Category: Photography

Helloooooo! Did you have a great weekend!? I sure hope so. I had a really nice weekend with just the right amount of business and quiet. The hubs and I went to Berkeley on Saturday and spent a very nice day together. I was volunteering – reading scholarship applications – on campus and the DH was nice enough to drop me off where I needed to be (in the rain) and then pick me up later. We also went to Scrapbook Territory and Paper Source, where I got some new crafty goodies. On the way home, we stopped in Davis and had a most lovely Italian dinner – really just such a nice day together. Sunday was spent in the craft cave making some projects for Poppystamps and to post here. A fine rainy day at home…perfect.

My newest crafty obsession is hexagons! Have you noticed? They're everywhere! Such a cool shape and they have an old fashioned vibe. I even started a hexagon Pinterest Board!  People are making the cutest things! I was very inspired and today I'm sharing my first project – I'm sure there will be more to come! I have a million ideas in my head right now…

I went for the shabby-chic-grandmas-quilt look for this card. I picked colors I like for Spring – happy, cheery colors. It's really easy to form the hexagons together – just like quilting – into flowers.

I sewed around the edges of the cream base to add more home-spun feel. I distressed the edges and also sanded the yellow paper…

Here is the die set I used to make this card. I found this on eBay – fifteen different sizes in one kit! Perfect! The biggest one is huge – probably won't use that one! I like that there are teeny tiny ones too.

Here are a couple of the other hexagon things I have on my desk right now….

So, yeah, I had to cut out each hexagon one at a time…took a while!

Ready for assembly!

I used some of my favorite embellies – ribbon, buttons, and pearls, to make a finishing touch on my sentiment.

I have some Instagram photos to share today too. CLICK here if you want to follow me on Instagram! It's one of my favorite iPhone apps and I use it all the time. If you have an Instagram account let me know, so I can check out your photos too! All these photos were taken and 'processed' directly from my phone. LOVE.  The past two weeks I was on the road for work in the Central Valley and managed to get a few good snaps…

This first one is Lake Kaweah, near where I was working – the rain clouds were rolling in….

My co-workers and I had a really nice dinner one evening….

This was one of the trees out in front of our work site…with a beautiful blue sky.  

This next one was taken on campus on Saturday…

This was my favorite photo of the day on Saturday – looking back at the main library and the Campanile Tower which is the center of campus… I really like the Instagram effect on this one.

More beautiful blosssoms we found in Davis…

Whew…okay…that was a lot of info for a Monday! I hope you found something you liked here today. I appreciate you stopping by and I hope you have a fantastic week! XOXO 

Hi peeps! Today I'm posting a card I made for the Moxie Fab World Blog! I love their challenges, and it's been too long since I entered one. This month's challenge is Cure for the Winter Blues… The challenge was to make a project using navy blue as the predominant element. Right up my alley!

When I think of navy blue, I automatically thing navy and white, nautical, crisp colors, pops of yellow or red… I adore navy and white together. So that's what I knew I wanted to use. Next to decide what images and embellies. I was having such a hard time deciding….so I went with whatever was sitting on my desk! I rather like the result.

I had this brand new San Francisco Stamp from Penny Black on my desk and it called to me! I stamped it in navy blue ink and didn't color it. That was hard – to resist the urge to color! The fence die is new from Memory Box and that was sitting on my desk too. In the back of my head was a photograph I took last year in San Francisco….you can see the photo at the end of my post.

I wanted a sentiment that referred to leaving my heart in San Francisco. I had this stamp in my stash. I use it all the time. I got out my stamp-a-ma-jig to line up my words. I blocked off part of the stamp and inked it and then blocked off the other parts that I didn't want. Voila…this saying in a line!

Here's a close up of that teeny tiny fence!

I popped a bright red heart on the top using my Epiphany Shape Studio Heart 25 tool and some red paper. Added some grey clouds (a Memory Box die) to look like foggy San Francisco clouds and that finished it off!

Here is the photo I was referring to! Cool, huh? I took this from the top of Lombard Street looking out at the Bay Bridge and Coit Tower to the East.

Thanks for coming by my blog today! You have until the 11th if you want to enter the Cure for the Winter Blues Challenge! Join me? CLICK here for the deets. Have a wonderful day. 

