Thanksgivng Joy

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when you take your camera out and put it on the kitchen counter to take pics of Thanksgiving day and forget all about it til the cleanup is done. Suffice it to say, we needed sideboards for the table! Turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed taters, asparagus, green bean casserole, two kinds of cranberry sauce, Monkey rolls, maple glazed carrots and pumpkin pecan cheesecake for dessert. Everyone left the table holding full bellies and one or two people had to find a comfortable spot and check their eyelids for holes while they pretended to watch the football game! Jake and Unka John retired to the man cave to play some Halo on one of the gaming devices. Joy, Jan and I went into the woman cave/scraproom and I taught Joy how to use Pinky to make herself a tag with her name on it. Jan "commissioned" me to make a tag for Jake to put on his viola case with his name on it. He picked the stamp he wanted, a raccoon, and I made him the tag so he won't get any more demerits for not having his name on his case. And I forgot to take a pic of IT! The appointed picture taker for the family certainly fell short of her duties this holiday. I will strive to do better at Christmas! I did manage to remember to get a pic of Joy's tag, so it wasn't a total loss. She wanted an acorn on it and once we had it put together, Jan said it meant Joy was a nut! Truer words were never spoken!

Canvas Tags

Thought I'd show all of the tags that were done by the various class members last week at Posh Scraps. I think it's pretty cool how each one of them turned out so differently.

Diane's sample

Helen's

Jean's. Jean is Helen's mom and she broke her right arm in a fall and was in a cast, so Helen did a lot of her mom's so theirs looked the most alike.

Rhonda's

Jen's

Mine. Rhonda copied me with the "bow" in her hair and I copied Rhonda with the glittery belt.

We talked Diane into doing another class in January! We could probably just do our own, but it's so cool to see everyone's different take on the same stamp. Plus it's nice to get out of the house and see other grown-ups on occasion!

Happy Thanksgiving

Gift Card holders

Needing a few gift card holders for the upcoming holidays, I decided to put Pinky to work. Make her earn her keep!! These are the pillow boxes on the AP cartridge and there have been more than a few of my sister CTMH Consultants who have already used this idea, so I am not the first. I used the CTMH Wonderland paper pack and made belly bands for each and embossed using white embossing powder with glitter added. The glitter doesn't show up so well in the pic. The stockings (which will be the gift tag) are also cut using the AP cartridge.

There is only one small problem. Small being the operative word. I didn't think to measure the boxes once I assembled them and the gift cards won't fit. Well, they fit. You just can't close the end flaps! They were cut at 5.5", so I think I need to go to 6.5" to insure I've got a skosh of extra room. Don't know yet what I'll do with these, but they're too darn cute to throw away.

What's that old saying? Measure twice, cut once.

Trinket box

One of the new t!m releases that was high on my wish list was his Trinket Box. I took a canvas tag class the other day at Posh Scraps and I managed to snag their last box! Came home and filled that bad boy up! I emptied two of my Cropper Hopper 12 x 12 boxes! So now they are all together and I don't ahve to sift thru a bunch of packages to find what I want. It's right there at my fingertips. He's a genius, that t!m!!

Cherish cards

Trying to use up paper packs! This is the Elemental pp. One that I was not crazy about in the Idea Book but has quickly become a favorite. Love that the patterns and colors will work for masculine and feminine projects. The stamp set is the Nov Stamp of the Month, called Cherish The Day. It has all 12 months of the year, along with numbers 1-31 and the sentiment "cherish the day." This is going to be one of my new "go to" stamp sets.

Scraproom re-do

Been promising pics of the scraproom re-do. And the day to share is finally here!

 This all started because I needed new storage for my CTMH stamps. We found these 4 drawer Sterlite storage units on clearance at W*M and got two of them. So we set the table up with my Pink Cricut Expression (henceforth to be known as Pinky!) and Vagabond and flanked it with the storage units. That was totally John's idea, so I'm giving him his props because I know I'll never hear the end of it if I don't! ;)  The drawer of stamps is all of my Solo Alphas and Solo Numbers along with all of my sentiment stamps. And there's room left in the drawers. I put all of my t!m stuff in one drawer (on the "Vagabond" side so it's all together and I don't have bits and pieces scattered all over the place. And I only found a couple of things I had bought duplicates of. I may have a fat lot of crap...err...valuable scrap stuff in here, but I can pretty much take you to everything in here.  I scare myself sometimes that I can remember that kind of stuff but still have to count on my fingers to add 1+1!!

