Giddyup!

Just some quick cards - I'm drowning in sorting and packing right now! I had these horses colored, so these cards came together fast....holding my own on that New Years Resolution! :)

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Tutorial: Gravy boat for an embellishment

A few of my cards have had some thicker embellishments, and folks have asked how I adhere them. So I thought it was time for a gravy boat tutorial! It works for buttons, and anything with some sort of a thick backing that is awkward to adhere on a card. I've seen a number of cards come in with an embellishment teetering on a giant gluedot (a dot which made it even thicker!), so this technique makes the embellishment more stable, and makes the card slightly thinner at the same time.

Note that I don't encourage much of these kinds of realllly thick cards for OWH; they take up lots of room in a box, so only send us a couple, and please make them general themed cards so we don't end up in a rush to get a bunch into a box. But boy are they special. So if you have a friend you're hand-delivering a superthick card to, you might try this.

I started with these cooooool flowers from the floral section at Michael's - I didn't realise when purchasing them *just* how thick they were. I got a pack of purple and yellow.

The backs of them have a wire stem; snip it off as close as absolutely possible! Wire clippers work well; they even work on buttons that have that loop thingie on the back. Or at least on most of them.

On the card, build up a little nest to set the embellishment down into. Here I'm using pretty thick squares, and created enough of a hole that the bulk of the flower will nestle into it.

Remove the sticky paper covering on your adhesive, and add your embellishment. It should rest pretty stably on the card now!

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Card kits again

I'm working madly on getting kits ready for a cardmaking party in Vancouver this weekend - pant pant - it totally snuck up on me! I think this one will be one of two designs I take with me...hopefully I can get both finished in time!

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Weekend at the beach

What a great weekend it's been....and it's nearing midnight, and I'm nowhere near ready to head back to work tomorrow! Someone really needs to work on extending the whole weekend thing, dontcha think?

First, I wanted to share the picture of all the amazzzzzing birthday cards - wow!! Between these and my flooded facebook page and emails, I am feelin' the love! Thank you everyone! One of my favorite quotes in them was a note in a letter from Ruthanne, she was talking about OWH cards: "I know that most have access to email - but nobody prints out an email and keeps it in a shoebox under the bed!"

As for my weekend...I went out to Ocean Shores WA, and had a great time with my friend Lori. We stayed at Julia and Ed's beachhouse - what a great place, and a sweet thing for them to allow friends to go hang out there!

And no, that's not my photo, darn it. Sure wish I had seen a sunset like that! But...Saturday we did see some really cool guys doing what's called "Kite Surfing." A real daredevil kind of thing! They strap a kite to their body and let it drag them across the water on a board at 50mph. They twist the kite around to get a poof of air and go flying 30 feet above the water's surface - it's nuts! We watched them for a while til we got cold....wayyyyy windy out there on the coast!

Just off to the left of the kitesurfers were a bunch of way cool rocks. The tide was out pretty far, so the tidepool was filled with a lot of critters! Check out this tird of starfish! Yes, I just looked up that word. A tird. I wish I had known it while looking at these guys, it would have made it a lot sillier!

We hit the local grocer to pick up food for dinner and I just had to snap this goofball shot. Who paints a grocery store the same color as my fab car? We headed back to the beachhouse and had chicken, potatoes, and mmmm fresh broccoli. We spent the evening watching comedy videos on tv and coloring....I think she'll be fully addicted to Copics anytime now! Mwahaha...my secret plan to take over the universe with markers has begun :)

This morning we went to find the Shark. Where else but at Sharky's! I had this great plan to get a photo with my hands looking like I'm pressing open the shark's jaws - and with way too much wind and giggling, the photo instead looks like I'm being chased by a wild shark. Whatever! lol.

Then we headed over to the beach, where I got to finally, after forty-something years, fly a kite. Without running to try to launch the thing! It just took off, and I was so excited. It's a two-stringed kite, and was pretty easy to get it doing little tricks—I don't remember kiteflying as a kid being nearly that easy or fun. If you check out my Facebook page you can see a little video Lori shot of me flying the thing. And you'll know by the audio just how windy it was!

And I also got to drive on the beach, also a lot of fun. The tide was up pretty high, and at one point I found myself taking a sharp left to get away from a rogue wave—in my car! lol.

And, lest my streak ever break, here's a quick card I made. It's a RAKd image, and this card was kept simple since it's for a little boy!

That's about it for today...time to hit the rack. Monday's almost here. :(

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I beeeeeee workin....nah, restin'

With any luck, I'm not around today...I'm getting this post ready at midnight for Saturday, and will be packing up to head to Ocean Shores Sat afternoon! Very excited to get out of Dodge. But here's a hardworking little bee - a digifreebie from MelJen Designs. (A ps - I didn't make it on her DT....*sigh*) I plan on being hardly working, unlike this little dude. I'm taking markers and stamped images, and the rest of the weekend will be playing on the coast! Kites, bowling, who knows what we'll do....but I need to get the heck outta town!

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Learned something new

And what did I learn? Only that if I get off this infernal machine, I can get through a LOT of stuff.

My internet connection went down tonight....I was trying not to be stressed out about it, so dug into the card hospital boxes to finally see if I could completely catch up. On the other triage days, I always seemed to leave some at the bottom - ones that needed the most work! Odd sized card fronts, destroyed ones that needed to be repurposed, etc. Well, tonight, I got it all DONE!

Then I made some more cards after kicking around the modem a while...lots more than this, but these cards are also for the S&S sketch challenge.

Gnight!

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Flower...and some catchup

This is a card I made for my friend Melissa...happy belated!! The image is a RAKd one, papers from K&Co.

