This used to be the track light in our kitchen. Once, it had 4 lights on it, but light number 4 gave up the ghost and just wouldn’t work, no matter how many new lightbulbs we got for it. Light #3 was in about the same place at the end of December, and we decided that the fixture just didn’t meet our needs any more. To work in the kitchen and have enough light you had to turn on that fixture, the living room light, the light over the sink, and the light over the stove. Not so you could see the sink or the stove, but so there would be enough light to see the counter properly.

At the very end of December we went down to Home Depot and bought this for ourselves:

There are more of them, there’s a wider span, they’re brighter, and the white glass shades help it give off a great light. Plus, it looks a lot nicer!

P is a lighting technician and designer, so a lot of thought went in to exactly which light would point where. Part of the problem was that that fixture is centred over the space between the island and the counter, not the counter itself. That meant that when you stand at the island (kneading bread/icing cupcakes/chopping veg) the light was coming from behind you and casting a nice head-and-shoulders-shaped shadow on your dough/icing/knife. Not ideal. With the length of this track, we had room to point the light you see in the far right of the photo at the left side of the island as you see it, and the far left left at the right side of the island. Now when I stand at the island, the light is coming from such an angle that I don’t cast a shadow on it. We also put a light in the centre of the track and pointed that directly as the island, but with the fill from the two angled lights, my shadow isn’t a problem.

Applying lighting design at home!

We took our pre-ceremony wedding photos in a park very near our house. This park is Central Memorial Park, and every year there is a Remembrance Day ceremony there.

I want with every cell in me to go to one of these services one day, but due to where it falls in the season, I haven’t had Remembrance Day off from work in the 5 years we’ve lived here. And I’ve needed to be at work at 11am for the past 5 Remembrance Days too. Some years someone will take the lead and we’ll have a moment of silence. Sometimes not everyone in the building gets the message, and someone will start up the bandsaw in the shop while we’re standing onstage remembering, lest-we-forgetting. And even if we get a full minute of silence, we immediately get back to our work of make-believe. Some peoples jobs are saving this country, and mine involves dressing people up in funny clothes and making sure hijinks ensue.

There’s just something about this day that makes me tear up at the first film I see of veterans standing (or sitting) tall at memorials, and the trumpeters never fail to make me bawl. It’s especially poignant to me because of my interest in WW II, and the very real fact that soon there will not be any veterans left from that war. I realize that we have many other veterans to be proud of, but WW II holds a special place in me. My two grandfathers were in Afghanistan and Egypt during WW II.

I bought a new stamp set yesterday, this lemon set from Flourishes. I’ve been eyeing all their sets online, and find a few at a scrapbook store in town (Scrapbook Pantry). I think I want all their stamps now! The designs are beautiful, I especially love all the botanicals. I coloured up the lemons on the branch immediately after getting home, and made up a little birthday card for Paper Garden Projects.

I also made another card using the same stamp set, but only taking 15 minutes to make it. I’m selling cards at a craft fair on Saturday, so I need to make a batch or two of quick cards!

Nice and simple, just a piece of cardstock, and 4 different stamps from the set. I went very lemon-y with my purchases yesterday, I bought the lemon stamp set, then decided I needed a yellow inkpad, a yellow inkpad, a yellow glitter pen, and two more yellow Copic markers!

The green in the leaves also makes my main card eligible for Copic Creations’ Green challenge!

Cute card Thursday’s challenge this week is for ‘new’. For this card, I used my new favourite technique of making a paper ‘quilt’ out of my scraps, and I used YR04 for Tilda’s orange dress and kerchief, which is one of my newest Copic markers.

The deckle-edged card base is one of the very oldest crafty things I have in the house – I went through all my craft supplies a while ago, seeing what I could steal for cardmaking, and I remember making cards with these bases in the house I grew up in. We moved from there in 1999! The matching envelopes had sealed themselves just, they probably got damp in some storage space sometime between then and now.

Generally, my job is 6 days a week. That’s a lot, and doesn’t leave me with nearly as much crafting time as I want. Length of work day changes in phases, during rehearsals it’s almost like office hours: 9am-6pm. When we’re teching a show (working on stage, adding in lights and sound, set and costumes) it’s 12-hour days that end at midnight. When the show is running is my most productive time, craft-wise. When work starts at 6pm, there’s lots of crafty time during the day! 8 shows a week also usually works out to about 32 hours of work, which is a nice rest after some of the 60 hour weeks. Working in theatre is not the lazy job most people think it is!

