So tired....

Katee and I just got home about a half hour ago from Rochester. Yesterday was the spring training gathering and today we boxed our fool heads off which was stellar. I sunburned my lips for the first time ever (how does THAT happen??). I'm exhausted, it's time for kitty hugs, my bed and then a double at work tomorrow but never fear! I have many, many pictures and I can't wait to post them. Maybe tomorrow. Oh, the anticipation!!! :)

Kitty toys!

Trixie's ultra snazzy and expensive hand embroidered spoiled kitty girl toys came today! I ordered them a few days ago after coming across them on Etsy during an LTC break. I couldn't resist since I was teary from making her cards and they had FOSSILS on them. Come on, how am I supposed to resist that? I think they're great but she's currently deciding if they are or not. In her defense she got a pretty sweet Kitty Hoots feather toy about 2 weeks ago and she's not quite bored with it yet so she probably isn't ready for a change. But here's photos!

The ultra cute packaging



The front of both



The back of the "book" and the front of the trilobyte one again



Hey mom, what do you have down there?...



Oooo, this string is fun.



Is this for ME??!!??!



Mine!


Hahaha, she's so cute!

Eff the pigment inks!

DOWN with pigment inks. They suck. Even when I head them with my embossing gun I can still get residue off them when I touch them. The crafting world needs to get on the chalk ink bandwagon. Seriously. I don't care if they dry too fast, I LIKE it that way. My coffee table is covered in Starlite Silver and it's not cool. They say "fast drying on vellum" but they lie. Jerks.

My Trixie LTC isn't coming out exactly as I wanted. Being a perfectionist, I have a hard time dealing with this. But what can I do? I'm hoping if I leave them and go to bed, when I wake up in the morning I won't be so critical. Sometimes that works. Sometimes I rip them apart and start all over again. It's a toss up. I've already redone them 3 times. Right now I'm toying with the idea of sending everyone in the ring 2 cards. I like the one I made but you can't see the detail in the stamp I carved a well and I LOVE this stamp. As in, I want to stamp in on everything. Like my refrigerator, my walls and Trixie herself. I'm so proud of it, I just want it to be shown as well as it can be because it really represents my Trixie. I've cried several times in the process of making this card, it's such a hard thing for me to do. It's a long story but the short of it was that my house burned down in college and she's literally the only thing I walked away from it with other than a shoebox with random things. Ah, my sweet baby, I thank God every single day that I have her. That's really what this card is about and why it's so hard to make it just right.

In other news, Guns N Roses really is music to carve a stamp to. They can set a mood for anything. Bon Jovi, too. Too bad I wasn't old enough when they were big, I would have rocked out with mall hair and acid washed jeans at their concerts and it would have been amazing.

Bad mom :(

I was so excited to get 5 LTC's in the mail today that I ran upstairs to open them (with my hands ful)l and tried to shut the door with my foot, squashing Trixie in between it in the process. She squealed, I screamed/burst into tears/dropped everything I had and went running after her, scaring her in the process. After 10 minutes of crying and coddling and asking Brent over and over if I should rush her to the emergency hospital (techs make the worst pet mom's, I tell ya) she's fine. A little quiet and a little ruffled because I scared her with the crying and carrying on, but fine. Moral of the story: yes, receiving LTC's is exciting but not so much so that you almost kill your own precious kitty girl. AND, not every minor chest injury=pneumothorax.


BTW, I somehow messed up mailing out my first batch of LTC's. I have 15 people they should have gone out to but only 14 cards that went out and 13 emails saved of addresses. I officially screwed up my first trades and made a spreadsheet to track them in the future. Score 1 LTC's, 0 Mary.

First LTC: DONE!

My very first LTC is done! Well, almost done. I just have to glue the last 5 treasure chests on the last 5 cards and they're done (they're drying right now). But yay! Done! Dance! And they're almost all traded away already. Most of them were traded before they were anywhere near done, haha. I can't wait until I start receiving ones from other people. It's going to be so inspiring to see what others can do and hopefully give me more ideas of what I can do. I'm happy with the outcome of my first one but I can't wait to see how I grow.

Needless to say, I think I'm officially addicted to LTC's now. I joined another tracker, which I am MOST excited about because I get to make a card all about my beautiful kitty girl. The only issue with it is that I have so many ideas for it I can't choose. Trixie is a multi-faceted kitty, that's for sure. Before I can start I have to make myself finish up some things. I need to finish these LTC's (5 left to trade if anyone wants one :), finish the logbook for the stamp I carved for the Norther NY gather and send it out and make a log book to replace one of Lock Wench's in downtown Syracuse. I also need to start carving some stamps to plant soon but I really have no ambition in that area right now. I am loving the LTC making process, it's much more of a creative outlet than simply carving a stamp of an image I found online. I know that once warm weather officially hits though and I'm back in hardcore hiking/boxing action I'll flip back into it.