And here's a little catchup - these are cards you would have seen on the hop if you made it around, but some didn't....so these are samples I did for other sites:

Gnight!

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You guys....are sooooo sneaky :)

For the last couple days, these have been trickling in....I'm not one to promote my birthday (even though I've gotten a pile of emails from FB telling me I should!), but someone's out there doing it! What a huge blessing --- you ladies make me cry! And so many wrote notes on paper inserted in them so the cards can be sent on....you think of everything! Big big big hugs to you all......*sniff*

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Now and Forever

Tonight's card is a flower image I received from someone and ooooohhhh was it a blast to color! I need lots of love cards for my guys, so this is one more to add to the box...

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Just a few...

I colored a bunch of images last night....which means I have a couple cards tonight to share! These are cards for me to actually send out (shock!). Got to go get the Thankful Thursday data processed now, so I won't blather on tonight....see you tomorrow!

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Heavens to Betsy

The Stars and Stamps blog had a floral challenge this week...if you hurry hurry hurry you can still get in on being in the slideshow that will get posted tomorrow! And oooohhhh do I have flowers. Heavens to Betsy! (And who is this Betsy anyway?)

I'm not sure what it is about flowers that I can't seem to make myself use them in abundance. After just a couple, I feel like it's "too much" for a card. But I love when other people use a lot of flowers. So...I think it's me hoarding again! I think I've gotten past my ribbon hoarding; if you look at my last cards, I've had a lot more ribbon decorating them than I used to. I think maybe flowers are the next thing to go. I have too much stuff around here that needs to get used up! I also had a couple half-sheets of springy epoxy stickers sitting on my table, so I mixed them in the bouquet too.

Another surprise that happened while making this card was the stamped vase. That's a stamp that had never seen ink, and has been staring at me for a while. And it turns out to stamp really poorly! I used chalk ink, and tried again and again; but this one, even though not stamped right, had such an interesting accidental highlight that I kept it! 

PS I had to look up that phrase, Heavens to Betsy. Which also reminded me of Heavens to Murgatroyd. And dontcha know the internet has the story! Or lack thereof.

'Heavens to Murgatroyd' is American in origin and dates from the mid 20th century. The expression was popularized by the cartoon character Snagglepuss - a regular on the Yogi Bear Show in the 1960s, and is a variant of the earlier 'heavens to Betsy'.

The first use of the phrase wasn't by Snagglepuss but comes from the 1944 film Meet the People. It was spoken by Bert Lahr, best remembered for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Snagglepuss's voice was patterned on Lahr's, along with the 'heavens to Murgatroyd' line. Daws Butler's vocal portrayal of the character was so accurate that when the cartoon was used to promote Kellogg Cereals, Lahr sued and made the company distance him from the campaign by giving a prominent credit to Butler.

As with Betsy, we have no idea who Murgatroyd was. The various spellings of the name - as Murgatroid, Mergatroyd or Mergatroid tend to suggest that it wasn't an actual surname. While it is doubtful that the writers of Meet The People (Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy) were referring to an actual person, they must have got the name from somewhere.

No fewer than ten of the characters in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Ruddigore (1887) are baronets surnamed "Murgatroyd", eight of whom (or is that which?) are ghosts. Herzig and Saidy were well versed in the works of the musical theatre and that plethora of Murgatroyds would have been known to them.

Where then did the librettist Sir William Gilbert get the name? It seems that Murgatroyd has a long history as a family name in the English aristocracy. In his genealogy The Murgatroyds of Murgatroyd, Bill Murgatroyd states that, in 1371, a constable was appointed for the district of Warley in Yorkshire. He adopted the name of Johanus de Morgateroyde - literally John of Moor Gate Royde or 'the district leading to the moor'.

Whether the Murgatroyd name took that route from Yorkshire to Jellystone Park we can't be certain. Unless there's a Betsy Murgatroyd hiding in the archives, that's as close as we are likely to get to a derivation.

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My hero

I'm finally getting lower on AnyHero cards - for a while I'd been getting huge boxes of them from cardsignings, and thought I'd never get to the bottom! But - I think I can see the bottom of my boxes, so it's time to start making and writing a bunch of my own. I picked up this stamp & sentiment a few weeks ago on my trek to the Amuse store in Seattle - I love it! Quick image to color, a little embossing and layering, the obligatory ribbon - and it makes a sweet and simple card!

I think I see a lot of these in my future....followed by a wonderful hand cramp. I love love love writing letters to our heroes!

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Oh, my - thank you all!

I'm still in a bit of shock - 140 comments on my bloghop post! I'm used to getting one or two, sometimes a couple extras when my blog posts to my Facebook profile. Wow! Thank you all so much for not only joining on the hop, but taking time out to make me cry! I needed kleenex to read through those - you all are so very kind!

My card share today is one I made specially for a hero - she's one of our OWH cardmaking family from Ohio, and is now deployed to Baghdad! So I knew I needed an extraspecial card to send her in her box.

The image is from the Image Swap we just had on the Facebook Fan Page (speaking of which, do you guys want to do another?) It didn't say who it was from, unless I cut that part off, but it's an image by Unity. The charm is one I picked up in the wedding aisle at Joanns - cheap! Great place to get love and thankyou embellishments! You can't tell too well, but there's a navy scallop around the stamped image, and it's popped up with popdots - I tried this side view, but it's still a challenge to see. It looks much better in real life, and I know our hero is going to love it!

And I also know why you came back to my blog - you wanted to see who won my candy!

And #68 is....

Congratulations! I'll be getting your prize out in the mail later this week. Thanks to everyone who stopped by my blog during the hop!

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