I’m in the rehearsal phase right now, which means I usually have about one project in me when I get home from work. Between knitting, stamping, baking, and reading I have lots to choose from, and not enough time to do everything I wanted. Tonight, I managed two tasks – baking banana bread and rearranging our books and bookcases. It doesn’t help that today is day #8 of 9 straight work days. Our schedule got messed up because of the holidays.

So, no projects, but there is an announcement! The Daily Marker has some great blog candy up for grabs. Go over and have a look – it is all stuff from Hero Arts’ new release, and looks wonderful.

Last night I had to clean up my craft desk (and my ‘unofficial storage space’, the futon beside my desk) because my parents are coming for Christmas. I thought I’d stick a podcast on in the background to keep me amused while sorting everything out. I noticed that I had a new episode of Scraptime in iTunes so I turned that on. And then I got out the papers and made more mess!

The episode I watched was #446 – Holiday Packaging.

I had just decided earlier in the day to give a couple of my co-workers some homemade jam for Christmas. I was just going to bring in the jars, but when I saw this project, I knew it would fit my 125mL jam jars!

I used up some Christmas paper, which is good – it’s just going to hang around until next year if I don’t!

I modified the boxes a little, not by size, although I thought about it. When putting the top piece on, I used Scor-Tape to adhere the back side of that piece to the back of the box. Then I punched holes in the front flap, then the front of the box, using the first set of holes as a guide (PS: I really want a Crop-a-dile. I got to use one at my last cardmaking class, and I love it!)

I made that modification because the jam jars are just a little too big for the box, so they made the sides bow out, and I felt this way would put less pressure on the box. The picture above shows how I threaded the ribbon through the holes. I also made that top piece a little bigger than recommended. I think the red/green box was 3″ wide, and the swirly one was 4″. I like the 4″ width best.

I pulled the two Kitchen Tildas out of my bowl of stamped, coloured, and cut out Magnolia stamps. They don’t particularly match, but they don’t clash like crazy either, I think. Especially since I used blue ribbon on the box with the blue Tilda.

I think I am going to use this box pattern A LOT. I can’t wait to try re-sizing it too!

Here’s another card with that gorgeous Impression Obsession mitten stamp:

Simple mittens coloured with Copics, then mounted on mica-flecked handmade paper. I love the simplicity of this card. And I LOVE this stamp. I went over the snowflakes on this one with white opaque pen.

I have a pair of these mittens (in green) on the front of what I’m calling my ‘idea book’. Really, it’s where I stick my practice colouring pieces, and eventually any other inspiring things or ideas written down. I’m excited to add to the cover over time, until the entire black cardboard cover has disappeared.

I just want to say that I have a ‘thing’ about mittens. I just checked my Ravelry queue, and I have 16 mitten patterns in line.

OK, so there are two fingerless mitt patterns, and one glove pattern in that mosaic, but you get the idea! I either want to make the cupcake mittens, or the tree mittens next, I’m not certain yet. First though, I need to finish these:

The one pictured is too small. I have up to the thumb of a new, larger one.

Last night a fell asleep picturing a mitten display – a board that hangs on the wall, with clothespegs or something to hang up all my mittens – one for each day of the week! If I want to see that though, I’m going to have to get knitting!

Since I finished my shawl, and the baby sweater, it was time to find a new project to take to work. Can’t be without knitting at work, after all.

I decided to be a good little knitter and pick up something that has been languishing. I had a few choices (oops…) but I ended up picking my toe socks back up!

This is the one that is done. I finished it back in July. I even knit the big toe for sock #2 before Sock Summit. I brought these socks to the freakin’ SOCK. SUMMIT. and didn’t work on them. I knit the first few rows of the 4-toes section in the airport, and at some point at the Summit I needed the needles, so I put the proto-toe on to waste yarn, and stuck it back in the project bag. That was the state I found them in at work a few nights ago.

Now, sock #2 is just at the point where I’m going to switch from blue to the variegated for the bulk of the foot. Then it will be perfect work knitting: work knitting needs to be able to be done in the dark.

