finally, something to share!

I'm back! Finally! I have 2 good reasons for not blogging lately. Well, I could probably come up with a lot more, but the 2 biggies are -

1. I was sick again! This time with a MEGA cold. The kind that hits hard, then lingers on and on. I'm finally back to almost normal. Yay! It's so hard to even think when you've got a cold like that.

2. I've been busy designing for A Muse, nothing I can share yet, so sorry. We are working on Holiday 2007 designs. Can you believe it? Didn't we just have the holidays? I think so. It's always so weird to work on holidays so far in advance. I worked in Display for a major dept. store for many years and I was always so sick of Christmas decorations by the time Christmas actually came. It was all I could do to put a wreath on the door!

Anyway, I did want to share my 1st attempt at trying some of the techniques in Claudine's Hellmuth's book that I posted about recently. I did this on a 16" x 20" canvas paper. I used one of her painting techniques where I put saran wrap over wet paint to create a fun background. I incorporated a lot of hand drawn elements in the piece as well as collaged fabric and papers. You probably can't read the text, because it's so small. It says "a little birdie told me to sing". Not bad for my 1st try at this kind of thing. I can't wait to have some time to try more.

Next up on my agenda...sadly, tax prep!

Back from FL

I just got back from a week in FL with my daughter, where we went to visit my brother and his wife and of course, go to Disney World! The trip started out pretty rocky (when I got really sick!) on the 2nd plane flight of our journey across country. We stopped to change planes in Detroit, where it was 11 degrees and snowy. They de-iced the plane while we sat in it on the tarmac. The fumes where extremely toxic and soon after that I begin to feel very sick to my stomach. We arrived in FL and I was sick for almost 3 days. It may have been a coincidence and I just had a stomach virus, but whatever the reason, I'm still not 100% well. The good news is I lost weight! However, I wouldn't recommend this type of weight loss program to anyone! Yuck!

After I recovered enough to get out and do some things, we had a good time. Disney World was amazing, even though I didn't go on any of the roller coaster type rides. My daughter went with my brother and they had a blast! We also enjoyed going to the beach, playing tennis and of course, every young girls passion - shopping!

We are glad to be home again, although 75 and sunny is a lot nicer than 45 and rainy. I would have loved to bring home some sunshine with those Mickey Mouse ears!

another sneak peek!

Well, now that Valentine's Day is over...it's time to change the window at the A Muse retail shop. Here's a sneak peek at the props. For a final picture of it, check out Linda's blog in the next few days. We chose Funny bunny for the main image in the window, because he's so , well, funny! It's going to be adorable! I made pink polka dotted clouds, (which don't show up too well in the photo) and we'll have easter grass, baskets and plastic eggs and of course all our fab sample cards and products in there as well.

a new book!

I just received Claudine Hellmuth's collage book in the mail today! It's probably old news to many of you, but I only recently found out about her wonderful work when I was reading julirhrr's blog from the CHA show. I fell in love with Claudine's wonderful textures, color palettes and whimsical style. I really admire her line drawings over the patterns and textures. She makes it look so easy! The book is full of instructions on how to create a lot of the textures she uses and it's got TONS of examples of her work. It even has a list of the tools, paints, pens etc. that she uses. I can't wait to start incorporating some of her techniques into my own work. Who knows, I may even start making some scrapbook pages!

new coffee cards

I thought I would share with you all what I've been working on for the past few weeks. I added 4 new designs to my coffee card line. Most of my customers work for Starbucks and are always wanting cards to celebrate their coworkers anniversaries and birthdays, so I created 2 new designs for each occasion.

For those of you readers who are stampers or scrappers, these designs are very similar to digital scrap booking. I used Photoshop to create them. Some of the elements were hand drawn, inked, then scanned. Other elements were decorative papers that I scanned, then changed a bit in Photoshop. I had the most fun working on these designs!

a new toy!

I've been having soooo much fun with a new toy I got for Christmas. It's a Wacom Graphire pen tablet. It's so cool! All I did was install the software, plug it in to the computer and PRESTO!, I can draw right on to my screen. At 1st, I tried to do it freehand and just started trying to draw something, but it was really shaky looking, so I figured out that I needed to make a sketch, scan it, then increase the size, so I could draw just sections at a time. That's what I did with the swirly pattern in the "Nikki's Red Shoes" layout. So much fun! I can't wait to figure out more cool things to do with it and to get better at the technique. Anybody out there that has one of these and has any helpful tips, let me know! Until then, I'll be playing with it and sharing any insight I get from trial and err.

a sneak peek

I thought you all might like a sneak peek of the props I made for the window of the A Muse shop. I recreated 3 of our stamps on a large scale - Kissing Couple, Fence and Skywriter. This picture shows them in progress. I added color (red and pink) after the picture was taken. If you get a chance, come down to the shop and see the finished display. It turned out so fun! If you don't live around the Seattle area, I'll try and take a picture of it and post it in the next few days.

It feels good to be moving on after the holidays and working with fresh colors like pink! I'm also busy working on new card designs for my coffee line using a variety of blues, greens, oranges and of course pink! So fresh, so fun.