A Rusty Ride!

Happy Monday my friends!  Whooo-hoooo did you all watch the Play-off games this weekend!  The Dean household was ON FIRE—SCREAMING—for TEeeeeebooooow of the Broncos.  We were yelling like a BUNCH of maniacs…welll guess we always are maniacs LOL!  We strongly, strongly DISLIKE the Steelers (hey we are Ravens & Redskins fans & Steelers are our biggest rivals ‘eh)!  So we enjoyed seeing the Steelers crying into their terrible towels…sorry I haddddd to go there hee hee!  That overtime pass and run down the field..whoooowheeee…we were at the table eating my homemade chili-n-biscuits and we were jumping and screaming all over the kitchen…then we STOPPED.  Cuz you know in the NFL you celebrate a touchdown…when you hear….there’s a flag on the field?! LOL!  But not this time baby….oh yeah that was a GOOD touchdown and I’m a TEBOW fan.  After all the negative commentary about him I was so rootin’ for him to have a great game & I wasn’t disappointed.  Looking forward to next weekend’s games---hopin’ the Ravens beat the Texas, and the Saints beat the 49ers.  Alexa and I are making these cute football strawberries (that I got from Pinterest), 7 Layer Dip and mini-pizzas for the occasion –so looking forward to it

I also got down 10 of my 11 Christmas trees down & packed away and all cleaned up thanks to help from my hubby.  The house always feels so bare after its all gone for awhile..I miss the twinkle of lights and smells of the trees that’s for sure.  But our real trees needed to get out to the curb for recycling to pick up and they were starting to drop a ton of needles…never fun to clean up.  And I cleaned up my craftroom…I won’t even tell you what a disaster my room was…DISGUSTING!  I had so many boxes of stuff…craft stuff and some hadn’t been opened or organized.  I had been so busy the last 6 mos that nothing got put away and it got to be such a huge CHORE and I had NO time to dedicate to it.  So I took 4 hours to really clean it up & semi-organize it today and whooo I feel so much better going in there….it’s a relief actually and my mojo is re-energized.  I didn’t go overboard with organizing because when my room downstairs is ready I will just be moving and organizing it again…so I didn’t want to do the job twice…but I needed it to be cleaned out and organized enough that it made it easy for me to work and know where stuff was.  I was spending so much time looking for things that I was wasting too much time and I don’t have time to waste KWIM LOL!  But all in all I was happy with everything I accomplished this weekend and felt I got a lot done.  I also did some reading, some eating, some watching tv and spent time with my family.  We watched “I Don't Know How She Does It” and I swear at times it was like watching myself….yes..including the part where she’s skyping with the business guy but doesn’t know he’s watching & she’s adjusting her pantyhose & then falls into the chair..uh yeah…done dumb stuff like that before.  Hee hee heck I do dumb stuff like that all the time!  And I have a surprise trip this week…can’t say where I’m going…but I’ll tell you after I get back…LOL…its top secret again!  I’m sure there will be some kind of shenanigans and I’m sure I’ll tell you all about it…so stay tuned for my first trip of 2012 LMBO!

NewsBitz:

-Thanks to all the participants for the Holiday CMC Challenge!  All the winners are posted up on the site so go see if you won!  We raised $500 (I’m topping it off to reach a full $500) for our Reading & Literacy Charity and I know that will buy them a bunch of books for the children which makes me happy. If you’d like to donate “just because” you can do that through the end of January directly HERE!  Thanks everyone!

-Tonight we have a NEW GROUP debuting at the CMC Classroom called “We R Smash Bookin’, Scrapbookin’ & Journalin’!!”.  So if you are interested in any kinds of scrapbooking or journaling or want to get started, then hop on over and join us! If you’ve heard of Smash Books—well we are doing those too but you can use any kind of book you’d like.  Each month we will have some fun themes/prompts/ideas for a fun challenge that you can join in on too (I hope it motivates me to get going with my books this year LOL)!  We have a fun chat/party planned at 7:45 pm EST tonight and everyone is welcome (you just have to join the site & scroll down till you see the chat box on the main page)—I’m going to be giving away some fun prizes too! Hope to see you there! (ps—if you’ve never been to a party/chat at the CMC site…well you are in for a treat lol…always fun, fast paced and lots of chitter chatter!).

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Want a Rusty Ride!!?

Today I’m sharing a fun masculine project with you all.  I know so many of us struggle with male-influenced projects and I have to say I like the challenge of them.  I find working-outside-the-box fun and makes me energized to try new things.  This image is a digi stamp from Fred She Said called “Old Truck”.  I love this old truck…reminds me of pictures of my grandparents old Chevy truck from back in the day LOL.  And I used a technique on this truck that I teach in CMC Copic Class 5 – to put rust on your colored images…a fun technique, not too hard but it just takes some time & patience.

The cardstock is a mix of SU & PTI, some scrap pattern paper and then I distressed all the edges with my Zutter Distress It Tool.  The rust cs was embossed with a clock-works embossing folder (see some cool grunge emboss folders here) and then inked to bring the background out a bit.  I wanted to make my own “gears” so I used my Spellbinder Pinking & Regular Circle Nesties to create gears.  I inked them, distressed them, added some silver stickles and added them to the card.  The corner elements are all brads…however I don’t like to punch many layers of cs…so I cut the ends of the brads off with my Tonic Scissors and add them with glue dots.  The sentiment is from PTI and then some twine to finish it all off.

I'm entering this card into the following challenges:

Pile It On (Manly Cards)

Here Come The Boys 

(sketch/boys--I flipped my sketch)

Speedy Fox & Friends (brads & eyelets)

Adding rust to objects with your Copics is FUN!  I always encourage everyone to look at items around them or google pictures when coloring to see how color and light play—it helps with your coloring.  For me this was a really fun project to create and the technique is a fun one—one of my faves from Class 5.  I added Diamond Glaze to the windows, bumper, bolts on tires and headlights and then lightly sprinkled DecoArt Glamour Dust on the Diamond glaze while its wet…it suspends in the liquid for a cool effect.  Then I used a bit of Distressed Stickles (in haystack or something like that lol) on the gravel for some extra texture.



That’s it for me today…hope you like this project, this image is one of my faves from Class 5 and I was happy to put it on a card!  Great for any guy in your life!  Hope you have a fabulous day…I’ll be back on Wed with a Smash Book project!