Signs + Cars + Me = Disaster!

I'm not a terrible driver...really. It just seems lately that I don't get along too well with signs. Not only do I plow them over, but I do it in the presence of those who will never let me forget. My first encounter was last winter in the hooptie while taking a co-worker of mine with me to work. We were having an early winter and the snow was coming down hard. So here I am, driving ever so carefully because of the snow, ice, and a last minute passenger.

I get to my parking lot at work safely, without slipping and sliding. My passenger's nerves seem to ease as we were turning into the parking lot. Now you have to picture the lot: It's a smallish lot surrounded by three buildings, it is completely flat, and everything is stark white from snow and ice. It's snowing buckets and anything that would be silver and white would be camouflaging by falling snow. This would include the two visitor signs that, by the way, did not have any reflective material. I've traversed this parking lot for the past two years, so I had an idea where these now camouflaged signs were. What made this slightly more difficult was that everyone was parking all over the lot. Apparently, when you can't see lines, you tend to make your own.

So here I am judging the orientation of the cars, and I'm driving up to my turn. I'm looking at a car that I can tell is close to where the visitors area is and sure enough, I see one of the signs. But I didn't see the other, and I thought the car was parked in front of the inside visitor's spot. So I make my turn. Needless to say, I found the sign. It caught the side of my quarter panel and my side mirror. Since I was driving a hooptie, I knew there was nothing taking out my mirror. So the sign not only falls flat, but complete breaks off the pole. My passenger screamed to the top of her lungs, then started laughing her butt off. The news spread so fast that I had everyone at work stop by my office to laugh at me and make jokes. Needless to say, I have yet to live this down. If anything good came out of it, they finally put reflective material on the old sign and the new one they replaced with the one I took out.

Now, fast forward to today. I'm not driving a hooptie, but a practically new Grand Marquis. A big storm is moving in and the dh is wanting me to park the car under a canopy at the station he works at to avoid the hail. So here I am, pulling up to the canopy. My dh and a couple of his buddies are standing outside and watching me pull in. Now, the spot that I'm pulling into has an old door, and an old sign propped up against the wall. I'm pulling in, and while I'm doing this, I'm trying to gauge how far way I am from the door and sign. Now, this is a fairly new car, and I'm thinking I have enough room to pull in a little closer. Wrong! To make a long story short, I bumped into the sign and door, shoving up into the wall. All this done in front of my dh and the buddies. My dh freaks because the car is fairly new, the buddies are rolling on the ground in hysterics. I'm five thousand shades of red.

The car is O.K., and I have already received my first ribbing. When I went back to pick up the car, I was backing out and my dh was waiting in his car behind me to pull out, and one of the buddies who witnessed the incident was in his car behind him. As I was backing out, I can see my dh backing up a little (there was about 20 feet between his car and mine). When I got home, my dh called to tell me that while I was backing up, the buddy behind him called and asked if he needed to back up another 10 feet, because with the day I was having, I'm liable to back into his car. HA!

I'll never live this down.

Here's all four completed cards. I used different colors for the layer and base of the card. 

Here's a shot of the completed card. I had a hard time getting a good shot of this card. 

Here's the completed card. The glare shows a bit of the gold metallic pigment ink from the Plastic Wrap Tech. 

Here's another background technique called Plastic Wrap. This will be the backgrounds and base for the finished card. 

Voomed In Image of stamped backgrounds 

Stamped Image on Shaving Cream Background (Image from Stampers Anonymous) 

Shaving Cream Backgrounds 

Shaving Cream Technique Pictures!

FINALLY!! I worked out the kinks with my bail out, cheap-o digital. The pictures are not as good as I want them to be, but they will work for now.

I made 4 cards today using my backgrounds made from the Shaving Cream Technique. Here's how I put them together with a little "background" on the backgrounds used:

The first picture shows the backgrounds before being made into cards. Playing with shaving cream can be messy, but having some foil to work over made clean-up easy. This was a technique that the rubber stamping group I'm in was working on 2 weeks ago (you can say I'm a bit behind). Anyway, to get the marbling, you take shaving cream and spray it on a flat surface (I used a paper plate) and add a few drops of ink from re-inkers. Take a stick or a toothpick and spread it around. Then take a pre-cut piece of cardstock and lay it on top. Pull up and scrape off the excess, and viola: you have a marbled background! Cool huh? The second picture shows the image (copyright Stampers Anonymous) stamped on the background.

For the layer and base of the card, I used another technique called Plastic Wrap, where you scribble markers on platic wrap, rub it together, and press your cardstock on the wrap. The marker I used was a gold metallic pigment ink marker.

The fourth and fifth pictures are different angles on my first completed card. The glared image shows the metallic background and the dimmed image is the completed card displaying the marbling from the shaving cream background(I love my cheap-o digital - NOT!).

The final picture shows the cards I completed so far. I tried doing several different color schemes to get different effects. I had a lot of fun getting my fingers inky today. I still have a few more cards to do and I hope it doesn't take me a couple of weeks to finish them!

One of these days I'll get to do everything I want to do....

I've been contemplating these past few weeks about the hobbies that I have or have dabbled in. Right now it's a combination of knit, crochet, rubberstamping, and scrapbooking. This past week, I was at Wal-Mart and spotted a Bead and Button magazine that had a beautiful beaded crochet necklace on the cover. Hmmm...beading using crochet and it's jewelry. Being the sucker for seductive glossies, I made my purchase.

After looking through the magazine for a week, I now have an itch to learn to bead. There are so many beautiful things being done with beads! Not to mention the fact I can crochet and bead at the same time. But where am I going to find the time!!!!! UGH!!! I know I'm not the only one who has a mulititude of hobbies. Have you ever felt the need to do something just to be creative? I must have my hands busy doing something that's truly my vision and of my making. Maybe I should say my hobby is being a Hobbyist! LOL! Finding the time: now that's the challenge!

Since my last blog, I worked on crocheted socks, shaving cream backgrounds, and continued to work on mastering the purl stitch in the Continental method of knitting. I have one of the crocheted socks done and am almost done with the other. I would have finished the other sock if I didn't run out of yarn! Well, I'm not worried about the dye-lot issue because these are "around-the-house" socks, and having a slight color variation is not going to rain on my parade.

I played with shaving cream backgrounds as a technique project with my rubberstamping group. I will post a picture as soon as I get this cheap-o digital figured out. That's my project this weekend! LOL! I've been putting it off. Maybe I will also have one of the cards completed too.

Hello World!

This is my first blog and I'm speechless. Go figure! Maybe I should have called this "brain fart." Anyway, I will mostly blog about knitting, crochet, rubber stamping, books, and whatever else that is on my mind. You will not find much about politics and religion since I'm surrounded by this everyday and I need a break! This is mostly to help me stay motivated in my crafts and reading outside of my normal everyday life activities.

I don't know how much I will post, but will try to do it at least three times a week. Right now, I have a cheapie digital camera, so you won't see many pictures. I'm petitioning my "Santa" for one at Christmas. We'll see.....