Happy Saturday!

This morning started with me spending time to do some organizing, tossing and cleaning in my craft room.  My last CHA project was mounted onto chipboard and packaged up to ship.  And so two packages ready for mailing out.  Yay!

After getting those ready, I indulged myself with a little eye-candy in the form of the stamps and art on the Whimsical Ink Sorority website.  I love some nice fairy / mermaid stamps – and these look CUTE enough to color…all night long.

Afterwards, I spent the better part of today, shepherding my girls around the neighborhood so they could sell Girl Scout Cookies.  Tis the season.  You cannot say 'No' to the two of them at your doorstop in their little vests.  I know, it isn't fair – but they tag-teamed.  It seemed everybody in the neighborhood placed an order on EACH of their forms.  Thank you, neighbors!

Then I took Bri to the fabric store to spend her Christmas money from Grandma and Grandpa M.  The girl got inspired after we spent another Grandma/Grandpa gift on a few doll outfits on Etsy.  I wanted her to appreciate the handmade and also see that it doesn't have to come from the AG store to be amazing.  She got three lovely little handmade outfits for the price of one 'authentic' one.  Score one for Etsy. To both of our delight's, they had patterns for clothing for 18" dolls.  She found a pattern, and we purchased the fabric and notions for a couple of the pieces.  Let's hope she is better at sewing than I am!  On the drive home she was envisioning a future as a fashion designer, attending Parsons and making a million dollars on Etsy.  Watch out world!

While at the store, I found a 'Transformers Bumblebee'-yellow for my son to paint his Pinewood Derby car.  He and Daddy worked on building it today.  Two coats of paint have been applied.  He was really patient and did a good job.  Now I'm going to add a couple of pieces of tape to the dried paint so he can get the black stripes just perfect tomorrow.

But now that I've got their creativity flowing, I needed to end the day on a creative note.

So when this stamp set first met my eye – I knew I had to have it.

It's not often you find a great mixture of natural elements, textures, transparency and framing in one set.  So of course all of these pieces needed to come together. 

I first stamped the large grapes.  Then I masked off this piece and stamped the oval frame.  Finally, I masked off both of these pieces and stamped the wine bottle / glass inside the frame.  This is the resulting compound image.

I love how the stamp artist gave the glass for the wineglass 'thickness', representing the liquid inside as being set apart from the bottom and sides of the glass.  You don't often see that in a stamp illustration.  Also, the wine bottle is placed just slightly behind the glass, which allows me to mimic the transparency of the glass to show the blue of the label through the glass surface.  Shiny surfaces are also represented, whether with the highlight mark on the glass, or the top of the wineglass / wine bottle's liquid surface, with the line disappearing at a point.  Brava!

So given all these lovely images, and an opportunity to color them with my Copics — here is the result.  A wine bottle tag.  My husband loves to attend fund-raisers at a local college with our neighbor and bid on fine wines.  So often they are gifting a bottle to each other as well.  So I'm ready for the next time!

I traced a larger oval mimicking the frame element and letting the larger pieces fall outside of this cutwork.  This is a wine bottle tag, which simply has a hole punched out of the top, to fit over the bottleneck.  A slit is cut along the edge of the circle, to allow it to fit over a larger winebottle opening or cork.

I embellished it with a Tim Holtz/Advantus metal corner and a Prima Grape Vine in glorious gold.  To finish, I ran a Brilliance gold inkpad around the edge of the oval to tie them together and wrote a quick note along the border.

 
And so now we come to your favorite part of the post.  I found an amazing kit from the Bad Girls' Club in my office today.  As much as I know I'd love to use it – I also know that my cup seriously runneth over in the craft supplies department.  So I'm going to give it up.  Painful – but necessary.

It's the Butterfly Kisses kit from April.  Worth $43.00 – it needs to go to a loving home where it will land on many lovely projects SOONer than it will here.  Even if you don't win the big box, folks – you should check out Wendy Rago's kits.  AmAzInG.  And I hear she is going into manufacturing now.  A must-see booth at CHA for me personally.

Well I hope you have a LOVELY Sunday.  We'll be off to my best friend's house tomorrow to make Valentines' Day cards for the soldiers with about 20 kids and their mommies.  I lent a huge bin of pink patterned paper, flowers and two heart-shaped punches to the cause.

Have a great rest of your (hopefully long) weekend.