BTW, funny thing I saw today. I was skimming through craftster and found a girl in the UK who is SELLING her hand carved stamps. From what I saw they were pretty simple images carved on the pink stuff (the horror!) and she was selling them for the equivalent of $10. WTF? I've seen some amazing carves that would warrant much higher amounts than that and I doubt the carvers ever once thought about it. Crazy people.

Creativity overload.

As I mentioned before, I learned how to do codex binding and made 8 books in 3 days 2 weeks ago. Then I got sick of them (and sick from the glue) and put them aside for a while. So I worked on my Ratatouille stamp and finished that (although I messed up the letters and am mighty upset about it) so I need to go back and make a logbook for it to send it out. I also have to make a logbook for a stamp Katee is carving to plant in Ithaca (she's leaving the logbook making to me). Ok, so that makes 2 logbooks to make and a stamp to send out.

Then I started on my first LTC. Why I started in the midst of everything else I need to do, who knows. But it's addicting. Seriously, anything that involves paper crafts of any kind and I'm all over it. The issue is that I want to make 20 of the same design and my card involves a hand made diecut that I need to trace, cut out and glue onto all 2o cards, PLUS 20 rhinestones on each card that need to be individually glued on PLUS the stamps that need to be stamped, cut out and glued on. But whatever, I can do it. It's not perfect, which is something I'm battling with, but it's pretty decent for my first time. Ok, so I have 20 cards to finish by the end of this weekend to (hopefully) mail out by Monday.

So if that wasn't bad enough, I joined 2 LTC swaps. The first one I freaked out about and got all excited for because it involved fairies (oooo, I'm a fairy junkie!) so I HAD to join that. The second one kinda fell into my lap because of a post I made on Atlasquest. Each one is 24 cards and one is due in June and the other in July. Yikes.

AND THEN I was trolling through craftster yesterday (craft crack, stay away from it!) and I saw this really awesome table a girl made out of beer bottle caps that she covered completely in resin. Really cool but stupid me sends a link of it to Brent at work and he gets all hot and bothered about it so somehow now I'm making a new coffee table for his apartment in his garage logo. Oy.

IN ADDITION TO ALL THAT, I still need to carve a lot more stamps to start planting now that spring is coming. Brent mentioned going up to the Adirondacks in June to stay for a weekend so I can finally get him up Blue Mountain and I want to carve a super awesome stamp to plant there. Actually, maybe a couple. And I need to get cracking on my waterfall series because that IS getting planted all summer long.

Oh yeah, and I want to paint my hallway so I can put up the supersweet Hello Kitty sign Katee's husband got me from his work.

How do I get into all this? And right at the beginning of hiking season, my favorite time to go? I don't know but I WILL do it all. Well, I'll at least attempt it.

Back to gluing on rhinestones like a mad woman...

P3 F313 X63

Online!

After many many months of being without a computer, I am finally back in action! And it's a beautiful thing. I was using Brentaroni's iphone and Blackberry forever and I am SO over looking at things online on a 2-3 inch screen. I even watched the entirety of project Runway 4 on the iphone and I thought my eyes were going to bleed but I am a dedicated fan.

Onto the boxing news...

A lot has happened in the last few months. I went to another gathering (Desperately Seeking Sun) and it was great. I finally got to meet Lock Wench and it was amazing because SHE'S amazing (but most of you already know that). I carved some personal travelers for it and they were well received, which was great. The best part of carving stamps is getting feedback from other people. I think my PT clues are pretty easy because honestly, I'll just give them to you if you ask. They're special to me and I want to share them :)

What else has been going on....I finally taught myself Codex binding and have been making logbooks like a crazy woman. It's fun and they look fantastic but the glue I use makes me a little sick so I've had to lay off for a few days. I'm really pleased with how they turned out though, they're exactly what I had been looking for in a log book.

I've been carving like crazy, too, to get ready for spring planting. I have so many ideas and just can't seem to carve fast enough. I'm excited to finally get some permanent plants out there. What I am NOT excited about is figuring out where to put them. I hate the planting process of putting boxes out into the world but it's a necessary evil.

Right now I am busy carving a Ratatouille stamp to donate to the Northern NY gather. I'm not sure if I'll make it up there but they wanted movie themed stamps and no one loves Ratatouille more than me. I'm a little pissed at it at the moment though, thus this little break, because I can't seem to figure out how to carve as tiny as I want to. I hope to figure out a solution soon because it's starting to limit me a little.

Oh, and just because I sohould mention it, I fell while trying to get a Lock Wench box the other day and got the biggest bruise known to mankind on my leg. And by fell I mean I tooking a flying face plant into mud, dirt and leaves over a huge fallen down tree. If you even look at it it hurts and I have to have every dog I treat at work put on a table because I can't kneel on the floor. At least we found the box! And katchick got a good laugh because I literally went from vertical to horizontal without any sort of in between transition. Oh well.

So anyway, I'm back, be looking for my boxes in April and May and stay tuned! I'll be writing more often :)

P3 F235 X63