I'm totally out of cream or milk for my coffee. eeep!

Its almost February. HOo raaa! I am so over January. That doesn't sound very good does it? Well I just spent so much of it sick and well.. not a whole lot panned out like I would have liked. I'm really hoping that February is more my kinda month. I didn't even get a date day in this month. Boo hiss! I love our days we get a babysitter and go out and do whatever for the day.

I didn't get as much done art wise as I would have liked. Saturday I didn't post anything for UPC acrylic. I was just way too sick. I did 4 weeks of it in Jan, I figured thats good. Its not supposed to be such a stick to the rules kinda thing anyways.

I did get my digital calendar done for this month. I will be doing these monthly, just like I did last year. Here's the one for this month.






























I love how it turned out. I'm also twittering now sometimes if anyone wants to follow me or if you do, leave me a link or your twitter name. I'm kinda getting into now. (this is a surprise even to me) lol

Today I need to get a few groceries, return some library books, and try not to pass out. I still don't have all my strength back. And my eyeball still is bothering me. It looks better, not sure what that is. I am hoping it gets better soon. My eyes and teeth are my two most important body parts!! (well.. my hands too, but still.)

Thanks for stopping by!

Off to get a drink and chew on ice ( I know know, its bad for me)

1. Ceiling Lanterns, 2. semi-recent tiny painting, 3. Tag door hanger, 4. installation project #2, 5. Twenty quotes, AEZine challenge #20, 6. Grumpy kitty pouch, 7. Pencil Vs Camera - 26, 8. Wickedly Stupendous, 9. roar

Created with fd's Flickr Toys

I am still sickly. I made it to the doctor today with boys in tow. Jealous.. I know you are! Wait till you hear why I went. Well.. I would have just road out the flu. I mean I'm on day five. But for whatever reason my right eye has swollen up and is red for the last 3 days. It wasn't getting better. Then my throat started hurting yesterday. So I looked into my throat....yeah... white splotches everywhere.

I have the remainder of the flu, strep throat and pink eye (conjunctivitis a technical term)
WHO HAS that all at once???

Overall now that I have eye drops, antibiotic pills, and the real deal advil I feel a bit better. Luckily it looks as Logan only has the flu still. He's on day 3 of being home. He's not going tomorrow either. He's still contagious and has a fever.

Once I'm better I think I want to start on making some small handmade pendants for me. I know where did this come from? I don't know. Just kinda feeling it. Maybe something with clay/watercolor/fabric. I don't know! Something. I've always wanted to learn to solder metal too.

I need to get to the post office to send out some stamps overseas. I'm hoping to get the strength! Wish me luck.

Thanks for stopping by.

I'm not answering my door. I know you are just trying to sell me something.

I'm still ill. Very very sick. Like even considering getting the flu shot next year that I'm so against just because I'M DYING!! Today is the first day I can kinda function. It isn't pretty. The pug foster didn't pan out. The lady decided to keep her pug. I'll be waiting a bit longer to get a foster pug. Which I guess is a good thing right at the moment, because I'm sick as a dog. (haha I totally meant that pun. I must be feeling better)

I just wanted to share a layout I did for after five designs so I could finally get my gift certicate from them to buy stuff. If you do so many layouts you get stamps on your card. Then when you fill up your card you get a 10 gift card to the store. Pretty cool. I've needed to do one layout for like 5 mths now. lol

Here it is..































Everything is from Afterfive design kits. Mostly Twilight kits, Kasia Designs, Melancholy collab, and creation 23 collab.

UPC Acylics week 4

I'm sick now. Argh! I feel horrible. I feel like we have the constant sickness around here. Its insane.

Anyways here's my art journal page for this week using acrylic paint.




















I drew the eye on the white page, then I collaged some pictures on the page and paper. Then I used acrylic paint to use around the outsides. Then I added some glimmer mist and paint droppings. Last I masked Tim Holtz mask alphas and used distress ink to ink over them to make the hope show through.

Hope you are all well and getting tons of creative ventures done this weekend!

I need to drink a 2 liter of coke zero before tomorrow morning. Logan needs a 2 liter for school. urgh!

