Hair New Era

To all of you, my wonderful blogger buddies: Have a happy 2011! I hope that the new year will be a good year for you with many wonderful moments of joy and fulfillment. Stay healthy and live life to the fullest.

We just came back from 11 days in the desert - wonderful, exciting days when we visited places we love and explored new sites. Our hope to find snow was finally fulfilled on the almost last day of our trip in Utah. But even though the snow was rare over Christmas, we had a very relaxing time that we enjoyed as a family - and I never got near the laptop, not even once.


I hope I can tell you more about the trip in the days to come, I'd really like to share it with you. I'm still sorting through my photos, I took almost 2000 pictures and many of them are just crap, at least in my opinion. But you will get to see some of them.

One of the nicest things of coming home is going through the pile of mail (you know, the "real" stuff,  with envelopes and stamps...). Among them, I received two items I'd love to share with you.

The first one is an ornament handmade by my blogger friend Rhonda at Roban Studio. She had shown these ornaments on her blog sometime before Christmas and I thought how cute they were - but I had never thought that she would actually send one to me! What a lovely and thoughtful surprise. Thank you so much, Rhonda, the little nutcracker will have a home here for years to come.


The second one is ornament #3 of Louise Gale's Creative Color Challenge Ornament Swap, and this one is from Regina. I absolutely love this little scene, it looks very peaceful. Thank you very much, Regina, this is so beautiful.

A few days ago a package came in the mail for me. No. 2 in the Creative Color Challenge Ornament Swap - a beautiful ornament ball in a pretty green (unfortunately the photo doesn't do the color justice) with golden glitter swirls - so so pretty. I immediately hung it in our tree where it looks like it belongs there.

Thank you so much, Sandy, this beautiful ornament will be with us for many more Christmas to come.

Hello WOYWWers, I hope all of you feel well on this cold day, and those who don't I wish that you'll be better real soon. I can't believe that we're already in the last month of the year - we just celebrated Thanksgiving in this corner of the world and now it's "Christmassy" wherever you look. On the radio they only play Christmas music to make sure that everybody is sick of it when Christmas comes around. How sad.

Of course it's also Christmas on my work table - I'm still working on the "Christmas tags" class that I am supposed to teach next Wednesday. Will it happen? I may know by the end of this week.


Louise Gale's Creative Color Challenge Ornament Swap is in full swing. I've mailed the ornaments I created, so I can show you a picture of the finished angels:

Hello WOYWWers, how are you doing? I hope you are all doing well and for those who aren't I wish that you will be better soon.

Sorry I missed last Wednesday, life got in the way (again), but I'm happy to be back today! If you have no clue what I'm rambling about, just hop on over to Julia's Stamping Ground to get the full picture.

So what's on my desk today (or yesterday evening when I took this picture, it hasn't changed much since then)? Angels!!! I've joined Louise Gale's Creative Color Challenge Ornament Swap and am preparing these angels as my contribution. I have loved these little guys since my daughter was a baby. I found the template in a German crafting magazine and since then have made an angel for her window every year for Christmas. This is the first time, however, that I add some painting.

Recently I found the Tuesday Taggers. They have a weekly challenge, and since I was looking for a new project I decided to join. This week's theme was "house" - you could create any project that you liked as long as it features a house.


By participating in Louise Gales Creative Color Challenge I've started to love turquoise and sea greens and use them way more often now. This card was pretty easy: Glue down background paper onto 4x6 card. Paint sea with acrylic paints (I used laguna, aquamarine and white). Smear the same paints on a small piece of bubblewrap and stamp. Let dry. Cut house from cardboard. Adhere different papers and stamp them. Punch little cat and put into window. Stamp mermaid and color with Distress Ink (vintage photo, spiced marmalade, worn lipstick, wild honey, peeled paint, faded jeans). Adhere to house and house to card. Print out words and glue to card. Done. (Stamps used: Mermaid/rocks by Expressions in Ink; Starfish Document by Stampington & Company; Shell Trio Wording by Stamp-It)

If you want to see more of the Tuesday Taggers, you can check it out here.

I'm quite surprised! It's only Thursday, and I'm already done with my piece for this week's Creative Color Challenge. The first time I barely made it by Saturday, then it was at least Friday - so does that mean next week's piece (the last one for this challenge) will be done by Wednesday?

Seriously...

This week's color was Sea Green, and to put a little twist to it, it's been combined with Cathy Nichols' theme "To the sea" of her Found Art Friday. And the deadline pretty much is today (now you know - I obviously need the pressure).

Here's my "Voice of the Sea":



The color looks almost like last week's turquoise, right? Well, blame it on the camera. I couldn't for the heck of it get even one picture in which the color was reflected correctly. This one - after zillions of photos - is the one that comes closest. The color is "laguna green" and really looks like that including all the shades that I mixed with it. But - the camera didn't recognize that. So please imagine a beautiful laguna green in three different shades...

I painted on a 8x10 canvas, stamped the starfish with antique white and wrote the quote by Kate Chopin - I really love this quote. I inked the stamped image of "sunsource" (Stampington & Company) with Distress Ink and sprayed the torn page with Glimmer Mist and also inked it with Distress Ink. As a final touch I adhered several treasures I found at the beach.

Working with this color was real fun. First, I really like the color, and Cathy's theme "To the sea" helped a lot since I love to create anything ocean related. No wonder I was done so quickly!!!

Hello WOYWWers - welcome to my workspace!

First, thank you everyone for your lovely comments you left here at last week's WOYWW. I hope I succeeded in getting back to each of you - if I missed someone I apologize. I also have to admit that I didn't get to everybody on Julia's list, I think I made it to 125... I really love visiting all your places, but it may take some time.


Alright, so what's on my desk today? I have several projects going at the moment, it's a busy time. Right at the centre I'm working on a canvas panel in orange - one of my very favorite colors. I will call it "I am orange" and I got the idea while reading Barbara Sher's book "Wishcraft - How to Get What You Really Want" - more on that in a later post (hopefully).

To the left you see my humble attempt for this week's Creative Color Challenge. The color is sea green, and this week it's combined with Cathy Nichols' Found Art Friday for August, theme "To the sea". I'm planning to include a small piece of driftwood that I found at the beach and one of my favorite stamps. It's still a little bit up in the air, but I think I'm getting there.

You can also see some tags hanging around that I hope to have finished by the end of the week - they're kind of afterthoughts.

Many of you asked me to see the finished piece of last week's project that was on my desk, so here it is:

I've called it "Pensive Mermaids". I am very happy that Louise Gale included it in her wrap-up that she does every Saturday of the different Creative Color Challenges.

That's it for today, now I'm off sneaking over to your blogs and checking out what you're working on. I really like WOYWW although it takes quite some time to visit everybody - it's worth it.

See you again next Wednesday. Oh, and if anybody wants to join in this, hop on over to Julia's Stamping Ground to get all the information.