Whew….I have a lot to share today! I had a super fun, busy weekend full of friends and laughter and food and crafting and pictures and oooh boy. I needed to go back to work to rest up! Hahaha. Happy Heart Day to you and your family. It's Valentine's Day! I'm sorry it's here because I feel like I was just getting in my crafty groove with hearts and stuff. I put all the Valentine crafty things away last night…until next year. I have one last card to share with you for the holiday.

As you probably know…I love banners! I'm crazy about 'em actually. Love them on cakes, and cards and hanging up for a party and all that. I even have a Pinterest Board called Banner Madness (click here). I wanted to make a pretty red and cream banner card so I got out some supplies and went to town with it! This card is definitely "more is more!"

Each little banner is different, but they are all unified by using the same papers, hearts, and butterflies. I adore crisp, bright red with cream.

Before I started, I went around the craft room and got out all kinds of yummy things I thought would go together. The pennants were cut from a Papertrey Ink die set and the hearts are also a Papertrey Ink die set. The butterflies were punched from Martha Stewart punches. The beautiful lace ribbon is from my sweet pen pal Holly in The Netherlands! I had to pretty much tear the whole room apart to find those teeny tiny clothespins!!!

This is the process of laying everything out first to see what looked best…before gluing it all together. I decided to layer two colors on each pennant.

Here they are all strung on a pretty piece of lace. I inked the edges of everything with linen distress ink just to make it look more vintage.

I busted out the sewing machine and made a free form edge around the cream paper. The message was stamped in brown ink.

Now, somewhere along in the process, Mr. Buddy decided to hop onto my stamping table and have a look…and he liked this one the best! Bad kitty!

Friday night my friend CJ met me at Paper Garden to take a class from the fabulous Ms. Julie Ebersole! CJ is an amazing baker/cake decorator. She brought me the most adorable (and delicious) little box of truffles she made! Aren't the pretty? They tasted so goooooooood!

In class, we made five fun fold cards. I think this idea was my favorite. The card lays flat for mailing but then pops up into a little diorama. SO cute! I will be making some more of these – I have some ideas in my head already. Thanks for a great class Julie!

Saturday I spent the day with some of my stamping gal pals….all day….eating yummy food and stamping and laughing and being silly and carefree! Sunday the hubs and I decided to do our Valentine's Day celebrating. It's too hard to go out on a Tuesday night with the crowds and such…so we just did it a little early. First we went for a nice long drive in the car just to relax and snap some pics. Then we went for a tasty dinner at PF Chang's! Had great service and a wonderful time. Made it home in time to watch the Grammys. It was a perfect weekend!

Some of you might know that I LOVE my iPhone. No, I mean like I REALLY love my iPhone! hahaha. I have about 20 photography apps and like to try different things with my phone photos. One of my favorite apps is Instagram. I like the different filters and effects and I like the fact that you can "follow" people's feeds and and share your pix. You can CLICK HERE to see my Instagram stuff. I thought I would share some of my favorite photos from Sunday's drive. 

One last picture…our daffodils have started blooming in our front yard! They are so fresh and bright and perfect right when they bloom. Makes me happy!!! Okay, that's enough of my yammering on for one day.

 HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!

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Happy New Year! It's the Year of the Dragon…and guess what, I'm a Dragon! So…it must be my lucky year! I think that 2012 is going to bring good things. Today is the first day of Chinese New Year. Every year I like to make Chinese New Year cards for my friends. Click here for my 2010 Year of the Tiger card and click here for my 2011 Year of the Rabbit card. Do you know what year you are?  

For this year's cards I went back to traditional red, black and gold. It was hard to find a Dragon stamp! The one I used is from Judikins. Here is the finished card:

The gold embossed characters are for double happiness. The dragon was stamped in vivid red ink onto a sheet of vellum and layered over another piece of paper.

In this photo you can see the white paper underneath the vellum. On that paper, I stamped a large Chinese character background and then some green bamboo. Both of those stamps are from Hero Arts. It was hard to get it to really show in the photo. But, you get the idea!

Here is the inside of the card. I wanted to carry the bamboo and green over into the inside to bring it all together. This symbol is for good luck.