I'm starting a new chapter in my life soon. Well I guess its more like a paragraph. haha I'm going to be a foster mom for a pug! Yes I put in my application online, had a home check and I'm approved! I even got an email that there is a pug who is need of a home soon. I'm hoping in the next week or so to possibly get him here. Yeah!

I'm so excited to take care of the little guy. I'm sure he'll be smothered with love by the boys and me. I'm also glad to have something to join in and help with. I'll be taking him to meet the pug days when we bring the pugs to local places for people to see them and possibly adopt them.

It seems the sicknesses are slowly weaning away at our house, though I've felt a little off the last few days. I did get a few art journal pages done I wanted to share.


















This one was done with a hole punch, white acrylic paint and a black pen and colored pencils. I added a few highlights with copic markers.




















This one I just wish I had used a regular pen to journal with instead of the black marker.

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On another note I'm totally bummed that now Caardvarks and 2S4U are no longer. I really loved following and playing along on their blogs.

Well tomorrow Logan has a half day at school. I'll be getting in some gym time and thats about it. Tomorrow the new jinglebelles challenge will be up! I'm in a card making type of mood. That will be good.

book check

I made and received my book from inkubook.com with my digital calendar pages I made for 2010. I couldn't be more thrilled with it. Its a hard cover book 8x8 that has 20 pages in it. Since I was a little short only having 12 digital calendar pages, I made some mosaic pages with projects I made through out the year. I also designed the front and back cover.

I can't wait to make one for 2011 also. I plan on making these every year I can. I love it.

Thanks for stopping by!

Spidey sense got lost somewhere

Another digi layout, I couldn't resist. Little Leo is sick again. I think he has some sort of ear infection that just won't go away. I'm hoping this is just a cold, not another ear infection. At this point though its not looking great. Have you ever heard of a 3 year old suddenly having trouble with ear infections when his first 3 years he had maybe 2 ear infections in his life?? Now I can't get rid of this one since early/mid December. The antibiotics seem to subdue the symptoms, then boom its back. I'm worried ear tubes are in his future and that does not make me happy at all.

I wanted to try to catch up with my scrapbook pages for this last years photos. Here's the sketch from Sketchy Thursdays..



















Here is my digital layout I made:





























Today I was going to start full fledged potty training camp with Leo, but since he's sick it'll have to wait. Wish me luck his cold/ear infection/sickness goes away soon!

jinglebelles upc/combo!

I'm doing UPC one day early this week. I had a collaboration challenge with jinglebelles card challenge blog. I'm still working with acrylic this month for UPC and so I made this card...





























With my card I took an old Basic Grey chipboard snowflake. I put all different color acrylic paints on my palette and painted them all together while wet and blended them at the edges. I then let it dry. I then stamped it with some Tim Holtz snowflake stamps in Blk Stayzon ink. I then added little dots of white like snow. After that dried I added the Cosmo Cricket snowman rub on.

On the background I used some white Basic Grey cardstock. I spritzed it with some Tattered angels misters. Mounted it on red cardstock and used the same Tim Holtz snowflake stamp for stamping. More white acrylic dots added. Then I added the ribbons, stamped Tim Holtz Merry Christmas sentiment and buttons. Very excited that many of you enjoying making Christmas cards like I am for jinglebelles challenges. UPC group I have started makes using your art crafts for the whole month on different crafts a goal. Please come check out my blog of weekly projects I've done with the medium or UPC's flickr group.

I hope you will all join along and do a card with acrylic paint. Use Practice Create!!

Thanks for stopping by!

Why am I tired when I slept so well last night?

I chose yesterday to drop my one class (ceramics) and get my money back. I just dreaded going because of the time 6 to 10:10. I just kept getting this nagging feeling it wasn't the right thing for me to do this semester. If it had got out early it would have been a little different. (or if it had been in one of the different buildings at school. Where it was located was a FAR walk from the parking garage at 10:10 at night in not a good neighborhood.)

I wish I could take day classes like last semester, but its just way too expensive. I am going to wait till this fall to pick back up taking classes when Leo goes into 3k. I am hoping to at least work in at least one or two classes that semester.

