A Blog With No Name

This week’s challenge for the Hambo Hoedown (week number 68) was to use a sketch and this adorable digital stamp, “Artist Pig.”  Here’s my card for the challenge:

Hambo Hoedown Challenge 68 – Artist Pig

I got a new toy for myself for Mother’s Day…..a Sizzix embossing machine.  I’ve been envying all the beautiful embossed cards I’ve been seeing and now I can do some myself!

Thank you again to Hambo Stamps for all their adorable digital stamps!

This week at the Hambo Hoedown the challenge was to use a technique that I’ve always wanted to try but just never got around to doing ……paper piercing!

Last week was kind of crazy!  I had all three of my beautiful daughters home so I didn’t get around to doing the challenge.  Therefore I missed out on the cute digital image they gave away, so I used one from a few weeks back – “Bailey Flower.”  Here’s what I came up with!

Hambo Stamps Challenge Week 68 – Paper Piercing – featuring “Bailey Flower”

I am working on turning daughter #2’s bedroom into my guest room/craft room, and I had a stack of Paper Crafts magazines and scrapbooking books that I was going to put on eBay.  I happened to be leafing through one of the books, “A Passion for Paper”, and saw this paper piercing pattern in there.  It was a little time consuming, but totally worth it!

Thanks again to the Bacon Bits and the great people at Hambo Stamps for all the cute digital stamps!

The few, the proud….the Moms.  God bless every single one, especially mine, considering the headaches and heartaches I must have caused her through the years!  I love you, Mom!

Every mom deserves flowers, and flowers are what the Hambo Hoedown challenge is all about this week!  (Don’t you love the slick way I segued into that?)  This week’s image is the adorable “CATCHING BUTTERFLIES” and our job was to incorporate flowers into our cards.  Here’s my “Clean and Simple” card.

Hambo Hoedown Challenge #65 – “Chasing Butterflies”

If this looks familiar, it’s because I CASEd it from the very talented Beverly, who is a “Bacon Bit”…….one of the design team at Hambo Stamps.  I saw her card and just really, really liked it, so I stole it.  Imitation is the finest form of flattery, right?  Thanks to Beverly for the inspiration, and take a look at her wonderful blog…..http://beestamper.blogspot.com.

My youngest, the Art School Daughter, bought me these lovely colorful pens for Mother’s Day.  Aren’t they beautiful?

Pretty pretty colors

My three daughters are all beautiful, talented, and smart.  I am so blessed that they made me their Mom!  Happy Mother’s day once again to everyone!

The few, the proud….the Moms.  God bless every single one, especially mine, considering the headaches and heartaches I must have caused her through the years!  I love you, Mom!

Every mom deserves flowers, and flowers are what the Hambo Hoedown challenge is all about this week!  (Don’t you love the slick way I segued into that?)  This week’s image is the adorable “CATCHING BUTTERFLIES” and our job was to incorporate flowers into our cards.  Here’s my “Clean and Simple” card.

If this looks familiar, it’s because I CASEd it from the very talented Beverly, who is a “Bacon Bit”…….one of the design team at Hambo Stamps.  I saw her card and just really, really liked it, so I stole it.  Imitation is the finest form of flattery, right?  Thanks to Beverly for the inspiration, and take a look at her wonderful blog…..http://beestamper.blogspot.com.

I am totally enjoying dancing at the Hambo Hoedown!
Come join us as we use the adorable Hambo Stamps digital stamps to make the cutest cards ever!

I never seem to find time to work on my challenge card until the very.  last.  minute.  Same thing happened this week…..I finished my card at about 8 o’clock on Sunday night.  I have really enjoyed checking back at the Hambo Hoedown blog every day or two and getting inspired by the creative and talented artists who manage to get their cards done and linked before the very last minute.

This week’s challenge:  Using the sweet digi “Bailey Flower”, create a card using the hot color combo for 2012:  hot pink, orange, and purple!  Here’s my card.