I still need to weave the ends in on this sock, and duplicate stitch the dimple into the top of the heart. I had so many yarn ends doing that intarsia at the top, I decided that coming back later would be much easier for those 4 stitches.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that short-row heels are not my favourite for socks. I end up with wrinkles opposite the heel, where my foot meets my leg, and that doesn’t happen so much with other heels.

My photography will be getting better (well, at least when I’m home in daylight, which is rare) because my new light reflector has arrived. And by ‘reflector’ I mean the coating of shiny white snow on my balcony. The balcony doors provide most of the light for my photos.

I received a parcel today that was full of stamp-y goodies. I almost doubled (oops…) my copic collection, and I got a couple cute stamps. I opened the package, and immediately stamped 3 of this image, and coloured them all in in different colourways.

It’s a stamp by Impression Obsession, and I bought it from Paper Garden Projects. There’s another gorgeous one I wanted (a snowman mug full of hot chocolate) but it was sold out. I had so much fun colouring this image! I have another pair of mittens in green, and another purple with grey cuffs just waiting to be made into something.

You can also see I’ve used one of my newest tools on this card – the Cuttlebug. This card was sitting on my desk, already inked blue, while I was colouring mittens. I didn’t realise it matched the blue mittens until later.

This was a test to see what would happen if I put the front of a card in an embossing folder, and left the back outside it, under the folder. It worked! Only the front embossed, which is what I wanted.

This coloured, stamped image makes this card perfect for Caardvarks’ Color It! Challenge.

A Christmas cards, in blues. With a touch of purple. And the sketch from Saturday Sketch #77.

I got to use my new Martha Stewart icicle punch on this card – that made me very happy. I just wish I hadn’t missed the ‘drippy goo’ border punch at Halloween; I think you could make a really cool card where one fades in to the other, like the ice is melting.

I also used an MS snowflake punch to layer with the felt snowflakes I used. The felt flakes are Hero Arts, as is the stamp. I put those glitter swirls on with a glitter pen and MS ‘carrara marble’ glitter – this glitter is also on the icicles, which were punched out of already glittery paper. Good thing Creatalicious Challenge #4 is Snowflakes and Glitter!

I feel like I’m getting better with my Copics, but am feeling limited in my colour choices. I coloured her cheeks but not her whole face because I don’t like the way that colour looks on her whole face. I have no other pale pinks to blend it with, so faces currently look a little flat around here. I shade other colours with grey if I don’t have more than one (like purple – just one purple marker!) but with that pinky colour grey just looks like stubble, no matter how much I blend.

I put this card together quickly, just to remind myself that I can make cards in a matter of minutes, when I want. Most of the time I love slowly piecing a card together. The ‘Joy’ and Holly & Berries are also Hero Arts felt shapes.

I’ve been having a lot of fun making Christmas cards in different colour schemes than the usual red and green. This one is one of my favourites so far:

I took what really looked like a very summery madras plaid-y paper, and used it for the background, then stamped my images on kraft cardstock (perfect for the Daring Cardmakers challenge!). The stamps are Stampendous Snowy Short Stacks, and are great because you get bodies, heads, and feet and get to make your own characters. I love stamps that let you build stuff.

I wanted to keep the images simple, to contrast with the loud paper and shiny ribbon (perfect for Allsorts’ Bring Out Your Bling challenge), so I stamped in black, and picked and chose which bits I’d highlight. I bought some Martha Stewart flocking powder at Michaels the other day, I thought it was the perfect time to try it. I also used yellow stickles on the penguin’s feet, and an R02 Copic for the snowman’s nose.

The sketch is from Our Creative Corner, although I think I might be just too late this week.

Materials:
Cardstock: DCWV, Recollections kraft
Stamps: Stampendous
Ribbon: Michaels brand
Other: Making Memories rub-on, Martha Stewart Flock, Distress Stickles, Copic R02.

This is a card I think I could easily produce many of, at least until I run out of little felt snowflakes!

The challenge at Colour Create (#31) was Blue, Silver, and White, with an optional theme of Winter and Glitter. The silver cardstock is metallic, and I wanted to keep this card simple, so that’s all the glitter I have on it.

Materials:
Cardstock: Michaels
Stamp: Inkadinkado
Other: Hero Arts felt snowflakes, vintage lace, button brads, white embossing powder.