I made a digital layout for the sketch from Sketchy Thursday.



















Here is my layout I made from the sketch. I want to make a plan to be able to get something concrete done this semester that will make me feel like this semester was not wasted. I need a plan. I either want to really working on painting more, doing some kind of new line of things in my Etsy, or starting trying to make my own felties and patterns which has been mulling around in my head. More digital kits are in my mind too.

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Yesterday the woman from the pug rescue came by for a home evaluation. I'm hoping it went okay. The huskies really wanted to smell her pug and it was terrified! Oy.. I'm hoping that didn't ruin my chances. She said she was going to email me the foster paperwork. We'll see I guess.

Leo actually cried when her pug left. He wanted it to stay.

Today is going to the gym like usual and then I'm debating about going to the zoo with Leo. Its freezing out which is good to see the animals, but I like going with mommy friends.

We'll see. Thanks for stopping by!

Soon it will be strawberry season

I'm still hacking away at doing the Tim tags from 2010. I do love doing them. I finished this one finally. This is day 9. Ah..yeah.. only 3 left!!

Here's what Tim did:



















I took a little bit of liberty with this tag. I wasn't feeling the whole big circle fan thing. I don't know I just kinda wanted a slightly different look, but you can see it was still seriously inspired by Tim's tag.
I made my own tag and stamped it with Tim H. music note stamp, distressed, colored, added a little BG pp fan, metal heart by Tim, glazed the die cut alpha (tims), and added the button over the top. Brown ribbon from Michaels.





























I also wanted to share another flickr fav's mosaic I made on big huge labs. I love sharing my fav photos I've found on flickr. All are in my flickr fav's. For some reason the links didn't post in my description on flickr to post. Here's a link to my fav's so you can check out any of these if you'd like.





























On Wednesday I have the pug foster group coming to check out my house to see if its pug friendly. Wish me luck!!

a little birdie told me

I did another card for the Christmas card challenge blog jinglebelles. I am so jazzed I will be ready to send out a mass amount of Christmas cards this year. Oh yeah! This week's challenge was to have a Christmas song and some inchies on the card. Here's my card. I know the song is really "O Christmas Tree", but I figured you wouldn't mind me taking a little liberty with how I spelled it. It just looked weird with just the "O".




















I made the inchies with Tim Holtz chipboard inch sized squares. The font stickers are BG, the ribbon from Michaels, and the bird is from vintage papers. I made the little trees with green cardstock, small star paper punch and stickles.

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I have to admit that yesterday (Sunday), I did NOTHING. I sat and watched like 7 episodes of Lie to me on Netflix streaming. I love that show. I moved laundry along, that was it. It was nice to do nothing for a whole day, but I do want to get in 5 days of cardio in this week. I only got in 4 because of my day of nothing. :)

Hope everyone had a productive Monday! Thanks for stopping by!

Peanut Butter time! I wish. Sounds good.

I did a layout! Holy crud. I can't believe how long its been. I'm very happy to be getting back in the swing of things. I joined in on the sketch this week by Sketchy Thursdays.














Here is the digital layout I made.





























Once I see another good digital print out page sale somewhere I'll have to get a bunch of my layouts printed out. Thats the one bad thing for digital layouts for me. I get them printed out and put them in books. I am good about that. But I'll wait for a sale and do like 20 some layouts at a time. Well... I forget sometimes where I left off. I'm always worried I'm going to end up buying the same one over again printed out OR that I'll never get some printed out because they'll get lost in between print outs and I'll think I printed it out, but didn't.

I'm making some coffee and took some advil. I have the worst headache. I had horrible dreams about zombies. urgh... Its really a curse most of the time that I'm one of those people who have very vivid dreams and remember them for like EVER. My dad, sister, and Logan are all the same way. We will sit there and go through our dreams of the week and how horrible/good/strange they were and how they just sat in our heads for the whole day after waking up. (sometimes longer depending) Anyone else vivid remembering dreamers?

Hope you all had a good weekend. I wanted to share another flickr mosaic of my favorite photos from people on there. I love these things.






























