I finally got to try a new technique from the TJ's newsletter that I have seen so many cool examples of, Alcohol Ink Foil. i made some atcs for two of my groups with them. One with the recipient's name included and the other for my Divas group called Changing Seasons. Very hard to photograph so a bit blurry but they are gorgeous in person!

I have been too busy to blog lately! Here are my inchies for my group that swaps month. This month I did Letter "J" is for Jigsaw and Ghosts/Ghouls. I used shrink plastic for the ghosts and colored the backs of them with colored pencil before shrinking. I cut these out with a Sizzix die.

We celebrated little Phillip's first birthday last week-end with a huge party at a park near their home. It was cold, windy, and rainy but a good time was had by all. Phillip slept through the opening of the presents but woke up to have his own personal cake. We took a lot of pictures and this is a four generation shot of my Mom, Kayla, Phillip, and myself. He was a really good boy through all of the noise and excitement especially for a little guy with croup. He was so sick all week and still was not himself but did so good all day!

So I finally got to see someone do Encaustic Wax in person and be taught how to do it!!! I have wanted to try this for sooooo long now! It is so fun and easy and very addicting. So pretty you hate to cover it up at all. I found that if I stamped my images first, they look better than trying to stamp over the wax. I used black Stazon on the glossy and then did the waxing with my craft iron, cut to size and added the leaf brad.

Here's an atc I did recently for our Ships Ahoy theme. I used a Simple Green Spritz background and then overstamped the ship, some waves, and the sun, then cut the shank off an anchor button and gluedotted that on.

We had a swap in my UK group to use "the Wandering Stamp" to make an atc for your partner and then send it along with the stamp to the next person on the list. So we all had to use the stamp somewhere on our atc creation. I decided to add the fun little witch on mine for a different twist. Background is just acryllic paints dry-brushed on in cross-hatch fashion.

We made Paperbag books in my atcs-are-us yahoo group in the theme of "Things I Love". It was a fun project. There were so many things I wanted to include but there weren't enough pages and supplies for all of them so I narrowed it down to family, friends, vintage style, art,coffee, Tim Holtz,the Wizard of Oz,fishing, nature,birds, flowers, and reading books. I sent mine to Christina and she really liked it which pleased me! I made little mini books with cut up old book pages and made covers with chipboard c0vered with wallpaper and then the images. They turned out so cute. Here are some pictures of the finished pages and tag inserts.