Happy Fall!

Well it is almost fall so I am decorating.....like it or not! lol

It has been a busy few weeks. I have no clue what I was doing I just know that I never seemed to have enough time to get much done and felt like I was spinning around.

But I managed to find a few minutes here and there to get my creative on.  :-)

If you have been here before then you know that I know how to color....I have been coloring with colored pencils for decades. But I signed up for the 8 week coloring class from Crafter's Companion. Why? Because it is FREE! lol  And I thought, hey, you never know, I might learn something.

You can sign up too....it is free after all.  :-)   You can find the info here.

I have actually learned a couple things I never heard before like when you sharpen your pencils turn the sharpener not the pencil. Never heard that before.  And one of the videos gives tips on how to try to mend a pencil that the lead is all broken inside. I definitely need to try that out as a couple of my Prismacolors have nothing but bits and pieces inside....they have since I bought them so I am thinking the stores don't really take a lot of care with them.

They also give us free downloads to play with. How on earth do you pass up free? lol

We received a page full of bookmarks to practice coloring. I was not thrilled with how this turned out. I didn't really like my color choices once I was finished. So I discovered something else (my own tip lol). Since I printed my stuff on my laser printer I can run it through my Minc and foil it......Foil hides a multitude of yukkiness! The shine distracts from the ugly colors! HaHa  Maybe I should credit Minnie with this tip since she seems to think everything shiny is much better than non-shiny lol

There she is, my adorable, little Minnie.  :-)

My Explore has not been sitting idle. (in case you were worried)

SVG Cuts has a new kit that just came out last week. It is called Harvest Sunset.

These sunflowers are 7 inches across (not including the leaves!)

It is not very often that I find something that dwarfs my pottery jug. I bought it in Colonial Williamsburg at least 25 years ago and rarely get to use it because everything looks tiny when I try to display it. lol

I used really cheap card stock (because I can't stand the color yellow and rarely buy it) The card stock came in a bulk pack of something like 200 sheets on Black Friday many years ago. Such bright and odd colors and yet, the perfect sunflower yellow. And just so you know, sunflowers are the only yellow flowers that I like. They say "Fall" to me. :-)

And of course I made a card. It seems like I am constantly needing birthday cards! lol

My brother in law just began running marathons this year. We are all so proud of him. I have days where I can barely hobble across the street and he is running!

I created this box card. All the medals were run through the Minc so they are nice and shiny and gold!  When I completed it I just kept thinking it needed something so I let it sit on my desk for about a week.

I then added a cheering crowd.  If I was running (which will never happen lol) I would certainly want people cheering for me!  :-)

And like I said earlier, I am in full on Autumn mode!!!

I saw a window at a yard sale last Saturday. 

It was already painted black. A shiny black lacquer. We don't do shiny paint in my house so I had to fix that but what is up with all the 1 inch double sided foam tape squares? They (or remnants of them) were around the entire frame, on the cross bars and on the glass! What on earth were they trying to stick to this window??? lol

I peeled them all up, scraped off what I could and then spritzed all the sticky spots with WD-40 and let them sit a few minutes then scraped again.  What I couldn't remove that way disappeared with the sander.

You can sort of see how shiny this was down at the botton of the frame. I sanded the entire thing several times to distress the edges and remove the shine (yet still keep most of the black paint)

BTW the yellow bars are my saw horses I had the window propped on while I worked.

My original plan was to do the entire thing in vinyl. My vinyl had other ideas.

The text in the top panes is done in dark brown vinyl.
After destroying every sheet of orange vinyl I owned I switched to paint for the pumpkins. They are reverse painted on the back of the glass which means you start with the highlights and shadows first and build your colors.

I am really pleased with how it turned out. The window it about 34 inches wide so it is taking up a good size piece of the wall and yet fits beautifully. So much so that hubby suggested we leave it up all year round.  :-)

That about catches me up. I hope you have all been able to get some crafting done as well.

Happy Crafting and Thank You for stopping by.  :-)