My New Blog Look... and Two Cards!

Hey y'all! That's what my kinfolk say in the south. I love it! I'm actually a little bit southern since my mother was born and raised in Mississippi and I was born in Alabama. But I digress (as usual). If you are reading this in Google Reader or similar, please click on over and check out my new blog design. This wonderfulness is by none other than Veronica McCollum of VK Design Co. I mean it when I say she is the easiest, most wonderful person to work with... not to mention, incredibly talented. She's actually pretty good at reading minds, too! I guess you'd have to be when trying to bring to life something that is a notion in someone else's mind. Anyway, we hope that it doesn't look too much like a pet store (ha ha). I absolutely love it, and am deeply grateful to Veronica for bringing my blog to life.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to say that I'm not really a cat lady, so to speak. I mean, I do have two cats... litter mates from a rescued mama... and had one other cat about 25 years ago. But that's it. One of my cats, a gray shorthaired tabby named Jazzy, is MY cat, though. She chose me as her Alpha and follows me around and "protects" me from the other marauding animals around here (that's her opinion... ha!). When I started getting into Splitcoast a little more than a year ago, I was trying to think of a clever handle. I suppose Jazzy must have been around at the time when The Cat's Meow popped into my head. (If you know me at all, you know I'm the queen of cliches.) So, I changed Cat to Craft, and viola! Not very exciting, but there you have it.

Onto a card! With all the activity of late, I've barely had time to do any stamping... in fact, almost none. It felt strange to finally sit down to stamp because I felt literally overwhelmed... I didn't know where to start or what to do first... and my mojo had completely left the building. So I turned to the best basic inspiration one can get, and that is a sketch challenge. I looked at several, actually, and so far have played with two.

The first is Viva la VERVE! March Week 3. Since I needed a masculine birthday card, I used the black rhinestone swirl from Prima rather than a ribbon. I didn't have room for the three "brads" to the left of the image, so I put them on the image instead in the form of more black rhinestones. This was because of the way I had to line things up to match the stamped image strip at the very top.

All paper, ink and stamps are from Papertrey Ink. The stamp set is Beyond Basic Borders by Pinefeather Press for Papertrey Ink (Heather Nichols).

The next card is loosely based on the current CCEE Stampers Sketch Challenge.


I had colored this digi stamp from Little Paper Shop awhile back and hunted around for some DP to match when I fell upon this scrap from K&Company's Berry Sweet Collection. I couldn't bear to cover up the design, so just skipped one of the sketch layers to make it work. It's hard to tell, but I sparkled up the scalloped mat with some glitter and used my atyou Spica gel pen on her shoes, belt, flower and butterfly. Although it doesn't photograph well, the other bit of bling I added in the corner... I believe that's also by Prima... really added the right touch. Something was just plain missing in that corner!

Please don't forget to support the SCS Cares Non-Raffle for the Victorian Bushfires Appeal. If you haven't looked lately, more wonderful prizes have been added to the gallery. And we really need to spread the word so that people will donate to this very worthy cause... and get a chance to win some wonderful prizes. I'm still offering a blog candy opportunity for those who post the logo and link on their blog.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!