Here are my envelopes….

I am a complete Starbucks groupie! I couldn't believe it when I found these SUPER cool Starbucks cards and sleeves last month! They were gone so fast! I must have timed it just right to get some. I actually collect Starbucks cards….I need to do a post on that one of these days….I have some good ones! And, these are a great addition to the collection.

The DH ordered me this amazing Starbucks Bearista bear on eBay from Taiwan! I have a Year of the Tiger one too.

I took this photo in San Francisco's Chinatown last year,  and I love the color, the movement, and the drama of all those flags and lanterns. It really captures the essence of the place.

Thank you for stopping by my blog today! Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy New Year everyone! Hope it's a good one, and best wishes for Health, Happiness and Prosperity in the Year of the Dragon!

Wanda!  

Hi! Today is the hubs' birthday and I thought I would share his birthday card and also share our outing to San Francisco yesterday to celebrate his birthday! My husband was born in San Francisco and he is a HUGE 49er football fan. Right now he's in the family room watching the game.  It is so hard to make him cards. But, I got an idea…this is his 49th birthday….so I made him a 49er card! Yeah! He totally flipped out and loved it. That made me really happy. I hope you get a kick out of it too.

I printed the SF logo off the computer on high print quality on good cardstock and then cut it out. I wrote the sentiment on the computer as well. The rest was inspired by the team colors of red, gold and white.

I can't remember where these chip board numbers are from…maybe Basic Grey? I painted them with gold craft paint before adding the glitter. I have found that if you don't put something (color) down first then the glitter looks dull. I LOVE making glittery numbers!

The stripe accent is based on the team's uniform pants. They have a stripe just like this down each leg. I cut the sentiment into a banner – cuz it just looked sporty!

Finished off the whole thing with some stars punched out of gold paper…

We got up yesterday morning, stopped at Starbucks, and headed into the city. From our house, we can be in downtown San Francisco in about 90 minutes. Oddly, there was no traffic yesterday! We stopped off on Treasure Island to snap some pics. It was sort of foggy and hazy, so the photo isn't really clear. I never get tired of this view.

First stop…Union Square…for shopping and people watching…and, boy, was there good people watching yesterday!

Tiffany's…Ah… I still have the first thing I ever bought there…my first pair of real pearl stud earrings. I think I've had them 25 years and I still wear them all the time. So many memories from shopping downtown.

All of a sudden, we heard all these police sirens and bullhorns. Weird, right? Well, turns out the police were clearing the street for the "Occupy San Francisco" protestors to come through.

On the top floor of Macy's is a Cheesecake Factory restaurant that has outdoor seating. It's really the best view of Union Square, and we like to go hang out there and have a meal when we are shopping. Here's the view from our table down onto the square, with the tree and the ice rink. It was a gorgeous evening!

This is a snow princess from the Christmas department at Macy's. This just really caught my eye. I still can't decide if it's beautiful or sort of creepy!!! What do you think?

I liked this little guy…so happy and retro just smiling away…

Not sure what was up with the harlequin elephants!

Mark took this shot with the fish-eye lens on his camera! 

This shot came from my iPhone at dinner…not the best photo quality, but it captured the moment! Cheers! And…Merry Christmas!

This one is also from my iPhone – with the instagram app. I LOVE that app! You can make your photos look old, or black and white, all kinds of stuff. I really love how this picture came out with the vintage feeling.  

One last stop on the way home – back at the same spot on Treasure Island to capture the city with her Christmas lights on! So breathtaking. This picture is better if you click on it and make it bigger.  

Okay, friends, let the frenzy continue! Have a wonderful week! 
  

Hi everyone! Greetings and salutations on this fine November day! Happy weekend to you all! Well, it's been a busy week here on the blog, what with all of the Taylored Expressions release week festivities and all that good stuff. BUT…we missed a very important day…my birthday! Hahaha. My bday was on Thursday. I'm a gal who loves a birthday, lemme tell ya. I love to get cards in the mail, to go out to dinner with my friends and to generally be spoiled by the hubs. Always have, and always will, love a birthday! In honor of this momentous occasion I have a birthday card to share with you. I also have some snaps to share of our fun-filled day spent in San Francisco.