From winter, I decided I wanted to think about spring. The current Penny Black challenge is to make a card inspired by a song title or song lyrics. I love Penny Black’s hedgehogs, so I knew I had to use one of the hedgehog stamps – the latest set of theirs that I’ve bought was ‘Garden Friends’, a very springy set.

This card is inspired by the song San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair).

I was obviously thinking ‘hippie!’ so I brought out the paisley paper, and some flower rub-ons that conveniently matched. I wanted to get some tie-dye in there too, so I took some white seam binding (from that same big lot that brought me the lace on the card above) and ‘tie-dyed’ with my Copic markers. I blobbed colours on the white binding (Y02, B02, V15, G12) randomly, then scribbled my blender pen all over the whole thing. That made the colours really bleed together.

Then on went the little guy with flowers in his hair.

Materials:
Cardstock: Bazzil
Paper: Heidi Grace Designs
Stamp: Penny Black
Other: Daisy Bucket Rub-ons, copic markers, vintage seam binding.

Once again, I tried to combine all sorts of challenges into one card. It’s fun, because that way I have a layout, maybe a colour combo or a theme all dictated for me. I find it easier to have jumping-off points like that, rather than just looking at a stack of paper and having no idea where to start.

This layout is from CPS Card Sketch 40, and I made sure to use stripey paper to qualify for Papertake Weekly ‘Spots & Stripes’.

The challenge at the Hero Arts blog was to make a holiday card with non-traditional colours. I took my inspiration from the paper I used for the background and the snowman’s jacket – citrusy green with pink (and orange, but that’s only in the paper). I stamped the snowman with green ink on the patterned paper, and black ink on white card, and the dotted card. My black inkpad is wimpy, so I ended up going over the lines with a fine-tip Sharpie. I also coloured in the pom-pom on the hat with pink Sharpie, before covering it with Stickles.

I cut a circle from some green Core’dinations Whitewash collection paper, then crumpled it up and sanded the crumply bits. I stamped the sentiment in pink  after gluing everything down. I think I kept enough green on the card to qualify for the ABC challenge G is for Green.

When the card was done, I made a quick one out of the scraps:

That’s the same Swiss dot cardstock, but with pink ink sponged all over it. It was then that I realised I have the perfect punch to go with the swirly paper!

Supplies used:

Cardstock: Bazzil, DCWV, Core’dinations
Stamps: Hero Arts
Ink: Brilliance pink, Colorbox green, Autumn Leaves black
Punch: Martha Stewart
Others: Making Memories button brads, Stickles glitter glue, Sharpies

The Penny Black Saturday Challenge #73 was to create a white-on-white card. You could have colour on your image, but nowhere else.

I really wanted to try this, but I’m not a very good colour-er, nor do I have the tools (but I’m taking a Copic class tomorrow and I’m SO. EXCITED.), so I thought I’d take the challenge one step further, and have all white, with just one colour for stamp ink.

I got out all my papers, and pulled out all the white I have. My ‘Christmas Mint’ pack had this great swirly cardstock – that became my card bases.

I used a couple border punches to get some texture, and even found a little bit of white lace and some leaves, in my old crafty bin. I used gold ink on the Penny Black stamp for my colour. I used the sketch at Sweet Stop Sketches (#28) for the layout.

This card even has an image on it, but it’s embossed in white on white cardstock, so it is subtle. The image squares are on 3-D adhesive, and the red-stamped sentiment has 4 little pearls on it. I stuck with one border punch on this card, and did 3 layers. This is my newest punch purchase (Martha Stewart, of course. I want all the ones she does!) so it fits in with the Daring Cardmakers challenge to use your newest punch purchase. I also bought a MS button punch at the same time, I’ll have to make some cards with that soon!

I stamped the big image from the Penny Black set I have – a mouse decorating a tree with a cat at the top. I cut out the cat and the mouse. You can see them better in this photo.

This sketch is from Sketch Saturday #75.

For both cards:
Cardstock: SEI Christmas Mint ‘Merangue’, Bazill (dotted), Office Depot (white)
Stamps: Penny Black
Punches: Martha Stewart
Inks: ColorBox

Both these cards also qualify for Colour Create’s ‘All White’ challenge #30 as well!