ethaschuette.com

My second batch of Yak ATCs
For this little picture I used the scalloped frame of Accent Essentials (cricut) and put it to the right size in Design Studio, deleted the inner frame rectangle to cut a base. Then used the same frame again just slightly smaller and cut the real frame without anything deleted. This way I could sandwich the picture between the two layers. All was glazed and adhered with Diamond Glaze to make it nice and sturdy. The background was stamped with the new SU color “soft Suede” and Distress ink “Old Paper” using a CTMH stamp that I had from ages ago.

After my short excursion to the Winter Holidays, how a bout a nice and cozy sunflower

I just love this image of the flower in the shoe and the sentiment is so fitting! You can find these in one of the new sets from Elemental Doodles called Garden of Friends .
I used today’s SCS sketch challenge 239 which is wonderful for what I wanted to show! Today I am talking about how to anchor or ground your image over at the Cottage Studio . This sketch no matter which way you turn it wonderfully anchors your main image panel so that it is not just hanging there in the middle of the card. On the image itself, look closely what I did on the bottom. The image itself has a few little dots for shading, I took a fine tip brown marker and added a few more dots to put the shoe a bit more securely on the ground. That is all that was needed for this one, very easy
For three more examples how you can avoid “floating images”, head on over to the to read my short article .

Everybody is doing it and there is no escaping this theme!
Lisa presents us with a new Rumble at the Cottage today and her theme is Holiday items. Go see what everybody did
I chose to get a head start on making gift tags, often overlooked but so much fun! My tags open up to write a message and after all the excitement is done you can just cut off the back part or glue it together and have a nice ornament to hang:

I used my cricut (Joys of the Season) to cut the base ornament tags at 3″ dial size from shimmer card stock. The snowflakes and layers were cut at 2.5 ” dial size, white parts from Gardenia Petals Textured Elegance card stock.
Stamped the cute little cat ( Joy of the Season) and Sparkles snow baby ( Moonlight Christmas ) on white and colored them with dye inks and shimmerz . The star behind the cat was cut with using an extra snowflake ornament just cutting out the slightly irregular star shape from the ornament. Some silver peel-offs, crystals, fun flock and pearls finish the ornament nicely. Here are some closeups:

I can see myself making quite a few of these for the coming season, much fun once you figure out your sizes to cut and use

We had an amazing hailstorm come through the other night which six hours later still had about an inch of white pebbles on the ground. Needles to say the garden looked like trash… But look at this sexy thing, a true surviver who opened up just a day after:

Remember which ones are the male and which ones are the female parts of a flower? hehe, reminds me of a certain song by Marlene Dietrich way back..

Here is what I did yesterday for this week’s color and sketch challenge on SCS:

The combo of the colors and inchie-type squares reminded me of kitchen tiles, so this one is my kitchen fairy who is looking at her herbs . The fairy and “herbs” are on the Whispers in the Woods set and the half frame on the tiles was stamped with the frame on the Herbal Thoughts set.

Tuesdays is a Happy Day in this house. It is when I pick up my weekly CSA delivery . The fridge is stocked to the fullest with green goodness, my teeth stained from fresh local organic cherries, so sweet it is better than candy, and my kitchen table is a delight with my little piece of prairie and a big fat onion flower LOL…

Yep, the farm doesn’t only give you fresh veggies, eggs, fruit, meat, but also flowers. Gotto love it!!

Lets talk some yakky stuff… did you know that:
The fat content of yak meat is low (3.8%, 1/16th the fat of beef).
The cholesterol level is under 50.
Yak meat is high in protein (22.95%), and has less calories than beef or chicken breast!
and that you can feed 3 yak on what it takes to feed 1 beef cow!

Well, with that in mind, I had a LOT of fun making my first batch of Animal ABC ATC’s for the letter Y!

I originally had ordered a pretty cool Yak rubber stamp but after waiting for some two months for it to arrive, numerous emails to the company, I finally found out that the company was closed, website shut down until further notice due to illness. Hmm, ok. I needed a Yak!!
There are several Yak farms in my neighborhood and thankfully High Country Critters allowed me to use some of their digital images for my cards

I stamped a background with several scenic type stamps from Sutter, grass, rocks and brush. The big Y was cut with the cricut (Storybook) altered with Design Studio to a size that was most pleasing. The Yak head is a bit propped up on a pop up dot. If you have ever seen the Colorado country side in spring, you know why I had to add two little blue flowers

It was dark and stormy and VERY ROCKY at the shore ….. looks to me as if this lighthouse is inside a rocky cave kinda cool!

Come and visit me at The Cottage Studio for some exploration of this interesting background technique. The card shown here is not completely representative of the tech but it was my favorite from the bunch

Elemental Doodles has added a few FREE downloads to their site. These are printouts with frames that you can use for stamping ATCs or Candy Bar wrappers with a frame. Since I’m not a candy bar girl, I chose the ATC frames to play with – big surprise here, yes? … Find all downloads here .
I picked the oval frames, printed them out on a medium weight beige card stock and stamped my main images right in the center of the frames. You get a whole sheet of 8 ATCs with one printout:

You can see that the oval prints just very faint so that the line actually will disappear when you stamp over it. I used the oval simply as a guide to wildly stamp small images from the Coffee Cafe Set in various inks, the spoons were silver embossed. Here is a progression of the stamping, from right to left adding more images along the oval:

While stamping the small images around a shape, you want to turn the stamp frequently so that the image goes in different directions. This is easily accomplished with using not blocks but acrylic RODS for stamping. You can just turn them between your fingers while stamping:

Where to get those? Easy, Elemental Doodles has these in their catalog here . They come three different widths in one package and those are perfect for all the tiny little stamps.

OK you knew I could not finish these ATCs without a bit of cutting…., I stamped the larger images again on beige card stock, colored a bit and sprayed all except the sack of coffee with glaze:

When using small stamps for background decorations I like stamping along an oval template/mask and that is what I did with the horizontally stamped ATCs from the top picture:

There are only three ATCs this way because I used one to cut my oval mask just lay it on top of the printed oval and wildly stamp the coffee beans around it as a frame. On the tops I stamped the coffee sentiment, isn’t it wonderful how you can shape the polymer stamps to your liking??

Just lay your acrylic block over the oval, look down from top and adhere your stamp following the curve, ready to go!

A bit of piercing and some more background stamping finishes these nicely.

Of course I made a few trader pockets to send these in:

You can find the templates and instructions for the pockets on the Elemental Doodles Tutorial Page .