First off, here's a card inspired by, and made with, the uber cute new Sidewalks Collection from October Afternoon. Do you not love that company? I love the retro colors they use and the happy prints. I made two cards using the same papers, actually. I'll post the other one a different time.

The pretty red doily is made from the big die from PTI! Nice! I cut out a pretty yellow border to offset the word paper.  

Added a nice big shabby chic rose to the whole thing and then used the stickers that came with the paper collection. No stamping involved! The Happy Birthday wording is a rub on!

If you're still with me…I have some photos to share too. I didn't really know what I wanted to do on my birthday. The hubs and I both took the day off from work and late Wednesday I decided it would be fun just to go hang out in San Francisco for the day, taking pictures, and shopping, and eating…you know – the good stuff in life. It ended up raining for much of the day, but we got some cool shots before the rain started.

FIrst we stopped off on Treasure Island, which is in the middle of the bay. Best view of the city and the bridges! The clouds were starting to roll in…the sign of things to come.

We went to this bakery I love called Miette. I have their cookbook and love it so much. They make yummy cupcakes and macarons.

For lunch we had a salami sandwich and cupcakes. Yum, no?

We hit up a couple of favorite art stores – Flax and Blick Art. Blick has the GIANT 'tower o' Copics' that I so would love to bring home with me. Unfortunately it would not fit in my purse! Every color in every shape… When I win lotto that baby is mine! Flax has the amazing paper room! Rows and rows of shelves with handmade papers from around the world. You look in a big catalog at the swatches and then go and find the corresponding cabinet. WOW. Been going here for years – it makes me want to be creative.

I had some fun with my iPhone photo apps – Instagram and Hipstamatic. I like to experiment with the images. Sometimes they come out neat, and sometimes not. I'm posting a few of those too.

Mark bought me an amazing leopard print cover for my iPad at the Tory Burch boutique. SCORE! It seems classy and cool at the same time. Rawr. LOVE. Thanks honey!

We did not buy these…but, man, aren't they pretty?

Thank you so much for coming by the blog today! I hope your weekend is just fantastic! See you soon!

Hi! How's your week going? Mine is going great…but fast! The DH and I spent a lovely and rainy day in Napa on Monday and then yesterday we did some more driving around and photo spotting. Today we've been at home taking care of business and phone calls, etc. Generally taking care of things. Tomorrow I have lunch plans with a gal pal and before you know it…poof…the week will be over. It's been a nice break from the office and lots of sleeping in. Hope you have been having a good week!

Today's card is a CAS Halloween card with a cool Bat cutout made from a EK Success punch. This idea just popped into my head because I kept thinking…what am I going to do with that giant bat punch?? haha.

I punched a bat out of some crisp, black paper and then layered that piece over some orange and white gingham. I popped that piece up over some orange paper with foam tape.

The Happy Halloween sentiment is from Amuse Stamps…don't you love the cheery mix of fonts? I had to add a couple of blings…even though it is CAS!

I took a ton of pictures in Napa on Monday but haven't had the chance to decide which ones to post, and haven't had the time to watermark all of them. I really wanted to share just a few today, though. I hope you enjoy the scenes! 
 

Thank you so much for coming by today to see what I'm up to! Have a wonderful day today!

Hi! Are you having a fun Labor Day Weekend!? I sure hope you are having fun in the sun with your friends and loved ones. We have been having a lovely weekend so far…so much so that I wanted to share with you! This post has a ton of pictures and some of this and some of that. I'll put the card pictures first in case that's what you came to see! I have some funny pictures of Buddy too – since I know his fans have been waiting for some new pix of that handsome devil! Thanks for coming by today. Here goes nothin'….

This weekend was the Five Year Anniversary celebration of the Paper Garden Boutique and Dave Brethauer came back to see us in Sac-town to celebrate in style. I never miss a chance to hang out at PG or to take a class with Dave. Dave also designed a line of stamps just for the Paper Garden! That is very cool! I bought them…of course! Hee hee. Beautiful flowers and sayings…

Whenever Dave comes to town,  I like to make him a card using his stamps…you know he is the owner/designer for Memory Box Stamps. His Autumn Collage image is a total favorite so I used that to make him this card:

I cut out the center of a piece of paper using my Nesties and then later mounted it over the top of a cream piece of cardstock with the stamped image. I think the tone on tone of the kraft helps keep it masculine.  

