Hello everyone!  I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  2010 – can you believe it?

I know I have not posted in a while – things have been so busy – with you too I’ll bet.  

One thing I want to mention up front – I had a total hard drive failure on my main computer over the holidays and I’ve spent the last 4 days trying to restore everything from back up (yikes! what a mess!).  If you contacted me by e-mail and I have not responded, please send your mail again.  It might have gotten lost in the restore process.

On the plus side – we got to spend time visiting with extended family over the Holidays - which was great (although I have to admit that my pants are all a little tighter after all the partying!). 

We also added a new little member to our family!

Meet Chesterton (Chester for short) – our new puppy.  He is very cute and really quite a gentleman for a puppy. 

(In case you are wondering, he’s named after G.K. Chesterton, the writer.   We are really hoping he has common sense too!)

 He is a mix of golden retriever and poodle.  We have some allergies in our extended family so I wanted a poodle mix to help prevent any problems.

Right now he is a kitchen dog  (till he learns proper bathroom etiquette). 

If you are allergic to dogs, don’t worry.  Chester is not allowed in the store (although I bet he’d love to chew on the paper crafts!  You should see him go to town on newspaper).

Hmmm…  maybe a little about the card…..

I used the Bella and Bronte clear stamp by Mo Manning (my oldest DD simply ADORES this dog – just like Bella.  The other girls like him but J is head over heels).

The image is colored with Copics.  Here are the colors I used. 

One thing I wanted to mention – sometimes it can be hard to blend red copics – especially the darker reds.  They are very heavily loaded with pigment and can travel outside the lines more easily when you blend.  It can also be harder to “correct” mistakes with the colorless blender with the reds.  The pigment is so saturated that it tends to travel everywhere instead of nicely going back where it is supposed to. 

One thing to try is to color your red, and then use a lighter shade to remove color where you want highlights, instead of coloring lighter and then blending in the darker.   I did this with Bella’s boots on the card. 

You just need to be careful not to over saturate the red with alcohol and push it outside the lines.  If you do the color removal while the base red is still damp, the highlighted area will have soft edges.  If you want harder edges, wait for the red base to dry.  

It just a technique to try and see if you like it or not.  I use color removal for highlighting quite often (and not just with red).  Maybe because I don’t plan ahead enough???

 To make the ribbon slide tag,  I just cut and embossed my ribbon slide die once in white and once in blue.  Then I used a sharp craft knife to cut around the inside on the tag.  Then just layer the white in the blue.

Here are all my card pieces.  All of the supplies came from the Frosted Winter Paper kit.  The kit has patterned paper, cardstock, ribbon and embellishments.  The colors are really great.

Well, that’s my news for today.  Stay tuned for some exciting new happenings in the Paper Garden Projects store.  We are going to be 2 years old in just a couple months!

Say goodbye Chesterton….