1. journal pages from 10-22, 2. Paris, 3. Octopus Mirror, 4. someone is watching you!, 5. Heart The Art Prompts Week 34 " Dream", 6. fish-156, 7. living room halloween decor, 8. 12 mai 2008 - La cage, 9. "Smooth Landing II"- a Chickadee oil painting by Camille Engel

Created with fd's Flickr Toys

Have a great weekend!

I need at least 5 minions from Despicable Me please... on my wish list. I love those guys.

Wow is it Saturday already? Jeez.. this week flew by. I decided to make an art journal page using acrylic this month's choosen art medium.




















I love how this page turned out. I did palette paint to make the background. Then I added the rub on jar (Hambly) and the rub on bats (Basic Grey). I cut the skeleton out of some Halloween paper I got from J's. The grey word stickers are Heidi Swapp. The letter stickers are BG. I added stamping and some more paint and some journaling.

This week I met my new mom's group I've joined. I'm so happy I finally got off my tush to join one. Leo will be so much happier and I'm much happier meeting other great moms in the area. I miss having friends and chatting up with them.

My giving days have been still happening, but not put as a priority of the day. Which is not cool. I have still made sure to give everyday. I'm on day 9 now.

Some of the things I've gave in the last few days...

1. All my change I had to the guy I brought coffee from in the mail in his tip jar. It wasn't much, but usually I don't tip at all for something like that.

2. I watched Food Inc.. this was giving in the sense of giving myself a better education about how our food system works. This movie has changed how I want to eat and buy food. (warning it will totally make you nauseous)

3. Took Leo to the park after I went to the gym just because I knew he would enjoy it. This is not something I would typically do. Usually we just go back to the house and have lunch. I don't like going to parks by myself and Leo. I like someone to talk to. I bucked up for him. We had a good time.

4. Mailed out my copy of 29 gifts to a friend who I knew would appreciate the book and liked hearing about what I was doing.

5. Took Leo today to a playgroup on a Saturday because I knew he'd like it and I knew Lewis would love a few hours to himself to do whatever he wanted with out Leo distraction or Gina distraction. :)

There's a new card challenge at jinglebelles. Going to work on this tomorrow and I have a new Tim tag to show off soon!

Thanks for stopping by!

I found some courage

I haven't had any time lately to work on anything crafty. Its been doctor visits, craziness, and insurance calls mainly around here. Oh yeah and there was that night Leo hit his head on the wall corner and it cut it open. No ER visit luckily, but still it was not a good night. I'm glad that one has passed. Poor kid he's a brave one, but is always getting hurt. I'm so afraid he's going to end up braking something one day like an arm or something. He's one of those types of boys..yes.. you know what I'm saying. All boy. All daring... All the time.

I've been keeping up with my 29 days of giving. Today I went and donated these books and one dvd to the library. I gave up the brand new Tim Holtz Compendium of Curiosities book I bought. I also gave up my copy of "My name is Memory" which I loved. I figured both I would not re-read anytime soon and I wanted to send out that possibility for someone else. Many more someone else's.

Day 6 also included me sending in my application finally for being a foster pug mom for pugs that need homes. I'm very hopeful they let me foster a pug. Maybe even two, who knows! I'm scared they won't, but I have to at least try to give a temporary home to a little pug.

Yesterday on Day 5 finally watched "The Cove" documentary. All I can say is my gosh... You have to watch it. Its on instant watch on Netflix right now. If you have Netflix there's no excuse!! Its really educational about what Japan is doing to our world's dolphins and want to do to our whales again. It wasn't easy to watch and I'm not going to forget about it. . Watch it. Really.



















Well off to bed I go.. Some creative plans are a loomin'.

run run as fast as you can..

Lauren and Stef have a new blog called jinglebelles for everyone to be challenged into making Christmas cards all year around! That way no rush during the holiday months. Great idea.

This week's theme was old and new.

Here's my card.





























