Autumn Abundance & Halloween 2014 LTCs

Autumn Abundance: Colorful Tree

Today I am gonna squeeze two LTCs into one blog post :)  

This is my third year participating in Housepitality Hostess's autumn LTC swap and this is the third of my cards using my plain tree for different seasons.

For the background I tore pages from a book and stamped my tree trunk on them.  I took some Tim Holtz Distressed Ink and rubbed it around the edge with a small piece of felt.  I cut up fall colored papers with my Bind it All and used them as leaves.  I just glued them on with school glue.  I glued the whole thing to brown paper.  I got to looking at it and decided that it needed another stamp.  So, I carved up the leaf and stamped it orange on the cards.  I think this is my favorite of these season cards.

(Spring: http://wchristmas6.blogspot.com/2014/06/flowering-trees-ltc.html)

(Summer: http://wchristmas6.blogspot.com/2014/08/mixed-media-tree.html)

Halloween 2014: Spooky Spider

I am also in the Halloween 2014 tracker and the cards are due just a few days apart.

I got the idea for this card on Pinterest.  I took some mixed media paper and Mod Podged strips of black tissue paper on it.  When it was dry, I wrapped the white yarn around the card to look like a spider web.

I glued that to the light grey background.  I carved up the spider and the fly stamps and stamped them on light grey paper too.  I embossed the spiders eyes with red glittery embossing powder.  I attached the fly with a small glue dot and the spider was attached with a 3D glue dot.  These turned out ok, but I got sick of making them pretty fast.

Day Out With Thomas

Today we went to French Lick to ride Thomas the Train.  We did this about 8 years ago when Lego Clone Trooper was 4 and R2-D2 was just a few months old.  We decided it would be fun to do it again.  This time is was a lot closer to home.  French Lick is almost 2 hours away.



At a Day Out With Thomas you get to ride the train, listen to stories, color pictures, play in a bounce house, blow bubbles, check out other trains, have your picture taken with Thomas and/or Sir Topham Hat and more.  The kids had a great time but after a few hours we were tired and hungry.  We left to get lunch and letterbox :)

I had boxed there last summer but a new box had been planted there just a few months ago.  We had a hard time finding it at first so we gave up and planted a 2 box series of our own.

On the way back to the car we started asking people for help.  It turns out that we needed to go behind the resort.  After that we had no problems finding the box.

We had a great day in French Lick :)

First Finder Ice Cream :)

Trail of Love 

Today my boxing buddy, G-MA, Lil Ewok, and I went boxing in New Harmony, In.  We started off at Harmonie State Park.

There is a small trail with 4 stamps on it.  G-MA had tried looking for them once and could not find them.  My family had looked for them once and found 3 of the 4.  So today we went and looked together.

We didn't try to look for the first one because it had been missing for a while.  We did find the last 3.  It was a beautiful day to be out boxing and it was also G-MA's birthday :)

We were supposed to make this trip on Friday but her mother was feeling ill at the last minute and we had to postpone our trip.

After our walk, we checked on 2 other drive bys in the park.  One was there and the other was missing.

When we were done at the state park we headed to Pop's Grill in the town of New Harmony.  This box has only been here a month or two.  We went in for lunch and grabbed the box.  The clue says that there will be a prize for the first two finders but there was noting extra in the box.

We asked about it and the owner said that it was too big for the box.  After we had been eating for a little bit she brought us an envelope.  It was a certificate to buy one/get one free Banana Split.  We were too full to get it today but promised we would be back.

I think G-MA had a pretty good boxing birthday :)

Whatever!! LTC

Whatever!! Patient Pumpkin

This is my card for the "Whatever!!" LTC swap.  I got the idea for the background on Pinterest.  I took brown scrapbook paper and cut it to size.  Then, I rubbed a dark brown Tim Holtz Distress Ink pad on to my embossing folder.  I laid the paper on and ran it through my Cuttlebug embossing machine.  Some of the papers tore when pulling them off of the folder but I love how they turned out.

I carved up a simple pumpkin.  I have been looking for some kind of blendy markers but decided to try watercolor colored pencils.  I like how that part turned out too.

I needed to add something else to my card and I tried some tan raffia that I had laying around.  I liked the look but the color was off.  So I bought some green raffia and used it as grass under the pumpkin.  I think they turned out okay :)

Interesting Find

This year we are planting letterboxes for each family member near their birthday.  Today we planted the last one for my noxer hubby.  He is on the cemetery board for Barnett Cemetery.  This is a rural cemetery in Warrick County.

It was about 9am and the grass was wet so Lil Ewok refused to walk.  I carried him around looking for a good hiding spot and taking notes.  When we discovered a bee hive in a big tree.

When we first pulled up I thought that the big multi trunk tree with another tree with it would be a good hiding spot.  The other tree had a note in a plastic bag tied to the limb.  When I stopped to check out the note I noticed the bees.  I sat Lil Ewok down and snuck up to take a pic.  I have never seen anything like it.  Both of the trunks had bees on them.

Pretty cool find for us today :)