Organize your Stuff: Week 13 (round 3): Stamps

This is a busy entry, so let’s get too it! Well for starters, let me wish my fabulous Jewish readers a festive and Happy Hanukkah! May there be plenty of gelt and latkes to go around! (and I will totally accept any fabulous latke recipes as my Nana never passed hers on…) Here is my Design Team card for Tuesday Trio’s Hanukkah Sketch #43.

You may not be able to tell, but the vellum in the background has the lyrics to Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song, literally the only Hanukkah song to make it onto the radio waves, at least here in America. It is fun, irreverent, but not mocking. The words are stamped using CTMH Giggle lowercase, and I hand drew the dreidel with a coordinating ink pen.

Next, is a super THANK YOU!!! to Scrappy-ness for passing along the Stylish Blogger Award to me! It is definitely an honor! The rules for this award (kind of like a chain letter but one that is cool to recieve!) are to link back to the sender (here), pass it on to 8 others that have not received it yet, and share 8 things about yourself.

8 things about me…

1. My favorite food is East Coast Chinese food (because Washington State’s Chinese is just different)- specifically Won Ton Soup and Chicken Lo Mein (which is Chicken Chow Mein here). To make up for it, I will eat sushi and Japanese Steakhouse!

2. I grew up with 3 television channels, but I do not know how anyone can survive married life without satellite TV and DVR.

3. When I was little, I wanted to grow up and be Cinderella’s Step Mother because she made all the rules, got breakfast in bed every day, someone else did the chores, and I wouldn’t have to marry some stinky old prince (but I love you Fabulous spouse!).

4. I would rather eat something salty-like potato chips- then something sweet- like cookies.

5. I do not have a favorite color, but Girl Friday has arbitrarily decided that mine is Purple.

6. I have a really hard time finishing projects. Ok that is something that you already know. PA Me is probably my most dominant personality!

7. I have a broken NO button. My husband tells me to NAVY: Never Again Volunteer Yourself!! But I always seem too.

8. I have a black thumb. The only plant that I haven’t killed is the hops that we grow in the backyard for homemade beer. …oh and the roses in the front yard of which I am very allergic, and actually would prefer that they died.

Now, who else is stylish out there?...find out next week (because I actually have to find you)!

Stamps are my downfall! The Inner Hoarder has never seen a stamp that she did not like! That keeps OCD Me on her toes. However, Creative Me uses these stamps (and inks!) on just about every layout or card somewhere! So, it is always important to keep these organized. As you can see, all of my wood mounted rubber stamps are on the left side of my new work desk, and the acrylic ones are on the right. OCD Me does not know why we keep the wood mounted ones, they are clutter to her. However, since they are mostly corralled in this old VCR rack, the POW has allowed my Inner Hoarder to keep them. I am thinking of cataloguing them, but I have thousands…I counted them last round, but the Inner Hoarder has collected more since then!

Here is my final entry for the Kitchen Keepsakes Food Network Challenge. Week 4 is Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, and I made my Thanksgiving Turkey Soup! Like any meal worthy of being tried on the show, it is a multi day event. Day 1: Cook the turkey (Thanksgiving). Day 2: Boil the Carcass and drippings all day in a stock pot. Day 3: Strain and retrieve any meat from the carcass (and put in containers to freeze-aprox 9 cups) then make the soup for the restless horde!  since last time I did 12 pictures, this time, I did one! Definatly Yo-bama-lama. Or whatever!

Organize your Stuff: Week 12 (round 3): Ribbons Part 1

Well, today we are snow bound! Don’t laugh Midwesterners or people who see snow more than once every two years… we had 6 inches in two days in our little town in the Greater Seattle Metro. That is worse than a full fledged ice storm in the south! Our weather bunny made a point of telling us that we were warmer than Barrow, Alaska (the northern most point at 34 degrees Fahrenheit), but one of Fabulous Spouse’s co-workers in Montana told us we were insane, as today they had 12 inches of snow, it was a high of -4 with a with a wind chill of -20 degrees Fahrenheit, and everyone went to school and work no problem. I bet they have more than 3 snowplows for the county too!

Since I could not go out, we ate in! Here is the Chicken Marsala that I made on Sunday…and braved our horrible not really that snowy roads to get the pictures from Costco to enter at Kitchen Keepsakes (If they don’t plow soon, I am nominating Fabulous Spouse for Snow removal director. The county cannot hear your theories on snow removal from living in the land of the Alberta Clippers while growing up through the TV…I’m sorry. It is true. Same with the football coaches, dear. The sound only works one way)!

There are two techniques that I used for this quilting panel (a total scrap user upper! So there Inner Horder!).  First, I used bamboo ink to distress the bright whites that did not go with the Graphics 45 base page.

Then, rather than cuttung up another sheet to put squares that match the base page, I just broke out the exacto knife, and cut holes in my "quilt"!

This week is ribbon week! Last round, OCD me did a pretty good job of collecting the ribbons that the Inner Hoarder had collected over the years, and put them in a DMC Floss style container (actually a fishing lure tackle box with removable dividers). The fibers are mostly all on bobbins, roughly by color. I found that suddenly, Creative Me was using ribbon more!… well because she could find it! However, the POW has noticed that the Inner Hoarder has been holding out on us, just a little. Also, it seems that the more ribbon that Creative Me uses, the more ribbon I seem to have!

