This is the best I could do . . .

 Hello Crafters!

Long time no talk . . .

I feel like it's been forever since I posted. 

I know I did post last week for the PC&S blog hop but that post was awful. 

In my defense I was posting from my phone on sketchy wifi without all my pictures. See I had to go out of town for training last week and I get to do it again this week. Lucky me. That's sarcasm in case you couldn't tell. 

Want to see what I learned last week? 

Yes, I am a woman in her thirties. Yes, I doodled the whole day. 

Despite the evidence I did actually listen to the people talking. Some of it was interesting, some of it wasn't. I survived it. 

While I was off living in the land of high school girls who doodle in their margin during history class my poor husband was a single dad all week. I came home and they were both alive. AND they didn't have any noticeable injuries. That husband of mine is pretty awesome. 

Why was the blog so scarce last week if I knew I had training?

That's easy. I'm a procrastinator. I plan ahead for pretty much nothing. ever. I run late to everything and I'm hardly ever prepared. Keeps like interesting ;) 

Need an example?

I had several cards to create on my weekend home. One of which was for my church. We are sponsoring a family for Christmas and I volunteered to create a card to go with the gifts. I made the card on Friday night. I then made seven other cards. I didn't want to have to move all my crap around to take a photo for one card so I just kept telling myself I'd take a photo of it when I did the rest. Yeah, Sunday morning came and I still had not photographed it. So it's gone. AND I had intended on entering it into the Simon Says Stamp Flickr Challenge to use stencils. Bummer. 

However . . .I wanted to emboss the sentiment onto my card but wasn't sure about the placement so I did scan it into the computer. Dawn Woleslagle once told me to do this so I could printout out some copies to practice on without ruining my original image. Brilliant idea by the way. Also comes in handy when you never photograph your card. You know for people who do things like that . . .

So here's the scan. It's not as rich as the original but I really loved the card and wanted to share it. As you gathered from the title this is the best I could do :) 

I used the Nativity set from Simon Says Stamp. First I stamped Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. I masked them and stamped the manager. I wanted a little more of the background to show through so I added some beams to the manager to make it an open structure. Recently Sandy Allnock did a video where she talked about coloring a night time scene and I knew I wanted to try that. Go look, it's a little elfin masterpiece! I used Simon Says Stamp Make A Scene Stencil for my hills. I did my copic coloring on the ground, hills, manager, and people. I'm no Sandy with knowing where shadows are supposed to go so I cheated :) I masked the people and then created my sky with distress inks. Since I didn't mask off any other areas it gave everything a blue night time glow. I added some details with my copic multiliner and a white gel pen. The sentiment is from the same set and was heat embossed in white. 

In an effort to be a little more forward thinking I have several things scheduled for this week. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to visit any of you this week :( Damn wifi. 

See you soon though!!

Thanks for visiting!

XoXo