I used my palette knife to smooth the acrylic paint across the cardstock background. I waited for it to dry then punched a circle out. I added the stamped gingerbread image that I've had FOREVER. I used some brand new bling diamonds that I am starting to really love to use. I see why Lauren is so prone to the bling. Its awesome! I added some sewing and some stickles dots.

I hope you enjoy the card. Go check out the blog its awesome!

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Day 4 of giving: Well I let a woman in a packed grocery store go before me in line with a totally open line. I know this isn't profound, I probably would have done this anyways.. I also let hubby sleep in an extra hour even though he said to wake him up at 8am. I figured he needed it. Soon it'll be back to getting up at the crack of dawn.

tree of giving

Resolutions 2011. A little late putting them up, but I am participating in Julie Balzer's art everyday challenge. I just don't always get pictures up of everything I get done.

Here are my resolutions:
1. Lose 20lbs
2. Triathlon in October!!
3. 29 days of giving
4. Make cakes in jars
5. Read at least 15 books this year (I got 20 read last year!)
6. UPC continue through the whole year. (my Use Practice Create challenge)
7. Lower amount of online time
8. More Patience
9.Go to 2 art museums
10. Organize boys room

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Today was my day 3 of giving. I had a hard time figuring out what to. At first I was going to give money to someone through kiva.com. Which I am probably still going to do this month, but the whole point of the project is to do something giving and with intention. I felt that just giving money again on my 3rd day was a bit much. It sometimes feels like if you don't give money you aren't really doing anything. I have to get past that thinking.

So I took the dogs for a walk today. I usually do this on the weekend. I always bring plastic bags to pick up there poop. I'm not one of those people who don't pick up their dogs poop. I have big dogs. I'd be ticked if someone left their dogs poo in my yard. I decided I would do something helpful on my walk. I brought some extra bags with me and picked up litter on our walk. I filled a whole bag full of mostly bottles and trash.

Sure no one will notice this probably. But its still giving to my neighborhood who can drive through our neighborhood w/out seeing random trash and to the Earth.

I also did one other thing that could be considered giving. I finally went and joined a local mom's group online. I'm hoping to meet more people and have it so Leo can make some friends his age. I keep saying I'm going to do this and never do. I actually went and did it today. Something for Leo. Its time he gets out more and makes his own little friends like I did with Logan.

Tomorrow is day 4! I'll have to get my brain a thinking.

UPC Acrylics week one

Starting out the new year using some art medium acrylic paints. What can be better? I learned in my painting class that for me using a glass palette makes painting clean up and mixing paint easier. Before that I always used those white plastic egg carton looking palettes. You can't mix in those well. In the picture above I was just using one of my large acrylic stamping blocks since I wasn't painting a big picture or anything. It worked well. You can just wipe the paint away or peel it off when its dry.

I also suggest when working with acrylics to get a palette knife to mix paints with not your brush. It helps alot.

These things are pretty much up to you whether you'd like to try them or not, but two things I strongly recommend to really help with acrylic painting of any type are these products.





























You can use any brand gesso, but gesso'ing your paper/canvas/wood/ whatever you are painting makes a big difference. Also if you would like to work with your acrylic paints so that they blend more like oil paints mix them with the slow dry medium. Acrylic paint dries FAST. This helps with slowing it down and allows you to blend colors like a dream.

The piece I made for this week, I made a little early for a Christmas present for Lauren. Its a small piece of wood 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 painted with acrylic paint. I used the slow dry medium with the acrylic paint to get it to blend well. I sealed this piece with some acrylic matte sealer similar to this. You can find it at any craft store.






























I wanted to give a shout out that today is also starting day of jinglebelles blog of Lauren and Stef's!! Make holiday cards all year so that you don't have to rush during the real season. We'll be doing a little collaboration around the 3rd week of January so keep your eyes peeled! All you card makers this is the blog for you!

I can't wait to see what everyone else makes with their acrylic paint. Remember its just the point of using what you have and getting your hand moving. Practice allows your art to grow.

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On a separate note I am still doing the 29 days of giving. On day two I didn't let the dog accidents change my mood and I also cleaned out the inside of Lewis' car for him and vacuumed it out. All better from our long trip to New Orleans. Day three tomorrow!