Hambo Challenge 64 – Bailey Flower

I’m actually not unhappy with the way my card turned out!  I am trying to learn ways to make CAS (clean and simple) cards that don’t look, well, simple.  I tried to up the ante a little bit by using ink around the edges of my card stock oval mats, and by adding a little bit of texture with the ribbed purple card stock.  Note to self for next time:  add a little bit of white matting to make the colors “pop” against each other!

I colored Bailey with Prismacolors.  Knowing that I was going to be pressed for time, I picked up a $1 sheet of flower stickers at Wal-mart in the right colors Friday.  Everything else is random scraps from my scrap box.

I want to direct some love to a fellow Hambo Hoedowner who is very talented, and from whom I won a beautiful card!  Check out “Patacake Pages” at http://patacakespages.blogspot.com.  Pat’s a real professional with a beautiful blog, and I thank her for being so generous with her artwork!  She also has great music on her blog.

This coming week marks a lot of personal changes for my family.  Art School Daughter is coming home for the summer, and she and I are planning to hunker down and do some major cleaning, decluttering, and yard sale-ing.  Psychology Student Daughter is moving into her very first grown-up apartment, so dh and I will be moving furniture all day Tuesday.  This is bittersweet for me as  a parent:  one the one hand, I’m sad that she’ll probably not be coming home to live, but happy that I’ll be turning her room into my guest room/craft room. Later on this month, Music School Daughter has some important audition and interviews, so we would all appreciate prayers and good vibes throughout the month of May!

Thanks again to Hambo Stamps for the free digis and the challenges.
Join in the Hambo Hoedown with us!

In celebration of Earth Day, the Hambo Hoedown challenge this week was to use something recycled in a card.  The cute digital image they gave us this week as a prize for joining the challenge of the week before is an adorable billy goat with three cute sentiments.  Here’s my card.

Hambo Hoedown 63 - Recycled Card using "Goat" Digi by Hambo Stamps

I always feel like such a slacker because my papers and embellies and such are all mixed up and out of their original packages, so I can’t credit the designers.  I know the patterned paper was in one of the dollar bins at Target — you know, for a buck they have some pretty great stuff!  I painted Hambo’s “Goat” digital image with my new Crayola watercolors (hey, big spender!).  I’m pretty sure the flower came from a kit my kids bought years ago to make leis for a Hawaiin luau!  So you could say that is recycled, as well.  But my big score for the week was…….

99 Cent RickRack!

Check it out!  Here’s the rick rack I used on my card.  I went to visit my Art School Daughter and she took me to the most awesome thrift store in the world, where I got all this luscious rick rack for only 99 cents!  I’ll plug them because they are so cool:  Fan Thrift, if you’re ever in Richmond, Virginia.  You have to go there, and take money.  They have everything you need.

And since I’m always talking about Art School Daughter, and since we’re talking about recycling, here’s a treat:

Art School Daughter models recycled dress made out of shoes at VCUArts Eco-Fashion show.

This is one of my beautiful daughters, who is a Graphic Design major at VCUArts.  They had an Eco-Fashion show on Earth Day, and she modeled this dress which she designed and made completely out of recycled materials….in this case, shoes and shoelaces!  She won second prize!  So creative.

Thanks again to Hambo Stamps for their cute and creative stamps and digital designs!  Card makers, you have to go to their site and look at their great stuff!

Remember that old song by Steely Dan?  I always liked that band because they were from Virginia, same as me.  I grew up in Williamsburg and they mentioned our local college, William and Mary, in “My Old School.”  I guess that really dates me, huh?

This week’s challenge at the Hambo Hoedown features an adorable digital stamp called “Candles.”  And these are no ordinary candles….this is a veritable PARADE of candles, with running shoes on!  The challenge was to include FOUR of something on our card, because there are four candles.  Here’s my card.

Oh how the years run by!

My original idea was to have four squares of patterned paper underneath the candles.   I really like my pretty yellow cardstock, and the way I alternated the directions of the stripes in the patterned paper.  But I am unhappy with the way the striped squares don’t stand out against the light colored base cardstock.  I wish I had matted each square, or even used a dark card stock for the base.  But it is what it is, and since the squares are not as defined as I like, I added four rhinestone stickers over the sentiment.  So you could say I doubled the challenge for double the fun!

