apple tree has a few pink blossoms and green leaves just starting to pop. Our cherry tree is in full blossom. No leaves yet, but I think every bee on the west coast of FL is at the tree! Oh. My. Lord the bees! You hear them beefore (!) you see them! Then there's the Earth Boxes. We've got spinach almost ready to cut again. And mustard greens. This will be the third mess of each we'll have. The tomatoes didn't fare as well in the cold. We lost two plants completely and almost all of the third. I bought one more plum tomato plant yesterday, so hopefully the worst of the cold is over now. The tomatoes will do fine all thru the Spring and into Summer. The spinach and mustards, notsomuch as they prefer cooler temps. I've got yellow and zucchini squash seeds ready to go in those boxes once they are done.

Whoops!

See what happens when you make something two months before the actual holiday and then get sick for almost a month?! That "something" gets buried on your work table (the gremlins come in at night and do it. Cuz I'm such a place for everything and everything in it's place kinda gal! And if you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell ya!) and you find it two weeks after the holiday!

My thought in making this Sue's World Famous Coaster Hanging was to put it on the front door before Valentines Day. So guess what? With only 6 days left in February, it's going on the front door today! I don't remember at this point what paper I used, what stamps I used, or much else for that matter! I DO know that the little hearts are part of my birthday gift o' goodness from Debbie and Evan! Oh, and I used round coasters! Hee hee!!

Thinking warm thoughts!

Great sketch this week at http://www.cardpositioningsystems.blogspot.com/.

I was thinking warm thoughts when I created this card! Since I had the CTMH Laid Back (retired) pp out, I figured I'd go with it. I pulled out CTMH Splish Splash (also retired) stamp set for the surfboard. If you look closely at the bottom of the surfboard, you'll notice I went out in the yard and got some sand and mixed with Glossy Accents to make real sand at the bottom of the board! I also paper pieced the surfboard.

Yummies!

Drool warning (especially for Jeanne!)

Our grocery store is having their "Italian Days" sale this week, so I stocked up on fresh plum tomatoes and made Sue's World Famous Salsa. I made it on Friday because it has to sit for a couple of days to really get "good!" I just popped the top to take the picture and the garlic-y, lime-y, cilantro-y smell coming out of the bowl was heavenly! I don't have a recipe, per say, but I'll share best I can. Adjust the amounts to your own liking. Plum tomatoes, red onion, garlic, fresh squeezed lime juice, jalepeno peppers, fresh chopped cilantro (no stems) salt, pepper, sugar. For something different this time, I roasted the jalepenos before I chopped them. I don't like my salsa hot, so I de-seed and de-vein the peppers. If you like more heat, leave them in. I even did a batch one time for a friend that likes his blistering hot and I used scotch bonnet peppers in his. Frito Hint of Lime Tostitos are the bomb with this salsa!

I also found a new food blog the other day. Jennie had a recipe for slow roasted tomato soup that sounded easy and good. I made her soup yesterday and that and grilled cheese sandwiches was our dinner last night. The soup was really easy and really good. She's got a couple more recipes on her blog I'll be trying soon.

http://www.injennieskitchen.com/2010/02/slow-roasted-tomato-soup

Not to be outdone...

by my good friend Jeanne over at silly to sane. . . ., who saw my post on Sarah Milne and promply went and made a digi layout using one of Sarah's sketches! Here's my take on this sketch http://www.scrapburbia.com/2010/02/same-only-different.html that I found on http://www.scrapburbia.com/!

These are more of the pics mom gave me of the kids at Christmas. There's one shot here, two shots there, not enough of any one thing to make a cohesive layout with! But I think I stayed pretty close in the overall theme, with the one Christmas pic being the exception. I used a discontinued CTMH pp called Laid Back and CTMH Extreme Happiness stamp set. The letters are Scenic Route that I painted with MM Dusk acrylic paint.

Random Randomness

Just a mish-mash of stuff!

*Seen on our news the other day. Someone has gotten the stoopid...err...brilliant idea to chop up the turf at SunLife Stadium in Miami where the Super Bowl was held and sell it off in 3 x 3 INCH sections in a plastic case at $100 a pop. That's dead grass folks. Or soon-to-be dead. For $100. I've got a yard FULL of dead grass you can come and TAKE! The weather guy did the math between commercials and if they sell the whole field, it will amount to 96 MILLION dollars. Wonder what will be done with that money? Certainly not sent to the still displaced from Katrina in 2005 people of the Lower Ninth Ward.

* I've been seeing MegaRed Krill Oil tablets being advertised on TV. Now we all know the benefit of fish oil and that it helps to raise our good cholesterol. Supposedly krill oil is the better mousetrap of the fish oil business. I checked the price of it the other day when I was at the pharmacy. $24.99 for 100 tabs. I can get regular old fish oil buy one get one free for $11.99. Guess where my money's going?!

*Olympics! I've never really been one for the Winter Olympics. But the other day there was nada on TV, so I started watching Curling. I'm hooked!! On curling!! Whoda thunk?! Also been digging on the biathalon. Cross country ski til you're out of breath then try to hit a target with a rifle. Then go ski some more and try to hit a different target with the rifle. Then go ski some more. And collapse at the finish line. Yeah, that sounds like fun. NOT!

* Some strange weather factiods our weather guy shared last night. This El Nino winter is gonna be one for the record books. So far, in 2010, we've had 28 nights below 45 degrees here in the Tampa area. We've also had 44 days with highs below 70 degrees in the greater Tampa area. Unhead of! And, although it has nothing to do with Florida, there is very little snow in northern Ohio right now because Lake Erie is frozen solid and the lake effect snows that they usually get they are not because the lake is frozen solid. Yep, strange winter all across the country! And the first day of Spring is a full month away, March 20! So I expect more weirdness.

