I {heart} the 70's

When I was a little girl, I thought spacehoppers and clackers were 2 of the best toys to play with, although my bionic woman doll and weebles were my absolute fave toys as I remember, I also remember enjoying playing hairdressers with the boy next door (6 year old girl + scissors + 6 year old boys hair = one little boy with a VERY short (1" max) lop-sided fringe & me hiding from his mom in an ali baba laundry basket!).
I digress, back to spacehoppers... I lost count of the amount of times that I bounced and fell off my spacehopper cos I was the one who always seemed to bounce off the curb or  bounce into fellow hoppers and I never seemed to go in the direction I wanted to go! was such a laugh though, especially when the kids in our street had a hopper race! (of course I was always last, or ended up going sideways! lol) I was forever getting my knees grazed as a kid, my Mom always had the germolene at the ready :D
My sister, Helen, had clackers. I used to love playing with those. They weren't much to look at, and were basically hard plastic balls about 2" in diameter, attached to a ring or small paddle with strong string. You held the ring or paddle, allowing the balls to hang below. Then you had to get a rhythm going using a up/down motion, making the balls swing apart, then together again (a bit like a newtons cradle), gradually swinging harder until the balls 'clacked' together above and below the hand. Many bashed knuckles and bruises ensued, but you kept trying til you succeeded and it was part of growing up in the 70s :)

When I was part of the Sweet Stampin DT, I was asked to pick a theme for one of their challenges, and i'm delighted to see that it is still going ahead despite my leaving. The theme is Childhood Memories. I had the spacehopper in mind when I thought of the challenge, so have decided to take part in their challenge, this time as a challenger ;)
I'm going to give this card to my sister...

I drew the spacehopper onto card then coloured it with promarkers.
I also drew the clackers onto card too, didn't realise at the time how fiddly it would be to cut out the image though. Obviously they aren't to scale with each other, the spacehopper would be way too big for the card if they were to scale!
The paper is by Dovecraft, from their 'funky vintage' collection.
I got out my circle punches and echoed the design in the paper with some cardstock scraps and layered them along the top.
The paisley strip across the middle was made using a cuttlebug folder.
The sentiment and verse were printed off the pooter.
Now I have to remember that i've made this card because it isn't Helen's birthday until September!
I'm safe to say she won't see this on here because Helen doesn't blog, infact she hardly goes on the computer at all (yep, i know, she's the weird one in the family! LOL)

I have made the spacehopper into a digi image, it's free, if you want it, snag it ;)

After deciding to share the image, I had to scan the coloured spacehopper into my pc and then use my paint program to draw the outline again. Would have been so much easier to draw the thing in my paint program to start with eh?

I'm entering this card into the childhood memories challenge over at Sweet Stampin (Hi Girls! xx *waves*)

also the fab challenges over at
Papertake Weekly 'fancy a punch',
and Crafty Catz 'give us a quote/sentiment'

Spooktacular!

Simon Says Stamp challenge has the theme of Halloween this week, which is great because I wanted to do a personal ATC swap with a friend of mine :)

For this ATC I have used a fab free image by Elizabeth Dulemba, it's simply called 'ghost with pumpkins' and is on her free colouring page tuesdays page of her site.
There's loads of fab images for all occasions to choose from.

I printed out the image 3 times so that I could layer it up.
I've used ProMarkers to colour in the images.
The 2 pumpkins both had the same base colour of 'orange' but one of them was coloured on top with 'gold' the other with 'oatmeal'
The base of the ATC is 2 pieces of black cardstock, one is a little smaller than the other, I used 'ice grey 5' ProMarker on some beige lace ribbon (closest thing I had to resemble a web in some way) and wrapped it around the smaller piece of cardstock before attaching it to the larger piece.
The sentiment is hand written.

The spider was hand cut from black cardstock, starting with 4 small strips for the legs, trimming the ends at an angle, then cutting an egg shaped piece for the body and a circle for the head, gluing them all together then adding the googly eyes to finish.

Not a brilliant close-up pic, sorry...

I'd also like to enter this into this weeks challenge over at Polka Doodles, which is make your own embellishments (my spider), the same theme also being the challenge over at Cute Card Thursday too, for CCT I had to check that it was ok to make something other than a card, and it is! :)

finally, Meljen's Thursday challenge have asked us to create something Halloweeny!


For those that don't know, an ATC is an Artist Trading Card, they measure 2.5" x 3.5" (6.4cm x 8.9cm) and are miniature pieces of art that are then swapped, but NEVER sold.
You make either one unique ATC for a personal swap, or make several depending on however many people are involved in the swap all of the same theme so each person gets 1 of a limited edition of you artwork.
On the back of each ATC is info about the swap and the person who made it...

TITLE: name you give your ATC or name of swap if set within a group, in this case a single ATC named 'You're SPOOKTACULAR"
DATE: when the ATC was made, or date of group swap closing date
CARD: 1 of 1 for a personal swap or 1 of 10, 2 of 10, 3 of 10 etc for example when in a bigger swap
GROUP: either "personal" or "blogger", "PCP", "forum" etc
ARTIST: Your name and signature (if you want to sign it) you can also add contact details or website, blog addy etc

Feel free to copy and save the ATC info back shown above to your own pc so you can print as many out as you need if you want to give ATC's a go yourself.