My last couple of cards, I have colored the digital stamps with art school daughter’s Prismacolors, because she took her pretty watercolors with her.  This week I felt like I deserved a treat, so I bought my own pretty watercolors and some teeny tiny little paintbrushes.  I need some practice with those bad boys, though, as this effort is just  a bit more smeary than I had intended.

As always, I thank the creative folks at Hambo Stamps for their adorable artwork.  No matter how busy I am I love to try to participate in the Hambo Hoedown Challenge, because their digital stamps are far and away the cutest ones I have ever seen!  Head over there and give them some love, and tell them I sent you!

This week’s challenge for the Hambo Hoedown was to use this adorable digital stamp,  aptly titled “Nerd”,  and to make a card using a plaid or multiple patterned papers.

I found this pretty blue and purple plaid in my DCWV tablet of self-stick papers and thought it paired perfectly with the blue textured cardstock and the nubby fibers I won recently from a Listia auction.  I usually do CAS (clean and simple) cards with these adorable Hambo images, because I really want the sweet characters to take center stage!

Once again I used my art school daughter’s Prismacolors.  I really miss the palette of beautiful watercolors I used to borrow from her, but she took them with her to art school!  I guess I’m going to have to break down and buy a set of my very own 8-).

I rarely invest in digital images or stamps, but I am sooooo impressed with the quality and originality of the designs from Hambo Stamps.  You can get some of their awesome little characters for free if you play along with the Hambo Hoedown challenge.  Their design team is awesome and I never fail to be inspired by their beautiful work.  Check out the Hambo Hoedown!

http://hambochallenges.blogspot.com/

It’s been a while since I posted anything in my Blog With No Name!  Things have been….well…..interesting for me and very, very busy.  But now I’m ready to get back into the Hambo Hoedown and get myself more of the adorable digital stamps that they are creating over there!

Here is the card for the first challenge of April, which was to create a card with an extra fold.

This is a birthday card I created for Aldo, the child my family sponsors through Compassion International.

I’m not exactly sure what an “extra fold” is in official card-making parlance, but in this case I made a card-within-a-card.  Here’s what’s hiding underneath the Party Elephant, if you lift the flap.

Here's the little birdie hiding under the Party Elephant!

I used a hodgepodge of free or cheap supplies to make this card.  The “Happy Birthday” sentiment and the little bird are stickers that I got at the Dollar General Store for a quarter.  The card stock is from a box of goodies I won on an auction on Listia.  And Hambo’s “Party Elephant” is colored with the Prismacolors I stol……I mean borrowed….from my art school daughter. 😎

Check out the Hambo Hoedown challenge to see some beautiful cards that are so much better than mine!!

http://hambochallenges.blogspot.com/

Here I am again at the Very Last Minute to upload the card I made for the Hambo Hoedown Challenge!

Top O' the Mornin' To Ya!

The challenge was to use the adorable St. Pat Hamster digital stamp image and to incorporate lots of GOLD!

This turned out to be quite a challenge indeed.  I only could find one little piece of gold paper in my stash, from who knows where.  I put it in my Cricut and lo and behold, I discovered to my delight that it was sticker paper!  So I didn’t have to worry about using adhesive to put on the circle embellishment that goes up the side of the card.

The actual GOLD in the pot of gold turned out to be a bit more challenging!  I tried three — count ’em — three gold gel pens and they were all either dried out or just plain refused to work for me.  I couldn’t find my gold glitter anywhere, or paint, or anything.  Finally I asked my artist daughter and she came up with a metallic gold Prismacolor pencil, which I used for the gold.

This card needs a sentiment.  Maybe “Lucky to be your Friend?”

Haven’t had time to blog, as my College Girl is home on Spring Break and I’ve been catching up with her.  Promise I will catch up soon!  I know I still haven’t sent out my blog candy, but there’s always……tomorrow!   (Don’t worry.  I’m not going to sing.)

Y'all Come Back Now, Y'Hear?