My table used to be under the hanging shelves and because I'm so short, I basically had everything crammed on the two bottom shelves so I could reach it. So we put the computer under the hanging shelves since the computer desk is narrower than my scrap table and moved the scrap table to where the computer used to be. And I like it! I can see everything on the shelves now and get to all of them. Even the top ones!

And more cards

This is gonna be a  theme for a bit. Working on Christmas gifts and sharing a few here and there.

Jan put in a request for more Sympathy and Thinking of You cards for this year, so there are quite a few of these. This is just a sampling. This uses up my Typeset paper pack. LOVE the new smaller pp's that CTMH introduced with the Fall/Winter Idea Book. For a paper hoarder (did I just say that out loud?!) like me, this is perfect. I used an all time fave stamp set, Treasure Life. I love the "weedy" looking stems that work perfectly on this type of card. And the Just Blooms Paper Shapes butterflies flitting about them also worked for me. I used some Perfect Pearls Mist on the cs to give a subtle shimmer and some of the Basic Assortments buttons tied with hemp and Bakers Twine.

More Joy!

Made a few more cards for Joy to give her gf's next year. I used the now retired CTMH Cherry-O paper pack for these, along with a couple of old stamp sets, Party Time and Birthday Celebration and the required Stickles Diamond for bling! Oh, and some Magic Mesh that I found when I was cleaning in my room. Had it for yeeears and it's now on my table so I see it and use it! Buttons are from the CTMH Basic Assortment and there's some Foundry Ribbon Slides as well.

Tampa Food Truck Rally

                                  downtown Tampa Skyline. This is known as the "beer can building."

                                                             Jerk Hut Express truck

                            John's Curry Chicken. The things in the lower left side are the fried plantains.

                                                  My Jerk Pork. Yumalicious!

                                               Crepe truck.

                  Killer Sammich Truck. They were wiping things they'd run out of off their board!

                              Fire Monkey truck. Can you tell where the line begins and ends?!

 Taco Bus Truck. They were featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives this week. We are going to their permanent location soon!

Dessert! There's Bavarian Creme filled, Raspberry, Strawberry and Apple filled, Sour Cream cake and Pumpkin!

John and I spent a lovely fall afternoon in downtown Tampa today. We all know what a bad rep food trucks of old had. Most were known as "roach coaches" with food of questionable origin and how long it had been sitting around. But no more! Food trucks are THE next big thang! And Tampa is getting in on the action. This is the third Rally they've had and each one draws bigger and bigger crowds. Tampa's Mayor Bob Buckhorn has said that the first Wed of every month from now til May will be a food truck rally in downtown at Gaslight Park. And  there were quite a few people from Occupy Tampa who came over from their "Headquarters" at Curtis Hixon Park, they were well mannered and well behaved. Most of them spent most of their time trying to get on TV because every local station was there filming.

I really wanted to dry the duck confit at the Fire Monkey food truck ( I had read about it in the paper!), but it was so jammed packed with people in line that we could not even see his menu board, much less order anything. We stood in what we thought was the line for quite a while, only to learn it was the pick up  line and we had to go "over there" to place our order. And "over there", we could not tell where the line ended and anyone we asked didn't know either. So we ended up at the Jerk Hut Express truck. And it was wonderful! John wanted curry goat and so did the lady behind us. When John ordered his, they announced they were now out of curry goat. And he graciously told them to give it to the lady behind us and he'd take curry chicken instead. :::I'll wait while y'all awwww for John!::: I wanted jerk pork and it was fantabulous! Both meals came with Jamacain rice with red beans and salad and three plantains. John's meal was $5.00 and mine was $6.00, and you can see by the styrofoam containers that they were slap full. I brought over 1/2 of mine home! I'd love to try again next month and maybe get there a bit earlier so hopefully I could try the duck at Fire Monkey. On the way home, the "hot now" light was on at Krispy Kreme, so we got donuts to bring home for later. Temps were in the upper 70's. Not a cloud in the sky. All in all, a great afternoon.

Joy cards

Working on cards for Jan for Christmas. Joy gets invited to no less than a bazillion birthday parties every year, so I have to do a bazillion and one cards just for her! Here are a few. I used the CTHM Veranda paper pack along with my best new friend...the Art Philosophy cartridge and Cricut! All the shapes were cut at 2.5" using it and all of the layered pieces have some sort of Stickles for the required blingy goodness! Other embellies are all from my stash. The half butterfly was a happy accident. It was the last thing I cut and the cardstock shifted as it was cutting and the other half was out of line with the half that I used. So I just cut it in half and positined it on the edge of the card!