Ride 'Em Cowboy!

I wasn't even born when Clint Eastwood starred in For a Few Dollars More - I saw it when I was an impressionable pre-teen and I fell in love with the Man with no name.  So, when Gingersnap Creations posted their Chestnut Theme - Cowboys and Cowgirls, I knew I had to include my first movie star crush. 

Say hi to the sexiest cowboy ever.  Swoon.

I distressed a black and white photo that I grabbed off the web and put it behind a rolled opening.  I colored a few chipboard stars and highlighted them, as well as the background paper, with a black gel pen.  I hand folded the rosette and added the twine.  I found a sheriff's badge in my charm drawer and I was done.

As always, thanks so much for visiting!

The Mark of the Beast

I'm totally slipping in under the wire over at Haunted Design House - this week their challenge is The Mark of the Beast.   It just so happens that I'm a total horror movie freak - and one of my top 5 favorite movies is The Omen.  So here is my homage to my favorite little antichrist - Damien Thorn.

The requirement was to use six of something three times; I did six flowers, 6 little crosses and Damien has six letters.  I printed out a publicity still from the movie, covered it with scratched acetate that I stamped with the number 6 and added a frame.  I was going to do a straight forward gloom/doom sorta thing but the background of Damien's picture seems so bright and cheery with the blue and green and I couldn't resist making the flowers to match.   Hey, just because you're the antichrist, it doesn't mean that can't enjoy a little scrapbooking!

As always, thanks for looking!

Flowers, Flowers

I love making flowers for my cards - a few years ago, I purchased a 500 flower pack from Oriental Trading Company.  It had 3 shapes, in 4 colors. I adore making these little flowers:

The small bud is one layer, the larger flower is 5 layers and the dual color flower is 4 layers plus 1 layer.

Here's the card:

I really love using the palette stamps for my backgrounds, particularly when I'm stamping on textured card stock.  I've also found that I get the best image when I layer color if I do a combination of inks - in this case, I used two Memento dye inks for the background with Brilliance pigment ink for the flourish.   I spritzed the stamp with water before I stamped on my paper.  You can see the faded water droplets on the dye portion; the Brilliance didn't react at all. 

Enjoy!

Red and Gold Gingersnap Creations Challenge

Where has the time gone? It's been almost three weeks since my last post.   Yikes!  In my defense, I got my first ever stamp order from Papertrey Ink, and for me, new stamps equals 0 creations because I spend all my time touching and ooohing and fondling and aaahing and rearranging all my other stamp sets and very little time actually stamping.

But! I did manage to get photos of this this beastie.  Here's my Red & Gold color challenge for Gingersnap Creations.  I used several papers/labels that I purchased from Collage Stuff (definitely check out her page - she has some cool swaps going on).  

I painted a slide mailer gold and layered my Asian papers, added a few punched flowers, a charm and some gold embossing powder.  The spine is covered in red velvet ribbon (which you handily can't see) and accented with a takeout chopstick from a local eatery.  I simply cut it down to size with my husband's bolt cutters and then sanded the end until I was happy.  Distress ink aged it nicely and I wrapped it in some gold cord.  I had a rough time getting it to stick to the spine so I ended up having to use hot glue.    

Inside are some more papers that I accented with Asian labels, a crackle stamp, clear embossing powder, more distress ink and some plastic slides.  The labels were glossy and didn't really take the distressing ink that way I would have liked.  I should have distressed first and then embossed.

I'm unsuprisingly incapable of not adding black to red, so I snuck in some black fibers and ivory beads with my gold and red tassels.  

As always, thanks for stopping by and enjoy!