Here is the beautiful stamp. Instead of stamping in black, I used dark brown. I stamped a second image and colored the leaves to cut out to add on the outside of my frame.  

Colored pencils did the trick for this card… 

Here are three of the lovely ladies from Paper Garden! Chelsea, Stephanie and Kelly! They make me happy!  Aren't they beautiful?

 Here's Dave in the classroom! A full house, as usual…

This is one of the cards we made in class… 

 And here's another one…This is one of the flower images he designed for the store…

Okay…so you thought my day was over??? After the festivites at Paper Garden, we drove to the bay area to watch the opening game of College Football Season! YAYAYAYAYAY! I am a die hard fan for my school and we go to games whenever we can. This year, our stadium is being renovated. The old girl was built in 1921 and she needed retro-fitting and updating. This is how she currently looks:  

Well, as you can see, ain't no football happening there this year! Yikes! So, all of our games are being played in San Francisco. The game yesterday was played at Candlestick Park (home of the 49ers). It was weird to see the stadium all painted for us instead of the 49ers! I've been to a million games there before, but never like this! Ha. It was a gorgeous day for opening the season!  

This made the trip even better! At least for right now, we are undefeated! We win some and we lose more, but I love my Bears no matter what. Great start to the season!

We had planned to stop on the way home and take night pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and the city. It was SOOOO foggy that you couldn't even SEE the bridge! We'll have to save that for another time. We did manage to take a few pix of the Palace of Fine Arts though. It was gorgeous at night!  

Today was time for Mr. Buddy to have a bath and a comb-out. Kind of a kitty spa day if you will. He got his nails trimmed and then a lovely warm bath, followed by a warm towel, a style, and a nap in the sun. I thought it would be fun to share some comparison pictures with you guys! Okay, so here's Buddy in 2007 in our kitchen sink…. 

And here's Buddy today in our kitchen sink! OMG.  

2007….. 

Today! I would say he grew just a bit! Um, yeah, like 17 pounds!!!! He's not really mad, just cold. But, we put the towels in the dryer for him so he can be toasty when he gets out.

 
I hope you enjoy the rest of your long weekend! HUGS!  

Hi Friends! Happy weekend! Yippeeeeeee! This week was a bit rough – especially at work. Yikes. Lots going on at my job. Isn't that true of everyone's job right now? I was so happy to see this week be over and I had a very nice dinner with a sweet friend last night to start the transition into weekend time. I have a fun card to share with you today…inspired by, of all things, a purse! One of my gal pals at work brought in the most adorable purse and as soon as I saw it I was inspired. My little crafty brain cells started thinking up a card! It was mostly the color – bright and happy and vivid. You'll see…

Here is the purse that inspired me! I loved the raw edge on the denim, and the crisp white stitching. Also, that pop of pure white and yellow is perfect in the simplest way. Love.

I wanted to mimic the stitching, so I busted out the sewing machine and stitched a free form double border around the blue paper. The buttons are from Stampin' Up. I love their buttons.

The flowers and the words were cut out using my Cricut machine. I tried two different fonts and ended up liking the one that looks like typewriting (Doodletype). The flowers are from the George cartridge. I wanted to incorporate that yellow ribbon…but it didn't work out. I put three flowers on at first, but then I added more later. I couldn't help it.

I hope that LIFE IS GOOD to you this weekend!!!

Here's a little tidbit from our dinner last night! Beautiful early evening light in the restaurant on a gorgeous plate of Caprese salad. MMMMM.

My sweet friend and her doggies Mezzo and Aria! I went over to her adorable house after dinner and we chatted some more…

And, then, when I got home, this is what I found passed out on my work table….HA! What do you suppose this one is dreaming about? Have a wonderful day everyone! Thank you for coming by to visit my blog. Mwah.

