Heart Art LTC

This is my card for Beetle's "Heart Art" LTC swap.  My card is called "Mechanical Heart" and I stole this card idea entirely from LROSEM's blog post called Comet Months.  I will go ahead and walk you thru it.

LROSEM said she starts with Watercolor paper.  I am out so I used Bristol; it is thick like Watercolor but smooth.  Take an old gift card and smear glue around and add pieces of paper.  Now, I have never used a plastic card like this and I kept spreading it to thin.  It dried super fast and you can see on the edges of some of my cards that the text pages are not attached everywhere.

You smear the glue under and over the text pages.  When the glue is dry you apply Gesso with the plastic card too.  Again, I think I should have used more Gesso simply because the next few steps didn't turn out as well as I hoped.

For the next part, I took an old sock and a Spun Sugar Distressed Ink pad.  I started off tapping the sock on the pad and rubbing the sock on the paper.  But after a while, I stamped the ink pad directly on the paper and used the sock to rub the ink around.  I was hoping that the ink would be a little darker.  Maybe I should have tried a different color.

Heart Art: Mechanical Heart

Then, you cut the cards to size and stamp your stamp.  That part was easy ;)  Now for the fun part.  You paint Tim Holtz Distress Crackle Paint (I used clear) on the cards.   My cards didn't crackle as much as I would liked.  I think the problem there was that I didn't use enough Gesso.  The Crackle paint comes in 3 colors-black, while & clear.  I played around with the other colors a little bit on my scraps.  I will have to use them on a future project!

Then I edged the cards just like LROSEM.  I wasn't really happy with the cards but sent them off anyway.  I went away on vacation for 2 weeks and looking at my extra cards again I think they are not to bad.  The background looks pinker in person.

Vacation 2016

Arches NP

I just got back from a two week vacation out west, did you miss me?  Over a year ago my parents suggested that we all go on vacation together.  That would be my parents, me, my husband & 4 kids, my sister, her husband & 2 kids, and my other sister and husband.  It ending up being my parents, my family, and my 2 nieces.

We had a great two weeks out west.  We live in Indiana and went out thru the Rocky Mountains to southeast Utah.  We visited Arches & Canyonlands.  Then we packed up and went to southwest Utah.

Canyonlands NP

It just so happened that where we stopped for the night was having a hot air balloon festival.  And the people that my parents were camping next to said that we could go up in their balloon.  My dad and the 4 biggest kids took off to do that but the winds wouldn't cooperate and they didn't get to go up.  The kids still loved being so close to the balloons.

Balloon Festival

While in southwest Utah we went thru Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon National Parks.  They are very different and very beautiful.  We hiked a trail at Bryce and just road the shuttle at Zion.

My parents at Bryce Canyon NP

Then we went down thru Nevada.  We had planned on touring the Hoover Dam but had issues.  It's probably to long of a story to go into here.  So we had a picnic lunch there at the lake made by the dam.

Zion Canyon NP

After Nevada we moved on to California where we had more problems.  We got almost to the campground we planed on staying at and we were turned around because of forest fires.  It took a while but we eventually found a place to camp.  We went thru the southern area of the Sequoia National Forest where we walked the Trail of 100 Giants.  We decided that we came this far that we would continue to the northern area.  There we were able to drive thru the famous tunnel log.

Trail of 100 Giants

The next day, we spent a little over an hour at ghost town and then started heading back east to the Grand Canyon.  We walked the rim trail at the south rim, enjoyed some shopping, and ice cream.  The last activity on the way home was the petrified forest.  My kids were expecting the trees to be standing.  They all enjoyed the colorful logs.

We made two stops on Route 66.  One was the Midpoint Cafe where we had lunch.  The other was the Cadillac Ranch.  We didn't take spray paint for the Cadillac Ranch but there were cans all over the ground and my kids joined in the fun.

Grand Canyon

When my parents came up with this idea I said that I had to find a letterbox in each state and I was surprised that my husband went along with it.  I already had boxes in Ind, Ill, and Mo.  I was able to get boxes in KS, CO, UT, NV, CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK & AR.  I found 13 boxes and 2 hitchhikers.  Of all the boxes I looked for only 1 was missing.

Petrified Forest NP 

This was my husband and kids first trip out west.  We camped every night but one.  It was exhausting but beautiful!  Two weeks living in a van is rough.

Cadillac Ranch