This week is really a tidy up week for OCD Me rather than a reinvent the wheel one. This is good, as I am theoretically busy…if I can ever get out of our development! Fabulous Crisann at 2 Peas asked us how many of us used sewing machines on our pages, and so far it has been mostly a resounding:
 BAAAAHAAAWWAAAAAHHA!!! LOL –from Luvs2lilboyz,
DO I sew? BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Oh sorry...um, no- scrappin usmc,
Uh - no!-weaser,
SEW what is that? Oh that was based on the class I took in Jr. High and was doing so poorly I was flunking-lovesribbons.
No! I don't sew on layouts!-scrappinJudy
She [MIL] keeps the machine, I give her my sewing. It's a win-win really-Kris74

The only real yes was:
LydiaInk- Yes! Mostly by hand because my sewing machine is generally stored away and I'm too lazy to set it up

My sewing machine lost its electrical attachment when we moved in 2008, and PA Me has not made it to Sears to get a replacement cord yet.
See you at the end of the week!



Organize your Stuff: Week 11 (round 3): Stickers Part 1

This week all the other stickers that were ignored last week! Whether you love them or hate them, stickers are a staple of the scrapbooking world.  When you're not looking they multiply...and multiply... and then invite their cousins. The big question is, how to sort them? By color? By theme? By manufacturer?

This is an area that I am actually eager to attack! Here was my results last round.  How I am going to attack the stickers now is under debate… but the POW is in negotiations as we speak. I did use Alpha stickers for the title on the recipe card further down.

Well, all of my personalities were in a super happy place this weekend! I went to CKC-Seattle and took a bunch of classes and learned a bunch of new techniques! It was AMAZING! Thank goodness that I was on a budget, or Inner Hoarder would have just gone to town with all the great shopping at the vendor’s Fair. The make and takes were just as awesome as the classes, and I already have a wish list for next year!

Here is the layout that I did for Kitchen Keepsakes Challenge. The theme for this was Ace of Cakes… and due to the quick turn around time… Fabulous Spouse made my cake (and took the pictures)! Ace of Cakes is about cakes with attitude rather than how to cook them, so Fabulous Spouse dug into his repertoire and brought his “A” game. Here is his awesome Tres Leche cake (recipe courtesy of Alton Brown). It may not have fondant figurines, but it tastes …mmmmmmm….

In Duff spirit, I brought out my aces and my scrapbook tools.  Like Tim the Tool Man, I used "more power" to get to work!  The goal was to bring this layout to the next level, but also not make something that was too bulky that I could not keep it in the kitchen.

My base page is from the Paper Loft, and I masked and glimmer misted it (new technique for me from CKC). Then, I used an old technique to apply layers of clear embossing powder on the playing cards (also from the Paper Loft), refrigerated the pieces, then cracked and inked them. Instant antique for pennies!

You too can use this to make any sticker look like aged ephemera!  Looking forward to showing you my progress at the end of the week!

Ta Dah!

Organize your Stuff: Week 10 (round 3): Alphabets Part 1

This week in the Organize your Stuff challenge is Alphas! Generically speaking, this week is alphabet stickers, but if you are really going for broke you could include your chipboard letters and letter stamps. I am saving mine for stamp week and chipboard week as they are stored there. Here is a card that I made for Tuesday Trio using acrylic alpha stamps (btw-Tuesday Trio is temporarily on hold, as our moderator is in the hospital, so please keep her in your prayers).

Depending how in tune you are with your inner OCD Me, Alphabet week is either super easy, or super hard. Last year, I went for super easy, and just rounded them up and dumped them in a Cropper Hopper folder. It was a total fast food, drive by clean up.

This time around, I have to do something else, even if it is just to put them in two folders! LOL! For most of the last five years, the POW has really limited my use of sticker alphas. She figured that the expense was not worth it, especially when you needed to buy 2 sets just to have enough E’s to finish your layout. However, just as tastes in close change from time to time, my love / hate with stickers has waxed again… and I mainly blame the Inner Hoarder’s love of shopping and Thickers. Thickers are dimensional alpha stickers (I used them on the football layout in my last post for the varsity letters). The only downside is that Thickers are notorious for losing their stickability (so OCD Me always adds glue dots to them).

Speaking of fast food, The POW has decided that the family needs to eat better, and that I really have no excuse (even though PA Me could give you list…) why I could not cook more home cooked meals. This is my first one. It is a layout of my attempt at from scratch, 3 hour, crock pot mac & cheese from Paula Deen. This is my entry for Week 1 in the Kitchen Keepsake’s Food Network challenge.

The only changes that I would make to the recipe is that I would use white pepper instead of black pepper, and I am unsure why you shred the cheddar, melt it with the butter, then put it in the crock pot and add the cold ingredients before turning it on. This left cheddar lumps that took until hour 2 to re-melt. Also, we added frozen peas (made on the stove in the last 10 min) and bacon bits to make the meal a little more balanced.

See you at the end of the week!