Okay…so it looks as if I'm all into butterflies again! (Remember Butterfly week a while back?) I just can't seem to get enough of those pretty creatures! They are literally popping up everywhere! Today's post is full of some Summer stuff – a couple of cards and some photos…stuff. I hope your weekend is a terrific one. We are doing house projects and a mountain of laundry. Hopefully later I can get some stamping in and maybe a movie. Thank you for visiting today! Taylored Expressions sneak peeks start again on Monday – August – wow. How did that happen? Anyhoo…

First up, some butterfly cards. I was inspired recently by a pretty color scheme and wanted to do my take on it. Soft yellow, a pretty coral pink and a light blue. YUM. That's the first card here:

A simple design – could be used with any sort of punch. Mittens for Winter, Flowers, Leaves… I added a pop of color along the bottom with the yellow scallops. I used light brown ink to put some text on the butterflies with the big Hero Arts Friendship text stamp. They seemed too plain without it. Glue down the middle only - to get them to pop off the page.

Okay, so I was closing up shop after making the top card and something came into my head…GINGHAM! You guys know that comes into my head very often! hahaha. So I made the exact same card with gingham butterflies and substituted green for blue! Yay! The sentiments on both cards are from PTI.  

The gingham butterfly card I made as a thank you card for my friend Jane who invited me up to the hills for dinner last night. I brought her a big bunch of sunflowers and that card. As I was driving up to her house I saw these AMAZING clouds in the distance. I had to take a snap out the windshield! Isn't that neat?  

And this is why Jane is my friend…(not really)…because she had lemon drop fixin's chilling in the freezer awaiting my arrival! Score! She found this cool lemon sugar stuff at BevMo and put it on the rims.

Um, yes please!!!!!

Wonderful! Drinks followed by a wonderful dinner and wonderful conversation late into the night. A perfect Friday evening.

I bought some Ranier cherries earlier in the week and went to eat them this morning and they were so lovely I had to take pictures. Yeah, I take pictures of everything! I think they're so colorful and simply perfect as only nature can do.  

Life is just a bowl of cherries! Happy Saturday!

Hello everybody! I hope that you all had a wonderful weekend full of summer fun! I am on my last day of a four day weekend and just hanging out in the craft studio making a card to share with you. My theme for today is the ocean…. Friday DH and I went for a marvelous, relaxing, wonderful drive to the Point Reyes National Seashore. We spent the entire day driving, talking, exploring and taking pictures. No TV, no internet, and, practically no people.

I love the ocean. Really love the ocean. It is my favorite place to be. Sometimes I even get a physical longing to be near the sea. The fresh air, the fog, the cold, the sand, the smell. All of it. One day when I win lotto I will buy us a home by the sea. Until then, I am very lucky that it is just a short drive away. I took a lot of pictures on Friday (no surprise right?) and the pictures inspired me to make an ocean card this morning!

I found paper in the lightest shade of beach-glass green. I cut out the words with my Cricut and glued them onto my background paper. (This idea was totally inspired by this post from Heather Nichols)  Yes, this did take forever…and required tweezers! I love the end effect though!

I made the coral about five different colors and ultimately ended up using a green ink that matched the paper exactly. I added a few light green blings and mounted the top piece with foam tape. This card matches my mood. :-) 

Here are (some of) my ocean pictures from Friday. I hope you enjoy them! This first one is from North Beach.  

This pretty algae is the other inspiration for my card. Not the color, but the shape and texture, made me get out that coral stamp. I loved how everything in this picture was in shades of tan, white, and stone. It was so pretty.  

This is Point Reyes Lighthouse. You have to walk about 1/2 a mile out and then walk down 300 stairs to get to it. I wasn't feeling up to the trek, but DH went and he took this awesome photo!  

This is looking down from the Muir Beach overlook. 
 

Drake's Beach inhabitants!

The drive itself is lovely and peaceful…Isn't this a pretty house?  

All over the area there are working dairy farms that have been here for hundreds of years.  

Happy cows come from California!  

The rest of the pictures are my favorite flower pictures from the day.   

And finally…the lovely San Francisco Bay!

DH makes these great videos of trips for us and he made one for me to share today. It's about three minutes long and has more of the ocean pictures…set to music.   

I hope that you have a wonderful week! Thank you for popping by today – you make me happy!

 
Wanda