* John and I recently found a new for us deli in South Tampa. Datz Deli is based on many of the deli's in New York. Datz Delicatessen & Foodie’s Market We headed down that way yesterday and had lunch. Just wonderful! I could only eat 1/2 of my Reuben, so had to bring the other 1/2 home. The sammys are served with homemade sweet potato chips with cinnamon sugar on them and a homemade bleu cheese dressing and chives. OMG! To. Die. For! We brought home some wonderful sliced meats. Soprasetta, Toscana salumi and Genoa salumi. Also a wedge of Irish cheddar cheese, some pitted Nicoise olives and wonderfully tart green Sicilian olives. A crusty bagette. Of course I had to bring home some of their wonderful stored in a barrel half sour pickles! I think I could LIVE on them alone!! And for dessert, a slice of Key Lime Pie and one of Strawberry Rhubarb pie. If you're ever down S Tampa way, close to MacDill AFB, you owe it to yourself to head to Datz!

Say "Hello" to an old friend

While Sarah Milne has stepped away from being the designer/owner of Scenic Route, she has started a new direction in her life. She is blogging and doing layout sketches! How cool is that! To now see her perspective on scrapping instead of in the studio designing. I've loved her since before I met her at a class she held at Ruban Rouge way back in Aug of '06. She has such a fresh style. Check out her new blog. She's got some great sketches that I'll be using soon!

http://www.scrapburbia.com/

A little birdie...

This is what I came up with with for this week's challenge at http://www.cardpositioningsystems.blogspot.com/. I've had these chipboard birds laying around forever and I love the CTMH Veranda pp and thought the two would go good together. I ran the Vanilla Cream cardstock thru the Cuttlebug using the Swiss Dots folder, then sponged the outside edges. The bird has some Smooch Accent Ink on it for "feathers." I also used some

t!m Holtz Fragments. I used the new CTMH Cherished Flourishes for the random stamping on the Juniper base.

Curiosity killed...

the cat! When I took the pics of my layout yesterday to share, I found this still on the camera! It was too cute not to share!

These are the blankets we used during the Great Freeze of 2010 last month to cover our veggies in the Earth Boxes. Once it finally warmed up, I was probably feeling my worst, so was not inclined to wash them, fold them and put them away. Instead, I threw them in the rocker on the back porch to be dealt with when I was feeling better, or by my heirs when I died, whichever came first. And there were a couple of days I was hoping for death, believe me! They have since been dealt with, only to be brought out again a couple of days ago when we had yet another freeze!

Mr Orleans had to get up and "see" what outside feral catz had come by and sprayed the blankets. Ish! Boyz are so weird!! Testosterone rulz!

A Layout!!

How long has it been since I've shared artwork? Almost two months! Sheesh. You'd think a girl had been sick for almost the whole month of January or sumpin!

I've been working on this off and on all week. Was waiting for Jan to let me know when Joy graduated from AppleSeeds cuz Aunt Sue is old and forgetful and she couldn't remember! Finally got that info, so I finished up the journaling this morning.

This is the first of the Welcome to Imaginisce (R) new sketch challenges and since mom had given me all the pics of the kids at Christmas to scrap, I figured I'd start with their sketch. I, of course, used my I-Top brad maker for the centers of the largest flowers!! The pp is CTMH Topstitch and I used the new Irresistables Lots of Dots alphabet for the title. LOVE the resist on the alpha! I used the centers of the g, a and d on the pink circle for the flower centers! Waste not, want not!! The smaller flowers are from CTMH Togetherness stamp set. I also used a CTMH White Daisy crochet flower that I sponged Baby Pink ink on the outer petals. There's a piece of Twill that I also edged in Baby Pink ink with a Pretty Pin in it.

Now that I'm feeling better, I hope to get more of the pics done and I will continue to share here and there. I'm also looking forward to getting back to my card challenges!

Edit: Thanks to Deb in pointing out I put the worng link in! Here's the right link to the Imaginisce blog...http://imaginiscescrapbooking.blogspot.com/

How 'Bout Dat?!

Dem Saints done won dem a Super Bowl!! 31-17 over the Indianapolis Colts.

What a great game. What a terrific outcome. This may well be the feel good story of the year. I think almost everyone in America was pulling for the Saints just a little. I know we certainly were. New Orleans is one of John's and my favorite cities we've ever visited. I'm sure Mardi Gras started 9 days early on Rue Bourbon last night and may go well after Fat Tuesday!

Still haven't done anything crafty. Working slowly at regaining my strength. Each day I'm feeling better. Still have a lingering cough and sniffles, but so does John. I'm hoping to feel good enough to craft some this week. Thanks for all the good wishes and thoughts!

I think...

the crud may be on it's way out! Finally! After only three weeks!! My right ear finally cleared late on Tue. And my left one cleared sometime overnight last night. I've still got some sniffles and coughing, but nothing like it's been. And I'm feeling the urge to craft. Haven't had that since I started getting sick. And while I'm not ready to do anything too quickly, I will slowly start getting back into things.

They had a neat story on my news last night. A pair of ospreys have built a nest close to a golf driving range in my little hometown of Dunedin. Someone set up a webcam to watch the birds, who have since laid three eggs in the nest. "Experts" seem to think the eggs should hatch sometime this week. I'll be watching! If I can ever get on the website during daylight hours that is. Every time I've tried, they have been exceeding their bandwidth and I've not been able to see. Maybe you'll have better luck! - Dunedin Osprey Cam

Last, but not least. I was sad to hear that Rusty Pickle is going out of business. I've been a fan of their funky, rustic, grungy papers for a long time. They are having a 50% off sale for all of their lines.
Site rustypickle.com